text:
A new bid on the tarmac?
Air Canada talks up a proposal with its partners, while the big banks choose sides in the airline war
Kimberley Noble October 18 1999
A new bid on the tarmac? Kimberley Noble October 18 1999
Kimberley Noble
For almost 24 hours, it looked like this might be the bid everyone had been waiting for. On Oct. 3, a Chicago newspaper reported that Air Canadas U.S. and German marketing partners were on the verge of announcing an offer to buy part of the Montreal-based air carrier. UAL Corp., owner of United Airlines and Deutsche Lufthansa AG were in talks with Air Canada. The report said they planned to team up with the Bank of Montreal to acquire a 35-percent stake, and that the move could be made public as early as Monday morning. Finally, it looked as if Air Canada and the Star Alliance partnership would give archrival Canadian Airlines International Ltd. of Calgary and its would-
be financiers a run for their money.
Then: squat. Monday morning dawned without a concrete counteroffer. It turned out there would be no announcement last week. Instead, Air Canada officials made vague statements about talks with "several third parties." Air Canada president and chief executive Robert Milton finished the week still vowing to unveil a counterproposal that will top Toronto-based Onex Corp.'s offer to merge it and Canadian. This new bid, Milton said, would not violate restrictions on foreign and individual ownership of Air Canada.
How Air Canada would pull this off, no one seems to know. "I've had no success in ascertaining what they're planning to do," says Ross Healy of Torontobased Strategic Analysis Corp. "But
then, I'm not sure that they have either." Last week's intimations mean that either Air Canada's management has something dazzling to unveil and is waiting to pull the rug out from under Onex president Gerry Schwartz, or that it is stalling in the hope that something will materialize before its shareholders vote on the Onex merger offer at a Nov. 8 meeting.
Schwartz did some of his own rugpulling late in the week, attaching "ironclad" commitments on jobs, regional services and ticket prices to Onex's proposal. He promised the federal government that a merged airline would: limit price increases for five years to the rate of inflation and uncontrollable costs (such as fuel); maintain service to small communities for the same length of time; use layoffs only as a final resort; and continue to hold seat sales and honour frequent-flyer points.
This is what Ottawa has been waiting to hear. But what about shareholders? The so-called phantom Air Canada of-
fer provides a glimpse of how the airline batde is dividing the Canadian investment community. By now, just about every significant financial or legal firm is involved, either working for Onex or Air Canada—or inadvertently for both. Heading towards a potential faceoff are two financial powerhouses—the Royal Bank of Canada and the Bank of Montreal. The intriguing dynamic is that these two wanted to unite and create a mammoth Canadian bank in last year's hotly contested, and ultimately unsuccessful, bank merger debate.
Until last week, the Royal was the most closely scrutinized of the major financial players in the airline debate—because it is the biggest domestic commercial lender to cash-strapped Canadian. The Royal has a lot to lose if the airline goes belly-up. The exact amount of its exposure is confidential, but it is said to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The bank came under fire in early September over a potential conflict when Royal Bank Investment Management Inc., the arm that handles private money management including mutual funds, joined Onex in asking an Ontario court to move the date of the Air Canada shareholders meeting to November from January. But RBIM officials insist their actions were not influenced by the bank. Mike Edwards, RBIM's chairman, told Macleans that Air Canada shareholders should be able to vote on any offer during the time frame Ottawa has provided. "This in no way indicates support for or against the Onex bid," he says.
RBC Dominion Securities Inc., the bank's investment brokerage arm, is also working as strategic adviser to Canadian. Ironically, RBC-DS started out as Air Canada's lead underwriter when shares in the Crown corporation were first sold to public investors in 1988 and still handles some of its financing. But Air Canada has grown close to the Bank of Montreal's Nesbitt Burns Inc.—its strategic adviser—ever since the investment house underwrote $500 million worth of the company's shares and debentures in 1995. The airline spreads its banking business around as much as possible. On the commercial side, Air
Canada relies mostly on the Bank of Nova Scotia and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce—the former a bit of a problem because Schwartz, a close friend of Scotiabank chairman Peter Godsoe, is on the bank's board.
Other than through Nesbitt, the Bank of Montreal has not been a major player in the airline business—despite
the fact that Air Canada chairman Jack Fraser is on the bank's board. BMO's potential involvement in a new bid would change that. Sources close to the negotiations are cautious, but point out that the Bank of Montreal is determined to expand its almost invisible merchant banking operation—and that this unit is capable of buying a large
Connecting flight paths
On the face of it, Air Canada and its backers are in a heated batde to thwart Onex Corp.'s proposal to merge the carrier with Canadian Airlines. But in the small worlds of the airline industry and Canadian finance, archrivals may not be as far apart as they seem. A program on some of the players:
Canadian Airlines-Onex
Sources say the Bank of Montreal may be prepared to join forces with Air Canada, Lufthansa and United Airlines in a bid to merge the carrier with Canadian Airlines.
The Bank of Montreal's Nesbitt Burns is Air Canada's strategic adviser.
Air Canada recently announced it is pulling its employee shareownership plan away from the Royal Bank's trust division.
The Bank of Nova Scotia is one of Air Canada's two main banks.
^ Onex sold 47 per cent of Sky Chefs, its inflight catering service, to Lufthansa.
Onex president Gerry Schwartz is an acp quaintance of Bank of Montreal chairman Tony Comper and a friend of Jack Fraser, chairman of Air Canada's board.
Schwartz and his wife, Heather Reisman, are close friends of Sherry Cooper, Nesbitt Burns' II chief economist. Reisman recently hosted a book launch for Cooper.
The Royal Bank is the biggest domestic commercial lender to Canadian Airlines.
Royal Bank Investment Management's mutual fund investors own a big piece of Air ^'Canada's equity. RBIM supported Onex's call for Air Canada shareholders to vote on its merger proposal.
Peter Godsoe, Scotiabank chairman, is a good friend of Schwartz, who sits on the bank's board.
equity stake in Air Canada. If that were to happen, BMO would make Canadian banking history—and might prevent the rival Royal Bank from recouping the money lent to Canadian.
From the outside, the "phantom" bid appears to involve Air Canada's Class A non-voting shares, which could be issued or sold to United, Lufthansa and the bank without violating ownership rules. This makes analysts question whether a serious counteroffer is in the works. "Are they buying shares?" asks Healy. "From whom? Existing shareholders? Treasury? Is this a refinancing? Or an injection of new capital? If that's all they are doing," he says, "it really amounts to nothing except a big underwriting."
But, from the Bank of Montreal's point of view, even if the proposal will be no more than a refinancing or buyback of the Class A non-voting shares, it would still involve an ouday of $100 million—huge by the chartered banks' standards. A potential political factor is that pension fund manager Caisse de dépôt et placements du Québec owns just under 20 per cent of these shares, which it could sell to Air Canadas allies to help block an Onex deal.
Money managers say that what such shareholders really want is a better deal than what's on the table. The investment community has come to accept Onex's argument that its offer is not worth only $8.25 an Air Canada share, but between $10 and $12, after taking into consideration that most shareholders would opt for a package of cash and stock. From the purely financial point of view, analysts say a deal could be done tomorrow for a combined offer that was the equivalent of $ 15 per Air Canada share.
With the Bank of Montreal in its camp, Air Canada may have finally found a source of money. Or the Nesbitt team may just have pitched in temporarily to stop Onex and its partner AMR Corp., the Texas-based parent of American Airlines, from getting control of Canada's biggest airline. What happens next still depends on United and Lufthansa, observers say. "It's inevitable that they will get a bid from these people," predicts an industry insider. "I just don't know what's taking them so long." Milton and the Air Canada board may be keeping their powder dry until just before the court-ordered Nov. 8 vote on the Onex deal. Or Air Canada, the insider says, "will sell some stock and solidify its position—and Onex will be left out in the cold and Canadian will be back in the soup." E3
Carty: Don't 'disarm' Canada
At 53, Montreal-born American Airlines CEO Don Carty is a veteran of air wars on both sides of the border, with experience at both Air Canada and Canadian Pacific Air Lines, the forerunner of Canadian Airlines. During a business trip to his home toivn last week, he talked with National Affairs Columnist Anthony Wilson-Smith about air wars, his airlines role and the industry. Excerpts:
Macleans: American Airlines is investing a great deal of time and money in its partnership with Canadian Airlines. What are the attractions?
Carty: First, Canada itself. There is an enormous and growing amount of cross-border traffic. Second, the access we gain to Vancouver: it is the ideal West Coast gateway from North America to Asia. As well, we don't really have a hub for traffic to Europe east of Chicago, and Toronto gives us that.
Macleans: Does there come a point at which American Airlines might decide the Canadian air wars have become too problematic to justify putting in any further energy and money?
Carty: Of course, you can come to an economic point where another alternative to present ef-
forts makes more sense, or else you simply do nothing more. Maclean's: How close are you to that?
Carty: I have a lot of faith in [Onex Corp. president] Gerry [Schwartz] and the solutions he proposes. We have been friends for many years and our trust is implicit. You don't get involved in a proposal of this magnitude unless that kind of trust exists. Macleans: Hostile takeovers are nasty and often expensive. How can that be avoided, even if the Onex bid is succes fid?
Carty: It wasn't intended to be unfriendly, and I still believe Air Canada would do well to reflect more carefully on the offer as good for both sides. I have a great deal of respect for [Air Canada CEO] Robert Milton, and in earlier talks some months ago, I felt the potential existed for things to move amicably. Macleans: Gerry Schwartz has suggested American carriers should be given access to the Canadian domestic market, so long as the same is done in reverse. Is that a viable option? Carty: There's no momentum in the United States for that idea right now. And given that, it would be naïve for Canada to unilaterally disarm itself. Macleans: Is Canada big enough to support two national airlines in their presentform?
Carty: I would not always have said this—especially since I have worked for both Air Canada and Canadian—but the answer is no. The choice has now made itself clear. Canada can have two money-losing international airlines functioning at far below capacity, or it is capable of producing one truly great carrier. Both are losing money. Air Canadas stock was about $8 a share in 1988, when it was privatized. When Onex began its play, the stock was at about $5. You would have been better offburying your money in a sock 11 years ago.
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As the All-American City of Owensboro, tonight we kick off our 23rd season "Shake, Rattle & Stroll"! From Paris will be playing current pop to classic rock from 6:30 pm – 10:00 pm on the Jagoe Homes Patio Stage at the BB&T Plaza located at the RiverPark Center. Hayley Payne offers country acoustic from 7:00 pm-10:00 pm in the Atmos Energy Courtyard. The 202nd Army Band Fallout will rock The Kentucky Legend Pier® sponsored by The Women's Hospital of Deaconess from 8:00 pm-11:30 pm located at the Owensboro Convention Center. Please join us at the Non-Profit Block Party at the Kroger Street Fair. We'll have special character Princess Poppi tonight, courtesy of TD's Tuff Decisions. Plus, we'll have free balloon animals created by Owensboro Twisters and the FA5 Free Foto Booth, courtesy of Have A Nice Day Mobile Entertainment! New to Friday After 5 this season is Glenn's Movie Night At The Museum showing Grease (1978) for their season opener at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum. The US Bank t-shirt cannon will be sending special t-shirts into the crowd, and don't forget the free popcorn! Friday After 5 is the 2018 Platinum Award Winner for Community Event. Join us tonight for some free fun!
Our 23rd season "Shake, Rattle & Stroll" continues as Liberty Financial brings Eighty Sixt who will be playing classic rock from 6:30 pm – 10:00 pm on the Jagoe Homes Patio Stage at the BB&T Plaza located at the RiverPark Center. Tonight, Glenn's Gospel on the River features The Conquerors Quartet, Jeremy Calloway, Living by Faith with Donnie Dortch and Deena Ashley Baumgart inside Cannon Hall from 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm with doors opening at 6 p.m. Your Decision offers rock, hip hop and blues from 7:00 pm-10:00 pm in the Atmos Energy Courtyard. The Andy Brasher Band will rock The Kentucky Legend Pier® sponsored by The Women's Hospital of Deaconess from 8:00 pm-11:30 pm located at the Owensboro Convention Center. Please join us for the Corvette Cruise In at the Kroger Street Fair. We'll have special character Princess Troll tonight, courtesy of TD's Tuff Decisions. Plus, we'll have free balloon animals created by Owensboro Twisters and the FA5 Free Foto Booth, courtesy of Have A Nice Day Mobile Entertainment! The US Bank t-shirt cannon will be sending special t-shirts into the crowd, and don't forget the free popcorn! Friday After 5 is the 2018 Platinum Award Winner for Community Event.
Tonight, we continue our 23rd season "Shake, Rattle & Stroll" as Big Rivers and Co-Bank brings V-Groove playing R&B from 6:30 pm – 10:00 pm on the Jagoe Homes Patio Stage at the BB&T Plaza located at the RiverPark Center. Elliott Sublett offers acoustic music from 7:00 pm-10:00 pm in the Atmos Energy Courtyard. GlasTone will bring the groove to The Kentucky Legend Pier® sponsored by The Women's Hospital of Deaconess from 8:00 pm-11:30 pm located at the Owensboro Convention Center. Also, be sure to check out the many vendors at the Kroger Street Fair. We'll have special character Honey Bear tonight, courtesy of TD's Tuff Decisions. Plus, we'll have free balloon animals created by Owensboro Twisters and the FA5 Free Foto Booth, courtesy of Have A Nice Day Mobile Entertainment! The US Bank t-shirt cannon will be sending special t-shirts into the crowd, and don't forget the free popcorn! Friday After 5 is the 2018 Platinum Award Winner for Community Event.
Tonight, we continue our 23rd season "Shake, Rattle & Stroll" sponsored by Owensboro Health. Insulated will be playing southern rock from 6:30 pm – 10:00 pm on the Jagoe Homes Patio Stage at the BB&T Plaza located at the RiverPark Center. The Honey Vines offer acoustic music from 7:00 pm-10:00 pm in the Atmos Energy Courtyard. DJ Shay will be mixing the tunes at The Kentucky Legend Pier® sponsored by The Women's Hospital of Deaconess from 8:00 pm -11:30 pm located at the Owensboro Convention Center. Please join us at the Kick Off to a Healthy Summer at the Kroger Street Fair. We'll have special character Snowy White tonight, courtesy of TD's Tuff Decisions. Plus, we'll have free balloon animals created by Owensboro Twisters and the FA5 Free Foto Booth, courtesy of Have A Nice Day Mobile Entertainment! New to Friday After 5 this season is Glenn's Movie Night At The Museum showing Back to the Future (1985) beginning at 7:00 pm at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum. The US Bank t-shirt cannon will be sending special t-shirts into the crowd, and don't forget the free popcorn! Friday After 5 is the 2018 Platinum Award Winner for Community Event. Join us tonight for some free, family fun for all!
Our 23rd season "Shake, Rattle & Stroll" continues as we bring Bobby McClendon who will be playing country rock from 6:30 pm – 10:00 pm on the Jagoe Homes Patio Stage at the BB&T Plaza located at the RiverPark Center. Tonight, Glenn's Gospel on the River features Mark Mudd & Family, United Quartet, The Johnsons with Donnie Dortch and Deena Ashley Baumgart inside Cannon Hall from 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm with doors opening at 6 p.m. Rack 'Em Leon offers acoustic music from 7:00 pm-10:00 pm in the Atmos Energy Courtyard. Cover Me Badd will bring pop dance music to The Kentucky Legend Pier® sponsored by The Women's Hospital of Deaconess from 8:00 pm-11:30 pm located at the Owensboro Convention Center. Please join us for the Owensboro Home Ownership Matters Fair by Greater Owensboro Realtor Association at the Kroger Street Fair. We'll have special character Chase/Pup Patrol tonight, courtesy of TD's Tuff Decisions. Plus, we'll have free balloon animals created by Owensboro Twisters and the FA5 Free Foto Booth, courtesy of Have A Nice Day Mobile Entertainment! The US Bank t-shirt cannon will be sending special t-shirts into the crowd, and don't forget the free popcorn! Friday After 5 is the 2018 Platinum Award Winner for Community Event.
Our 23rd season, "Shake, Rattle & Stroll", continues as Republic Bank brings Top Tier, a dance variety band, from 6:30 pm – 10:00 pm on the Jagoe Homes Patio Stage at the BB&T Plaza located at the RiverPark Center. Tonight, Glenn's Worship on the Water will be performing contemporary Christian music inside Cannon Hall from 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm with doors opening at 6 pm. Ryan Pfeifer & Pete Riddle offer acoustic music from 7:00 pm-10:00 pm in the Atmos Energy Courtyard. Blackford Creek will bring country rock music to The Kentucky Legend Pier® sponsored by The Women's Hospital of Deaconess from 8:00 pm-11:30 pm located at the Owensboro Convention Center. Please be sure to enjoy Civic Services (City & County) at the Kroger Street Fair. We'll have a Toy Story look-a-like costume character tonight, courtesy of TD's Tuff Decisions. Plus, we'll have free balloon animals created by Owensboro Twisters and the FA5 Free Foto Booth, courtesy of Have A Nice Day Mobile Entertainment! The US Bank t-shirt cannon will be sending special t-shirts into the crowd, and don't forget the free popcorn! Friday After 5 is the 2018 Platinum Award Winner for Community Event.
Our 23rd season, "Shake, Rattle & Stroll", continues as Air National Guide Band of the South, a dance variety band, performs from 6:30 pm – 10:00 pm on the Jagoe Homes Patio Stage at the BB&T Plaza located at the RiverPark Center. Luke Hilgenhold & Kelly Clark offers acoustic music from 7:00 pm-10:00 pm in the Atmos Energy Courtyard. The SunBurners will bring an island party blend to the The Kentucky Legend Pier® sponsored by The Women's Hospital of Deaconess from 8:00 pm-11:30 pm located at the Owensboro Convention Center. Please be sure to stop by Owensboro-Daviess County Motorsport Revving up the Street at the Kroger Street Fair. We'll have a Scooby Doo costume character tonight, courtesy of TD's Tuff Decisions. Plus, we'll have free balloon animals created by Owensboro Twisters and the FA5 Free Foto Booth, courtesy of Have A Nice Day Mobile Entertainment! The US Bank t-shirt cannon will be sending special t-shirts into the crowd, and don't forget the free popcorn! Friday After 5 is the 2018 Platinum Award Winner for Community Event.
Our 23rd season, "Shake, Rattle & Stroll", continues as Hilliard Lyons brings Hard Road, a rock/blues/country band entertains all from 6:30 pm – 10:00 pm on the Jagoe Homes Patio Stage at the BB&T Plaza located at the RiverPark Center. Tonight, Glenn's Worship on the Water will be performing contemporary Christian music inside Cannon Hall from 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm with doors opening at 6:00pm Logan Dyer & The Fire offers acoustic music from 7:00 pm -10:00 pm in the Atmos Energy Courtyard. Josh Merritt Band will bring country rock music to The Kentucky Legend Pier® sponsored by The Women's Hospital of Deaconess from 8:00 pm-11:30 pm located at the Owensboro Convention Center. Please be sure to stop by the AARP Veterans Spotlight at the Kroger Street Fair. We'll have a special character tonight, your friendly neighborhood Web-Slinger, courtesy of TD's Tuff Decisions. Plus, we'll have free balloon animals created by Owensboro Twisters and the FA5 Free Foto Booth, courtesy of Have A Nice Day Mobile Entertainment! New to Friday After 5 this season is Glenn's Movie Night At The Museum showing The Sandlot (1993) beginning at 7:00pm at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum. The US Bank t-shirt cannon will be sending special t-shirts into the crowd, and don't forget the free popcorn! Friday After 5 is the 2018 Platinum Award Winner for Community Event.
Our 23rd season, "Shake, Rattle & Stroll", continues as German American Bank brings Retro Shock to dance the night away from 6:30 pm – 10:00 pm on the Jagoe Homes Patio Stage at the BB&T Plaza located at the RiverPark Center. Tonight, Glenn's Gospel on the River features New Journey Quartet, Still Water Quartet with Donnie Dortch and Deena Ashley Baumgart inside Cannon Hall from 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm with doors opening at 6 p.m. Roy Kyle and the Red Hot Cruisers offers acoustic music from 7:00 pm-10:00 pm in the Atmos Energy Courtyard. The Hiding will bring variety dance party music at The Kentucky Legend Pier® sponsored by Ruoff Home Mortgage from 8:00 pm-11:30 pm located at the Owensboro Convention Center. The Musick Studio Dancers will entertain all ages at the AT&T "Your Thing" Overlook Stage. Please join us for The Sunset Cruisers' Rolling In On the Ohio at the Kroger Street Fair. We'll have special character Dori tonight, courtesy of TD's Tuff Decisions. Plus, we'll have free balloon animals created by Owensboro Twisters and the FA5 Free Foto Booth, courtesy of Have A Nice Day Mobile Entertainment! The US Bank t-shirt cannon will be sending special t-shirts into the crowd, and don't forget the free popcorn! Friday After 5 is the 2018 Platinum Award Winner for Community Event.
Our 23rd season, "Shake, Rattle & Stroll", continues as US Bank Home Mortgage brings The Jimmy Church Band, one of the hottest R&B bands performing on the Jagoe Homes Patio Stage at the BB&T Plaza located at the RiverPark Center from 6:30 pm - 10:00 pm. Kings Highway will be performing bluegrass acoustic music from 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm in the Atmos Energy Courtyard. Bourbon Revival will bring a pop/bluegrass blend to The Kentucky Legend Pier® sponsored by Ruoff Home Mortgage from 8:00 pm-11:30 pm located at the Owensboro Convention Center. Please be sure to stop by and visit the many vendors the Kroger Street Fair. We'll have a costume character Simba the Lion Cub tonight, courtesy of TD's Tuff Decisions. Plus, we'll have free balloon animals created by Owensboro Twisters and the FA5 Free Foto Booth, courtesy of Have A Nice Day Mobile Entertainment! The US Bank t-shirt cannon will be sending special t-shirts into the crowd, and don't forget the free popcorn! Friday After 5 is the 2018 Platinum Award Winner for Community Event.


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Family of Origin: A Novel
CJ Hauser
CJ Hauser has written a completely original novel featuring an eccentric cast of characters who distract themselves from the ignorance and squalor of the past, their failures and fears, and all the warning signs of imminent end times. It's also about a duck with joie de vivre. A comedy of maladaptive manners, Family of Origin is hard to pin down and even harder to put down. Hauser's uncommonly funny and moving novel transported me out of my day-to-day life while letting me see the world as it is but also anew.
John Francisconi, Bank Square Books, Mystic, CT
August 2019 Indie Next List
A novel by the author of the viral essay sensation "The Crane Wife": When Nolan Grey receives news that his father, a once-prominent biologist, has drowned off Leap's Island, he calls on Elsa, his estranged older half-sister, to help.
This, despite the fact that it was he and Elsa who broke the family in the first place. Elsa and Nolan travel to their father's field station off the Gulf Coast, where a group called the Reversalists obsessively study the undowny bufflehead, a rare duck whose loss of waterproof feathers proves, they say, that evolution is running in reverse.
On an island that is always looking backward, it's impossible for the siblings to ignore their past, and years of family secrecy threaten to ruin them all over again. Yet, despite themselves, the Greys urgently trek the island to find the so-called Paradise Duck, their father's final obsession, all the while grappling with questions of nature and nurture, intimacy and betrayal, progress and forgiveness.
CJ Hauser teaches creative writing and literature at Colgate University. She is the author of the novel The From-Aways and her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, Esquire, Third Coast, and The Kenyon Review. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She lives in Hamilton, New York.
Praise for Family of Origin: A Novel
"Family of Origin may be the most oddly enticing novel you will read this year. . . . Shimmering yet precise. . . . Keenly satirical yet unashamedly tender."
"Oddball-brilliant . . . An innovative work of climate fiction, a nuanced and empathic family story, and, for my money, the summer's best novel thus far."
—Lily Meyer, NPR
"This is a captivating book, as intentional and finely crafted as a tightly wound clock. . . . And it's easy to get swept away in Hauser's beautiful prose. It feels like the science fiction of Michael Crichton with hints of thriller, and even Southern Gothic with its Gulf Coast setting and strange and twisty family histories and mysteries."
"CJ Hauser's Family of Origin is strange in that way raw honesty often is. It is sharp in its prose and in how it can so cleanly make you feel pierced through. Hauser lures us to an island and from there we learn of family and loss and the nature of our essential humanity. Funny and unforgettable."
—Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black
"A bold, strange novel, one that spirits readers to some of the furthest reaches of human experience. Wildly inventive and intensely moving."
—R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
"Family of Origin is a meditation on a singularly unique family that opens up to embrace all of us, every single family, every human being, and it doesn't let go. It's amazing…a supremely weird novel that displays humor and heartbreak in equal measure."
—Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang
"In Family of Origin, CJ Hauser explores and explodes the most complex moments in life: those moments with a power that spirals both backward and forward in time, those moments that shift in meaning and shape us into who we are. This riveting and emotionally intricate book doesn't shy away from the deepest questions about how a family, and a species, can survive."
—Helen Phillips, author of The Need and The Beautiful Bureaucrat
"Family of Origin is a novel full of wonders: a heartfelt, hilarious book about the possible end of a family, and the world, and how an obscure duck on an obscure island populated by obscure scientists might just save us all. There is some serious magic in these pages. All hail CJ Hauser, who has made us a funny, tender, and hopeful book, just when we need it the most."
—Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
"CJ Hauser's Family of Origin is unexpected and beautiful and utterly propulsive. Set in a world where colonizing Mars is a possibility, where a group of scientists and misfits believe that evolution is running in reverse, where love is strange and changeable and astonishing, Family of Origin reveals a new, spectacular universe. I've never read anything quite like it."
—Anton DiSclafani, author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls
"Reminiscent of the family explorations of Rick Moody, Jennifer Egan, and Lauren Groff, this tragicomic novel explores climate change, family ties, and the millennial generation's feeling that they have arrived late to the party, that humanity and the environment appear to be declining before their eyes. Full of brilliantly realized characters, Hauser's latest is profound, often incredibly funny, and captures the times like few other contemporary novels."
—Booklist (starred)
"A strange and heartbreaking novel…Hauser's ability to render the complexities of family relationships with radical honesty is a feat…A lesser writer would not be able to deliver the disturbing and weird with the grace that Hauser does. A unique, poignant, and slightly taboo novel about family, biology, and evolution."
"Hauser impresses with her wistful contemporary tale of family bonds and misplaced pessimism…This shimmering take on grief and family will enthrall fans of character-driven stories with its bevy of dashed dreams and cluttered emotions."
"[S]harply and mysteriously illuminating…Hauser is a sharp and often witty observer of human behavior. She brilliantly portrays some of the central issues of contemporary life, particularly issues for the lives of millennials. And she raises provocative questions about how contemporary human beings will survive and make full lives for themselves in the future."
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The Sweet In-Between
Sheri Reynolds
#1 New York Times bestselling author Sheri Reynolds continues to captivate in this masterful tale of redemption and finding a place to truly belong. ...
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Finalist for the Booker Prize: the "deeply felt and fiercely written" story of a young girl's journey out of Zimbabwe and to America (New York Times Book Review), from the author of Glory. ...
After the Fireworks: Three Novellas
Aldous Huxley, Gary Giddins
"After the Fireworks is a major work and a turning point for Huxley, leading directly to Brave New World." —Gary Giddins ...
Just by Looking at Him: A Novel
Ryan O'Connell
From the star of Peacock's Queer as Folk and the Netflix series Special comes a "funny, tender, and beautiful" (Gary Janetti, New York Times bestselling author) novel following a gay TV writer with cerebral palsy as he fights addiction and searches for acceptance in an overwhelmingly ableist worl ...
Mad Honey: A Novel
Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Finney Boylan
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • "Alternatingly heart-pounding and heartbreaking. ...
The Smash-Up: A Novel
Ali Benjamin
Smart, sublime, and wickedly clever, The Smash-Up captures—then transcends—our current polarized moment ...
The Round House: A Novel
Louise Erdrich
Winner of the National Book Award • Washington Post Best Book of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book ...
Hope and Glory: A Novel
Jendella Benson
One of the year's most anticipated by Marie Claire, Essence, Debutiful, & Goodreads ...
The City We Became: A Novel (The Great Cities #1)
Three-time Hugo Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author N.K. ...

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Lulu Brud (born 1985) is an American actress and interior designer, best known for her role as Sabrina in Pretty Little Liars.

Career
Brud is an actress and interior designer.

Selected filmography

Selected television
90210 new generation (2010)
Pretty Little Liars (2015–2017)
Ray Donovan (2018)

Private life
Her best friend since they were at high school together is Troian Bellisario.

Brud married in November 2013.

References

External links

Living people
1985 births

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Air France female flight attendants protest head scarves on Iran flights
By World Tribune on April 3, 2016
Some female Air France flight attendants have been protesting an airline rule that they must cover their hair when Air France resumes flights to the Iranian capital, Tehran, on April 17.
"Every day we have calls from worried female cabin crew who tell us that they do not want to wear the head scarf," a union representative, Christophe Pillet, told AFP on April 2.
Air France flight crew.
French media reported that Air France has sent a memo informing female cabin crew they would be required to wear trousers and long jackets, in addition to covering their hair with a scarf when leaving the aircraft in Tehran.
The hijab became compulsory for women in Iran after the 1979 revolution and the creation of an Islamic republic.
Foreign women traveling to Iran are also required by law to wear the hijab.
Flore Arrighi, head of the UNAC flight crews' union, said: "It is not our role to pass judgment on the wearing of head scarves or veils in Iran."
She said the cabin crew members are denouncing the policy because it is compulsory.
She also said female cabin crew must be given the right to refuse working on flights to Tehran.
Air France has defended the decision, saying that the rule is respected by all other international airlines that have flights to Iran.
Air France announced in December that it would resume Paris-Tehran flights after an eight-year gap.
Air France female flight attendants protest head scarves on Iran flights, WorldTribune.com
Air France female flight attendants protest head scarves on Iran flights added by World Tribune on April 3, 2016


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The Great Competition, designed for current undergraduates, aims to promote greater industrial innovation by encouraging students to develop solutions to today's most pressing social and environmental issues.
This year, candidates are invited to respond to an industry-led live brief on sustainable manufacturing, inspired by the UK Government's Industrial Society. A judging panel of leading experts across design, engineering and related fields will select the shortlisted and winning submissions. Shortlisted submissions will have the opportunity to take part in a designer-led masterclass and Awards ceremony in May 2019. The winning submission/s will also receive a cash prize of up to £3,000.
As the competition's Project Facilitator, Thomas hopes to recruit as many students as possible to contribute; over 60 LSBU students are on board, and hundreds more from universities across the country. We interviewed Thomas to find out more about the competition and why he decided to get involved.
How did you become involved in the Design Museum's, 'The Great Competition'?
"I'd worked with the Design Museum last summer to run a Continued Professional Development (CPD) day for higher education lecturers. The CPD day was about utilising gallery space as a point of inspiration for contextual studies and lectures.
At that time, the learning team mentioned their plans to run a higher education competition for engineering. So, I kept an eye on their website for the advert and, on reading the spec, applied for the appointment.
"When I read the job description and the synopsis about the competition, it was strongly aligned to my current field of research - so applying was a no brainer. The competition focuses on sustainability and engineering, as does my PhD. When I was invited to the interview, I was able to discuss my work with the Design Museum's Head of Learning: Sevra Davis. With such strong synergy between the competition's ambitions to promote cross-disciplinary innovation and my own work, I was appointed in the role. I was excited by the opportunity to collaborate in my subject area with such high profile institutions as the Design Museum and the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851.
After being appointed, I've help develop the competition brief in collaboration with the Learning Team and was asked to speak at the launch event at the Design Museum in November (picture). I've been developing the outreach lecture and will be going up to a number of UK universities over the coming months to give a keynote lectures that contextualise the need for sustainable solutions amidst humanity's increasing demand on Earth's natural resources which overshoot what the planet can replenish.
Within this role I've been able to draw on my past experience as a lecturer in entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation, whilst bringing in to focus my new areas of knowledge; engineering and sustainability."
You've mentioned this ties in really well into the PhD paper you are writing; how so?
"My doctoral research is about global challenges, sustainable development and engineering. I am looking to understand how engineers can better support industrial growth through sustainable solutions. This was a very new subject to me as my background was in communications, entrepreneurship, innovation and marketing, but in 2017 I made a conscious decision to change the direction of my profession to align with how we as humanity need to move forward and progress.
After several months reading about various subjects, including: the UN's Sustainable Development Goals; creative theory and frameworks; engineering research and academic case studies; industrial advancements thought the first three industrial revolutions and also looking at predictions for the forth, I have managed to scope out a body of doctorial research that leans on my strengths in understanding creativity and conjoining it with what's required from the engineering industry under the context of the global challenges. The global challenges include population growth, resource depletion and climate change – all which need to find a sustainable balance."
What is the outcome you want to see from the Great Competition?
"Ultimately, I want to see more engineers and designers thinking about sustainability as a core part of their practice and projects. I hope my outreach lectures will inspire the next generation of engineers and designers to think about sustainability as central to everything they do as opposed to a superficial add-on or project after thought. When the word sustainability becomes redundant as it is the norm – then we've truly got there – but we are still building on the bad habits and practices of the past so it will take time.
As well as seeing great ideas about sustainable solutions, individuals are encouraged to think about concepts as scalable business solution– a novel idea is not enough unless it can be put into practice in the real world.
With regards to competition entries, it will ultimately be up to the judges to choose a winner. They will have their own ideas of what is best. However, I always think judges want to be surprised by the ideas they see - from solutions to really complex issues - communicated clearly, to simple ideas not yet thought of but that can be clearly actioned and implemented."
Interested in joining The Great Competition? Register your interest.
Follow Thomas and The Great Competition on Twitter to keep updated.
Featured image (above): Beazley Designs of the Year 2018, courtesy of the Design Museum.


Sunrise commits itself to a cyclical responsibility for the world to see.
Every early morning, its soft lights knife through thatched-roof homes of slumbering heads, gagged mouths, and motionless bodies, leaving no dust in a spectrum unmasked. Sunrise is the culmination of the death of night and the first sign of the birth of day, where two long-rivaling ends meet. It is a predictable phenomenon, which could mean many things to a billion different people. It could mean just another monotonous day for the uninspired, another dreaded day for the burned-out rat, another sunny day for the optimist. Or another sweat-it-all-out day for the hard worker who has mouths to feed.
In Santa Fe, one of only three municipalities on Bantayan Island, sunrise means another day to possess and thank the gifts of water. Unsurprisingly, as being islander locals, a lot of whom are fishermen. As early as five in the pastel-colored morning, fishermen end their fishing in deep waters. In a fascinating manner, they return and help each other by carrying ashore a banca (outrigger) in cadence, which goes to show the spirit of bayanihan (cooperation) still truly lives on. The toiling fisherfolk bring their past-midnight haul of bolinao (anchovies) to their anxious wives and drowsy children, where each member correspondingly untangles the fish out from the fishing net and puts them in a pail or bucket.
Apart from finding their fresh catch straight in wet markets, they also sell them as buwad (dried fish) prepared by themselves.
It is not uncommon to see fishing as a family affair on the resource-rich island.


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The Lady Of The Lake; Free Fall; The River; Street Pair; Dance Of The Spheroids; Colors; Tiahuanaco. (Total Time: 47:50).
Tom Harrell: Trumpet, Flugelhorn; Jerry Bergonzi: Tenor Saxophone; Larry Schneider: Tenor Saxophones And Flutes; Mike Richmond: Bass; Jeff Williams: Drums.


What is the ebike workshop?
Did you ever think about how good would be to have your own ebike? We did it too. This is why we teamed up with fellow engineers from Mechatromotive and figured out what is the best available kit to pimp up our bicycles to ebikes on reasonable prices with good performance.
We'll do a workshop with the support of pro engineers in the SummerOffice at Kővágóörs. We provide basic tools for the process, you just need to bring your own bicycle. Workshop language: Hungarian by default, but we support english as well.
Day 1: Everyone builds their own ebikes using the pre-ordered kits, see the video above. After that dinner + campfire.
Day 2: We go out for a test ride together.
We'll order engines from the range of 250 - 750W with central axis system or 26" Rear drive. The batteries and other devices may vary according to your individual needs, and we'll care about the orders to make everything smooth (no commission of course).
These kits have good reviews, and easy to implement to 99% of the bikes (except fatbikes, and special designs). See the product specs on the official website.
... or, you can bring your own kit if you prefer.
What will happen after the application?
Deciding together the best timing. Some batteries may require 2-3 weeks delivery time, so expect early July as the earliest slot.
Collecting the money for the ordering.
Ordering the kits + accessories.


text:
The Walker Percy Option
Charlie Clark
In his book The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher proposes that Christians ought "to quit piling up sandbags and to build an ark." I wish to offer a counterproposal. Dreher and I share a common interest in the work of Walker Percy, Dreher's fellow Louisianan, and one of the great Catholic writers of the twentieth century. Percy's novels and essays sketched a posture towards modernity that resembles Dreher's own, but differs in certain key respects. While Dreher's attention to the practices of literal Benedictines like the monks of Norcia can be valuable for modern readers (and would have been appreciated by Percy, himself a Benedictine oblate), I suggest that, in his quest for a new St. Benedict, Dreher would have been well advised to look somewhere very different. If St. Benedict offered a spiritual and cultural survival guide for the original Dark Ages, Percy has a plan for our own. But unlike St. Benedict, whose Rule was addressed to "the athletes of God," a spiritual elite, Percy's is meant for the common man, for the Christian and almost-Christian rabble. If the Benedict Option imagines a faithful remnant waiting out the flood, the Walker Percy Option imagines an unfaithful one, nonetheless borne up by grace.
Whereas Dreher sees Christians and Christianity as uniquely threatened by modernity, Percy sees the modern condition as a common disaster for believer and unbeliever alike. Dreher can see the cracks in the secular; he knows it is unsustainable and inimical to human flourishing. Yet he seems to suggest that only Christians—or other "traditional religious believers"—are truly alien to it. However, Percy recognizes that, where the modern condition is concerned, we are all in the same boat. This is no one's native country. The good news, though, is that no one is born secular, and no one is condemned to remain so. The gate to a fuller life is narrow and even hidden, but it is open. And this gate not being the one of Paradise, but only of "a kind of comfortable Catholic limbo," it is open to people far less holy than those St. Benedict set out to form.
Like all Christians, Percy believed that man's immortal soul had been jeopardized by his fall from grace, that his original connection to the divine had been severed by sin. But he saw the problem of modernity through a narrower lens. Influenced by existentialism, he saw that man had fallen not only from grace, but (more recently) from himself as well. Moderns were uncomfortable in their own skin, alienated from their daily lives, restless, angry—and this in spite of unprecedented wealth and leisure. Like the secular existentialists of his age, Percy became convinced that something about modernity hampered human flourishing. It blocked not just the special grace by which the monks attended to the counsels of perfection, it interfered with the common, everyday grace that makes an ordinary life feel worth living.
Percy's anti-modernism is not reactionary. He does not propose to re-erect a premodern social imaginary "amid the high tide of liquid modernity," as Dreher says. When his characters imagine a coming calamity that will usher in a new order, it is a sign of madness, not wisdom. Rather, Percy's vision is forward-looking, synthetic—even syncretistic. It tolerates a high degree of imperfection, the rough edges that are the mark of all real and natural things. He envisioned a new humanism, one that combined an affirmation of animal life with an openness to higher perfections, and which could rescue believer and unbeliever alike from the common disaster of estrangement from their selves. This vision, Percy's Bad Catholic Existentialism, may not promise eternal salvation, but it does create occasions for further in-breakings of grace. The cure for our modern ills can be found through cathedral doors—and not just behind monastery walls.
Meditations on the Malaise
Writing in the second half of the twentieth century, Walker Percy saw that even amidst external peace and prosperity the Western soul was haunted by anxiety and depression. In his first and most famous novel, The Moviegoer, Percy names this modern disease "the malaise." The novel follows Binx Bolling, a scion of a well-to-do New Orleans family who tries—and fails—to content himself with a bourgeois existence of money making and philandering. He works as a stockbroker, dates his secretaries, and patronizes the local cinema. Yet Binx has a neurotic streak that keeps him at an ironic distance from his ordinary life and makes him a philosopher in spite of himself. His habitual "moviegoing" is, even consciously, an enactment of the distance between himself and his own daily life. He is a spectator trapped inside his own head, watching his bodily life like a projection on a screen, shrouded in a fog of malaise.
Binx's neuroticism and irony are what make him conscious of the malaise and able to articulate its character: "What is the malaise? you ask. The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo's ghost." He is present, yet absent, alive, yet not alive, cut off from himself. Binx's feeling of unreality is echoed by the novel's other leading character, his cousin Kate Cutrer. Suffering from anxiety, depression, and bouts of mania, Kate too sees her daily life as ghostly and inauthentic. She finds any break from this "dim" existence—even a disaster, like the car wreck that kills her fiancé—a great relief:
Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck—people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell's death.
Kate describes the chaos in the wake of the accident as the happiest moment of her life. While that sentiment may seem morbid, Percy means to underscore how strongly the human soul longs to break free from the malaise.
To better understand the nature of the malaise, we must look beyond The Moviegoer to Percy's later works. Percy first names Descartes in Love in the Ruins, referring to "the dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house." In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes undertook the project of establishing certain knowledge through subjecting all his beliefs to methodic doubt. He argued that our experiences of the physical world and of embodiment, because they are mediated through the senses, are ultimately untrustworthy. He famously concluded that the only absolutely certain knowledge was "I think, therefore, I am." That is, while any belief he entertained might be subject to doubt, the simple fact of his entertaining beliefs in his mind could not be doubted. Descartes, or his mind at any rate, could be said to exist as a thinking thing.
As Percy saw it, Descartes's new anthropology established a dichotomy of mind and body with the mind as the true seat of human personality and the body as just another object of observation by the immaterial mind. This closely mirrors the image of ghostliness and detachment that Binx describes as "the malaise." It puts the human being in the position of not truly identifying with his body or his bodily life, yet being inextricably linked to it. What the human person ultimately wants is to feel reintegrated as a whole and healthy union of mind and body, but this desire is continually frustrated as long as one views the world through a Cartesian lens. And this divide within the self affects people all along the spectrum of belief to unbelief, righteousness to depravity. It is a problem of all moderns, Christian or secular.
As Binx and Kate attest, it is profoundly uncomfortable to be alienated from oneself. In fact, as Binx sees it, the characteristic features of the modern world, from the proliferation of entertainment to the prestige of science, are all defenses against the malaise. Binx describes two overarching strategies that modern subjects use to disguise or distract themselves from the malaise. Each can be thought of as choosing one horn of the dilemma between the person as body (immanence, bestialism) and the person as mind (transcendence, angelism). Neither of these strategies is ultimately successful, but their failures cast additional light on the problem they are meant to address.
The first path, the path of immanence, Binx refers to as being "sunk in everydayness." Those who are sunk in everydayness are blind to the question of the meaning of life. They are thoroughly distracted by work, consumption, and entertainment. They learn to see themselves "on the model of organism-in-an-environment," as bundles of drives awaiting satisfaction; they learn to understand their chief purpose in life as getting their needs (and perhaps the needs of others) met. The embrace of immanence and descent into bestiality has nothing to do with the alternatives between wealth and poverty, or highbrow and lowbrow aesthetics. As Percy writes in Lost in the Cosmos, "the compliant role-player and consumer and holder of a meaningless job… an Archie Bunker beer-drinking TV-watcher" and the person "who is savvy to all the techniques of society and appropriates them according to his or her discriminating tastes… creative cooking, moving out to the country, moving back to the central city": both of these types are equally sunk in everydayness.
Binx has come to see the prospect of living sunk in everydayness with dread, and at the beginning of the novel, he advocates the path of transcendence, which he calls "the search." He says, "The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life…. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." To be sunk in everydayness is to have forfeited one's humanity, reducing oneself to a mere body or, as Binx says at one point, "an automaton." Indeed, the total descent into immanence resembles death: "For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead." This is why he and Kate thrive amidst disaster, because it breaks the grip of everydayness and makes the search possible: "Everydayness is the enemy. No search is possible. Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength. Now nothing breaks it—but disaster. Only once in my life was the grip of everydayness broken: when I lay bleeding in a ditch."
The search, however, has its own problems. Percy compares transcendence to launching the self into orbit around the world of the everyday. From this distance, the searcher is engaged in generalizing about the world below. Binx explains, "as you get deeper into the search, you unify. You understand more and more specimens by fewer and fewer formulae." But just as one sunk in everydayness risks losing his humanity by reducing himself to a mere organism, the searcher risks losing his humanity by jettisoning everything that makes him a particular and concrete individual. As Kate points out to Binx, "it doesn't matter where you are or who you are… And the danger is of becoming no one nowhere." This godlike distance is ultimately unsustainable, and more often than not the pendulum swings from the extreme of mental exaltation to the opposite extreme of physical indulgence: "even the best scientist and artist must reenter the world he has transcended and there's the rub: the spectacular miseries of reentry.… It is difficult for gods to walk the earth without taking the form of beasts."
So while the search may be preferable to being sunk in everydayness, while it may be the first step on the road to redemption, it cannot cure the malaise; it does not restore the human person to wholeness of body and mind. At best, the search allows the malaise to be discerned and described. Percy's ultimate objective is to find a way beyond the search and beyond the dilemma of immanence and transcendence toward a renewed integral humanism.
The Decline and Fall of the Therapeutic
As Percy sees it, modernity birthed the malaise by splitting the human person in two, opening the "dread chasm" between body and mind. The individual is now forced to choose between living as an immanent self, sunk in everydayness, or as a transcendent self, perpetually in orbit. But Percy also sees the symptoms of the malaise extending beyond the individual, in the guise of what Binx names "scientific humanism." Scientific humanism translates the chasm within the individual to the societal level, dividing mankind into an elite of transcendent conditioners and a mass of immanent consumers.
Under scientific humanism, says Binx, "needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle." In other words, it is a regime under which the mass of humanity is intentionally kept sunk in everydayness. Absent a direct confrontation with the malaise, the main business of life for most people becomes maintaining a subjective sense of wellbeing, however tenuous, by satisfying the body's felt needs and keeping the mind distracted. In such a society, power and authority are accorded to the scientists, technicians, and other experts who help keep ordinary people content through therapeutic conditioning, helping them adjust to an essentially animal existence.
Percy believes that the experience of having been reduced to an object of conditioning explains much of the distress of the modern subject. In Lost in the Cosmos, he observes that in spite of radically "improved" standards of living, the modern self is paradoxically impoverished, depressed, and anxious. He explains, "The impoverishment of the immanent self derives from a perceived loss of sovereignty to 'them,' the transcending scientists and experts of society. As a consequence, the self sees its only recourse as an endless round of work, diversion, and consumption of goods and services." Scientific humanism deprives non-experts of agency; the secret to happiness in each of life's dimensions is presided over by a particular expert, and the consumer's only responsibility is to comply with their advice.
Percy imagines the logical conclusion of scientific humanism's mission in the Qualitarian movement described in Love in the Ruins. In the novel, people accused of antisocial behavior and deemed in need of reconditioning are placed in "Skinner boxes" where they have electrodes installed in their heads that stimulate either the pleasure or pain centers of the brain. Those who do not respond to reconditioning are "shocked into bliss, soon learning to press the button themselves, off and dreaming so blissful that they pass up meals." This is ultimately a passive form of euthanasia, but a more active form is being debated: does a person "not also have the right to throw a switch that stays on, inducing a permanent joy—no meals, no sleep, and a happy death in a week or so? The button vs. the switch." The Qualitarians favor the switch, with or without the consent of the patient.
With but a little imagination, we can see the logic of scientific humanism behind the sociocultural dysfunction the Benedict Option is supposed to remedy or resist. Everywhere we see physical and emotional comfort treated as paramount and morality and meaning as relative, everywhere we see the overreach of a managerial class of technicians and social engineers: here are the marks of scientific humanism. But Dreher errs if he conceives of scientific humanism as a secular aggression against Christianity. The target of scientific humanism is not Christianity, but the malaise; like a dangerous, delusive fever, it is an immune response to the modern condition.
Though the malaise demands a response, the attempt to adapt humanity to its bifurcated condition is ultimately futile and destructive. While Percy hardly has a straightforward plan of salvation to offer, he shows us that scientific humanism is, if anything, a cure worse than the disease. We are not meant to be happy either as supine consumers within an artificial environment or as transcending conditioners of our fellow men. But however dangerous, scientific humanism is not the true enemy. Rather than merely fighting symptoms, our objective must be to treat the modern disorder at its roots.
Strategic Retreat to Lost Cove, Tennessee
Percy's stories never have more than a bittersweet ending. His characters' victory over the malaise, even when real, is always partial. But some of them do manage to carve out an existence that is truly humane if yet imperfect. They are able to make some progress toward the reintegration of body and spirit, the healing of the "dread chasm" within the self. In Lost in the Cosmos, Percy employs Lost Cove, Tennessee as a metaphor for this partial recovery of a postmodern Eden.
In "A Space Odyssey (II)," a vignette from Lost in the Cosmos, Lost Cove is the ancestral home of Dr. Jane Smith, "the last Methodist in Tennessee." Smith is one of four astronauts who, having been off-planet at the time, are among the few humans to survive a global nuclear war back on Earth. She describes Lost Cove as "a tiny valley of the Cumberland plateau sealed off by a ridge. No roads, no phones, no TV. Only three farms and a cave. Good water, sweet white corn, quail, squirrel, deer, fish, wild pig." And passed over by the nuclear fallout.
Returning to the mostly dead planet, Smith marries Marcus Aurelius Schuyler, the captain of her spaceship, and convinces him to accompany her back to Lost Cove along with a small band of survivors including a Catholic priest and "an admixture of locals, strays, wanderers, refugees." In Lost Cove, the survivors live simply, practicing subsistence farming, raising children, and keeping their faith. Smith becomes a devout Catholic, joining the abbot in his daily celebration of "Mass with corn bread and scuppernong wine." Schuyler, like his imperial namesake, remains a virtuous pagan: "My cathedral is the blue sky. My communion is with my good friends."
Tom More retires to a similarly quiet life after the events of Love in the Ruins. Five years later finds him in Paradise, Louisiana, hoeing collards in his garden while his wife Ellen stirs the grits for breakfast: "Poor as I am, I feel like God's spoiled child. I am Robinson Crusoe set down on the best possible island with a library, a laboratory, a lusty Presbyterian wife, a cozy tree house, an idea, and all the time in the world." A lapsed Catholic during the events of the novel, by its end he has returned to the Church: going to confession, even wearing sackcloth and ashes, and receiving communion.
Percy is especially interested in three practices Lost Cove and Paradise share, which we might loosely call Sabbath, Marriage, and Eucharist. The significance of these practices is that they are sacramental in character. Percy is only occasionally concerned with "the Sacraments" proper, but he is highly invested in a life characterized by "sacramentality." The good life that he envisions is shot through with sacramental patterns of participation in nature and in other selves, and even directly in the divine. As signs, the sacramentals point to realities beyond themselves, and as participations, they draw the human person up into this higher reality. The elements are not merely consumed, appropriated by the individual to fill what Percy calls "the nought of self." Their sacramental quality is marked by their not being used up or exhausted by observance. These sacramentals bridge the divide between body and spirit, and by participating in them, even as "bad Catholics," Percy's characters are gradually reintegrated into full and healthy human life.
Sabbath represents the total reorientation of our attitude to work. As many critics of modern political economy have argued, when labor is reduced to a matter of production to finance consumption, the worker suffers as he becomes more and more alienated. The world is treated as raw material to be reshaped at will for the purpose of meeting human needs. Work characterized by Percy's sacramental of Sabbath is able to rest in (as Marilynne Robinson calls it) the "givenness of things." It does not concern itself with maximizing profits but rather is pleased to receive enough to subsist on. Sabbath means that the body and spirit are no longer at odds over work. It prevents the spirit from being sacrificed to the continuously expanding needs of the body, as it is for those sunk in everydayness, while it equally protects the body from being reduced to a despised slave of the mind.
Just as the sacramental of Sabbath transforms work, Marriage transforms sex. Sex speaks to mankind's need to unite body and soul, but Percy recognizes how Marriage channels and perfects sexual love. Each of the marriages in Love in the Ruins, Lost in the Cosmos, and The Moviegoer has this sacramental quality, but Binx's marriage to Kate provides an especially clear example. It takes Binx beyond his search, and leaves him content to "plant a foot in the right place as the opportunity presents itself." Binx's support and sacrifice for Kate as she struggles to find her peace is a participation in loving relationship that knits body and soul together.
For Percy, Sabbath and Marriage are accessible even to those who are not religious believers or whose faith is weak. Binx, More, and Schuyler are all able to experience these sacramental practices and so get partially beyond the malaise, everydayness, or search, closer to a complete humanity. But they also find the divine within the mundane: "through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God's own importunate grace." These lesser signs point toward the final sign, the true Sacrament of the Eucharist. Here mankind's true hope for restoration and healing lies. As More says, "it took nothing less than… eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh."
Neither Lost Cove nor Paradise is a fully realized Christian community. They lack the purity of either a monastery or the quasi-monastic intentional communities of the Benedict Option. Each remains pluralistic, and even their believing residents are far from perfect in their devotion or obedience. Yet these are Percy's vision for the good life after modernity. Their practices unite saint and sinner in resistance to their common enemy, the malaise. Each offers opportunities for the healing of the self and, in turn, for the drawing of the self into the divine.
While the close-knit fellowship of Lost Cove is a helpful illustration of the good life of the bad Catholic, Percy doesn't believe we have to retreat to remote villages to live sacramentally. For Percy, New Orleans is also a Lost Cove, a city that binds sinner and saint together, hoping that grace has just enough pull to open the doors of Purgatory. The "triumphant mediocrity" of such a community can be built anywhere. Our call is to choose this distinctive life within our historical context. One of Percy's most lost characters speaks more truly than he knows: "I like your banal little cathedral in the Vieux Carré. It is set down squarely in the midst of the greatest single concentration of drunks, drugheads, whores, pimps, queers, sodomists in the hemisphere. But isn't that where cathedrals are supposed to be?"
Culture, Theology Benedict Option, Walker Percy
Charlie Clark lives in his hometown of Murfreesboro, Tennessee with his wife Sarah. An alumnus of Dartmouth College and the University of Tennessee College of Law, he works in his family's fourth-generation scrap metal recycling business. Charlie is a founding editor of Fare Forward and chairman of its board of directors.
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Fans were left to mourn for Malaysia after they suffered a MASSIVE 10- defeat at the hands of the United Arab Emirates today.
Dollah's men went into the group as major underdogs, but there was a certain degree of belief within them, that the tide could shift in their favour. But as soon as the match kicked off, it was evident that it was going to be a long night.
They controlled possession from the get go, before eventually breaking the deadlock on the 16th minute mark through Mohammad Salem. Merely four minutes later, Ali Ahmed made it 2-0 after a horrendous error from Khairul Fahmi.
On the 23rd minute, UAE made it 3-0 Ahmad Khalil, before Habib Al Fardan netted the fourth goal of the night, on the 25th minute. The Malaysian players were already being torn to shreds at this point, and Dollah opted to withdraw Khairul Fahmi, and bring on Zamir Selamat to guard their posts.
But within one minute of him coming on, Malaysia conceded their fifth goal of the day, with Ahmed Khalil getting on the scoresheet for the second time. Ali Ahmed made it 6-0 on the on the 33rd minute, before Mohamed Ahmad Gharib netted UAE's 7th goal six minutes before half-time.
After the break though, UAE slowed their tempo down, and Malaysia were a little more organized defensively. But despite that, the Middle East side managed to add three more goals, with the first one coming on the 70th minute – Ahmed Khalil's third goal of the night.
Five minutes later, Ali Ahmed became the second player to get a hat-rick out of this match, making the score 9-0. And with 12 minutes left on the clock, UAE effectively turned the scoreline into doubles figures, scoring his fourth goal of the game to seal a whopping 10-0 defeat.
This marks Malaysia's worst ever defeat in a football game, as they continue to remain winless throughout 2015, with three defeats and two draws. In those five games, they've only scored a total of two goals, conceding a total of 23 goals.
M E M A L U K A N !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In the aftermath of a 10-0 trashing to the United Arab Emirates, the Johor Football Association has pledged to contribute towards hiring a qualified foreign coach for the national team, adding that trainer Dollah Salleh should be sacked immediately.
"Enough is enough, we cannot continue to be ignorant of the problems we are facing," said the association's patron Tunku Ismail Ibni Sultan Ibrahim (pic) in a post on the Johor Southern Tigers Facebook page on Friday.
On the pledge to contribute towards hiring a new coach, the Johor crown prince, however, laid stated that all teams in the Malaysian league should first be allowed broadcasting rights, which would equate to 70-80% of the total broadcasting revenue.
He said the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) only requires 20-25% to run the leagues and employ foreign coaches.
Youth development he said should be left to the state FAs and clubs.
He added that all teams should spend on youth development and upgrade their football facilities with revenue from the broadcasting rights and sponsorship revenue.
"A good foreign coach is also essential and we cannot put 100% blame on the players. As an example, why do JDT players fare differently when they play for their club and when they play for the national team? It's due to the coach who is guiding the team.
"Pablo Aimar once told me: 'There's no point of having a Ferrari with a driver who only knows how to drive a van'. Thus, to have a good team, its 50% the coach and 50% the players," said Tunku Ismail.
He said that to improve the mentality of the players, education as well as proper academies are needed to increase the professionalism of players.
"The current players we have are beyond saving and it's not their fault. It's FAM and all the teams, including Johor, who have failed in our your development program since before," he said, adding that Malaysia needed foreign expertise.
He also targeted FAM's office bearers, whom he said have overstayed their welcome.
"For those who say I have already achieved my mission when we lost 10-0, I'm far from achieving it as I will only stop when we lose 50-0," he said.
Nowadays in soccer is money rules. Which ever team got very rich owner can buy any players to help them lift trophy.
National football coach Dollah Salleh has quit.
Dollah Salleh was never my choice as coach!
This was the shocking revelation by Tengku Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah, who announced his decision to quit Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) president on Monday.
Tengku Abdullah, instead, blamed the FAM technical committee for selecting the former international despite his preference for a foreign coach.
"From the beginning, Dollah was not my pick, but the technical committee wanted him ... this is not an excuse, but from early on, I had stated my intentions to hire a foreign coach, that is why I am disappointed," Tengku Abdullah told Bernama in Kuantan on Monday.
The national team suffered their biggest defeat in history – a 10-0 thrashing by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – in the World Cup qualifying match in Abu Dhabi last Thursday.
Dollah resigned in a huff the following day on arrival at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport and took full responsibility over the shameful defeat.
The FAM have appointed Datuk Ong Kim Swee as the interim coach to handle the remaining World Cup qualifying fixtures.
Tengku Abdullah, who announced his intention to "quit in stages", has suggested that FAM appoint his deputy president – Datuk Seri Affandy Hamzah – as the acting president.
"This is a very embarrassing and shameful loss, I cannot accept it. We have accepted Dollah's resignation," said Tengku Abdullah.
Meanwhile, a shocked Affandy has urged Tengku Abdullah to reconsider his decision to step down.
"I have not received any official update from the president or FAM about the appointment as acting president ... I believe Tengku Abdullah should reconsider his decision," Affandy told StarSport.


We have saved the broadest, yet most impactful, oil market discussion for part III of this blog series. The latest round of geopolitical news has made the oil market crystal ball less murky. The interactions between the countries of OPEC, Russia, China and the United States are tense, and oil prices are at the mercy of the discussions. The continued uncertainty and recent hypothetical outlooks add a strongly bullish argument for the price of oil, currently at $74/barrel (bbl) for WTI. Analysts are currently debating several fundamentals including; the physical capabilities of global spare production capacity, the politics of OPEC, implications of Iranian news and lastly, how negotiations from President Trump factor in. While oil market volatility never ceases, this blog will provide the current geopolitical condition and the impact on oil prices.
We last discussed the how global influences can affect natural gas and oil in our blog "Trade Wars: Energy in the Marionette Theatre". The global market for oil is no less complicated and the chronological story centers on a few main factors.
With the implementation of sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, it is estimated that global oil production has already fallen by 1.5 million bbls/day and could fall by another 1 to 3 million bbls/day by the end of 2018. This figure is dependent upon the rate of collapse in Venezuela, as well as the strength of participation globally in the Iranian oil embargo. Add to this the fact that OPEC was collectively trying to cut production in the first half of 2018. OPEC has since ceased production cuts, with Saudi Arabia producing 500,000 bbls/day more in June than in May.
Over the past two weeks we have seen President Trump tweeting about the oil markets and discussing the potential for production increases. It is estimated that Saudi Arabia is the only country with significant spare capacity, with the potential for an additional 2 million bbls/day. Russia is rumored to have an additional 500,000 bbls/day in spare capacity and all the other countries producing oil could potentially add another 500,000 bbls/day. The caveat is that all of this spare capacity is speculative, due to the physical uncertainties of pumping oil from the ground.
Price shocks rarely come from anticipated events, but there have been clues recently. President Trump is not the first US president to criticize OPEC, but he does seem to have leverage. Saudi Arabia is torn between their OPEC alliance and their new found alliance with the U.S. President and his ability to maintain the Iranian embargo. Saudi Arabia risks hurting OPEC cooperation in the long run by alienating Iran, for the sake of their financial benefit by appeasing the wishes of President Trump. Iran recognizes this situation and recently threatened a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. This essential waterway would cut off 35% of the world's oil (including Iran's) and is a seen as a nuclear option for Iran (likely bringing armed confrontation) if all else fails.
When discussing geopolitical influences on the price of oil, historically you haven't needed a crystal ball to know that the risk has always been to the upside. While this is currently a safe bet, it is also grounded in the facts and figures of the current market situation. If we continue to see increasing oil demand from the US and China, mixed with un-replaced, lost production from Venezuela and Iran, then we will certainly see prices increase. Any news about lower spare production capacity from OPEC will also bring prices higher. The final and most volatile factor in the equation is that any news or potential for armed conflict in the Middle East will bring oil prices higher. All of this risk is likely the reason why the futures market confidence intervals favors upside movement.


text:
C-17 Cargo Movement, March 10, 2022
Video by Staff Sgt. Jerreht Harris
United States Air Forces Central
A U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III crew, assigned to the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, move cargo from Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, March 10, 2022. The C-17 is capable of rapid strategic delivery of troops and all types of cargo to main operating bases or directly to forward bases in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Jerreht Harris)
VIRIN: 220310-F-ZD833-9001
Location: QA
High-Res. Downloads: 19
This work, C-17 Cargo Movement, March 10, 2022, by SSgt Jerreht Harris, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
1CTCS
AFCENT
816th EAS


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Beeswax, Olive Oil, Almond Oil, Arnica, Calendula, Essential Oils of Manuka & Lemon. Also includes Hypericum.
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