text
stringlengths 179
94.7k
|
|---|
Morgan Verkamp, Experienced Federal Litigators
Working Exclusively for Whistleblowers
Having been awarded one of the largest judgments ever in any False Claims Act case – over $487 million – Morgan Verkamp has a proven track record of successfully representing whistleblowers for decades. Through the False Claims Act and other federal and state laws, we have helped our clients return billions of dollars to the United States and individual states – money that was illegally obtained through fraud.
Our skilled litigation team – of lawyers, an investigator, and support staff – will work closely with you to evaluate your case and decide whether to bring a suit. Our lawyers’ and investigator’s years of working at and with the government allow us to effectively aid the investigation into your fraud claims and to work side-by-side with the government if it takes on your case.
Unlike many whistleblower law firms, we do not disappear if the government does not get involved. Morgan Verkamp’s team has the experience and expertise to stand toe-to-toe with defendants through the years-long litigation process and, if necessary, to take a case to trial. Click here to learn more about our commitment to advocate for our clients at every step of the process.
“It is my great privilege to represent whistleblowers.
Our clients humble me every day with the courageous steps they take to come forward, to bring fraud to light, and to protect their fellow citizens and taxpayers.”
Representing whistleblowers is all we do, and we’ve been doing it longer and more successfully than most. Because of our experience and results, we are regularly asked by other firms to litigate cases after the government declines to intervene. We are also regularly asked to speak to the media about False Claims Act cases, to present at legal conferences, and to contribute to published treatises. We have earned Martindale Hubbell’s highest “AV Preeminent” rating for ability and integrity while developing a national reputation for zealous, effective representation of whistleblowers.
Please take some time to explore this website and learn more about our team and our practice areas: |
This essay is the sixth in a series by Hillel Halkin on seminal Hebrew writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The first five dealt with the novelists Joseph Perl, Avraham Mapu, and Peretz Smolenskin, the poet Yehudah Leib Gordon, and the essayist and Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am.
A man sits writing in his diary in the German city of Breslau—today, Polish Wrocław—in the summer of 1903. His name is Micha Yosef Berdichevsky. Although he is writing in German, he is one of the best-known, and certainly the most controversial, of the Hebrew authors of his day. It is the end of July and he is summarizing the month’s events in the kind of personal shorthand, fully understandable only to themselves, that diarists use. He writes:
A grave and difficult question: should the baby be made to join the Covenant of Israel? It should never have happened but it did. There are historic forces to which individuals are subject. And still it shouldn’t have happened.
Various matters come next:
Our family physician, Dr. Cohn. “The Burden of Nemirov.” Inquiries at the Russian consulate. . . . “Between the Hammer and the Anvil” is finished. Malter was here. He hasn’t changed much, he’s just happy no longer to be poor. We talked a lot and with little understanding between us. He’s a shrewd fellow in correspondence but overly tactful in conversation. And yet one is glad to have him.
And still other things:
The clinic has begun to operate. The competition: Hurwitz. The registry office. Rabbis regarding Emanuel. . . . My father-in-law arrived for a surprise visit. The same conversation for three days. On his way to the Congress in Basel, where he expects to find a redeeming word.
The month’s final entry is:
Ewa, who has been a true mother to the child and is able to calm its bawling with her love and devotion, is leaving. It’s been a hard day.
A hard month! Its full drama is barely hinted at even when the diary is decoded. It is only revealed by a letter from Berdichevsky’s friend Tsvi Malter, discovered in Berdichevsky’s archives by his biographer, the Israeli literary critic and historian Avner Holtzman.
Tsvi (Heinrich/Henry) Malter was a Galician-born scholar of medieval Jewish philosophy with a doctorate from the University of Heidelberg and a rabbinic degree from the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, where he and Berdichevsky met during 1893-94, the latter’s student years in the German capital; a fellow companion, also a graduate of the Lehranstalt, was David Neumark, later to become a prominent Reform rabbi. In 1900 Malter would move to the United States to take a teaching position at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and in 1903, shortly after the birth on June 18 of Berdichevsky’s first and only child Emanuel, he visited him in Breslau while on a trip to see his ill mother. In early July, Malter wrote a Hebrew reply to a non-surviving letter from Berdichevsky. It reads in full:
Saatz [Czech Żatec], July 5, 1903
Greetings, my dear friend! I’m sorry to tell you that I am not sorry that I can’t do anything in regard to the matter you write about, because I wouldn’t have done it even if I could have. While I knew your views on Judaism, so little did I think you would have the “courage” to do such a thing that I had to read your letter twice to grasp the gist of it—namely (although you recoil from saying so in plain language), that you did not circumcise your son. I don’t fear being suspected by you of false piety, because you know perfectly well what a freethinker I am, but I still must say that all this is far from me and completely alien. You don’t need anyone’s agreement or approval, and most of all, you don’t need anyone’s criticism. The very fact that you’ve found the strength to break with the thousands [sic] of generations of your forefathers gives you the license to do it. But this strength leaves you standing alone in our orb and you mustn’t expect that I or Neumark will be as brave as you or be your partners in your uncharted path. I’ve forwarded your letter to Neumark without stating my opinion. Let him do what he can. My mother died this week and I’m on my way home, and then to Berlin. With best wishes to your family from my wife and myself,
Your friend Tsvi
Malter’s letter, with its combination of shock and qualified sympathy, spells out the “grave and difficult question” referred to by Berdichevsky in his diary. Even today the Hebrew reader feels something of the same shock at the thought of one of the great figures of modern Hebrew literature refusing to bestow on his own son the most basic distinguishing mark of Jewishness.
Just what Berdichevsky wanted from Malter and Neumark is unclear. (Their support, obviously. But in what form?) And yet, as his diary tells us, his refusal did not last long. Emanuel, it is true, was not circumcised when he should have been, on June 25, the eighth day from his birth; so we learn from Tsvi Malter, who visited Berdichevsky before then and may have discussed the question of circumcision with him without realizing his intentions. Sometime in the course of July, however, Berdichevsky changed his mind and agreed to have the circumcision performed, not by a mohel, a ritual circumciser, but by the family doctor—after which he castigated himself twice in the same paragraph for letting it happen, as if once were not enough to express his regret.
That same month, we also learn, Berdichevsky read in manuscript (it had not yet been published), or heard about, “The Burden of Nemirov,” Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik’s electrifying Hebrew poem, later renamed “In the City of Slaughter,” about the April 1903 pogrom in Kishinev. As a Russian citizen, born in the small town of Dubova in the Ukraine in 1865, he visited the Russian consulate in Breslau, presumably to clarify Emanuel’s status. He finished writing his short story “Between the Hammer and the Anvil,” which appeared in print in 1904. His wife Rahel, a native of Warsaw who had studied dentistry, opened a clinic that would vie with the nearby practice of a dentist named Hurwitz.
Berdichevsky registered Emanuel’s birth with the German authorities. He consulted rabbis, or rabbinic literature, about Emanuel, perhaps to ascertain the validity of a non-ritually performed circumcision. Rahel’s father, Yakov Ramberg, passed through Breslau with his younger daughter Ewa on his way to the sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, at which Theodor Herzl was to broach his fiercely debated “Uganda Plan”; for three days, apparently, Berdichevsky had to listen to Ramberg talk about Zionist politics. When he left, Ewa stayed on to help take care of Emanuel, who was a cranky baby. Indeed, it was more likely the joint pleas of Berdichevsky’s wife and sister-in-law rather than “historic forces” that broke down his resistance to circumcising his son.
So it would seem, at any rate, from the only conversation I ever had with Emanuel Berdichevsky. Recounting with a rueful smile the scandal of his near non-circumcision, he told me that “family pressure” had caused his father to relent.
“Between the Hammer and the Anvil,” the story Berdichevsky finished writing in July 1903, contains clear autobiographical elements. Its narrator, Shimon Ben-Moshe, is at the time of writing an assistant librarian in a city somewhere in Central Europe. (Moshe was the name of Berdichevsky’s father, a small-town rabbi.) His account begins with a description of his early education in the Russian shtetl he grew up in, that of a ḥeder child whose imagination weaves vivid fantasies from the biblical texts he studies in the schoolroom. “I knew our father Abraham and Sarah as I knew my father’s neighbors,” he tells us. “When Miriam stood on the bank of the Nile to see what would happen to baby Moses, I stood by her side while she stroked my hair and asked me about my family. I crossed the Jordan with Joshua, carrying my own little stone [like the twelve stones carried into Canaan by representatives of the twelve tribes].”
When he is ten, Shimon’s mother dies. (Berdichevsky lost his mother at the same age.) “Although all I felt,” Shimon relates, “was a kind of bafflement, my soul lived in shadow from then on.” In the ḥeder, the enthralling stories of the Bible make way for the rigorous logic of the Talmud: “I was torn from my heroic Samson, from the kings of Judah and Israel whose wars I fought and bore arms in, and went to study with Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva.” The first stirrings of rebellion take the form of partly conscious anger at the strict world of paternal authority, untempered by a mother’s love, that condemns Shimon to long days on a school bench when his young body and boyish spirits crave activity:
Once, I imagined that my father had died, too. Freed from the yoke of the ḥeder, I learned to wield a hammer at the forge from the village blacksmith, whom I had always liked stealing away from my studies to watch. The whole town pitied me for being an orphan, but I—I had the terrible thought of starting a fire in its streets and watching it rise to the sky.
The first stirrings of sexuality also. Once, Shimon recollects, when he was bar-mitzvah age,
my father sent me to borrow ten rubles for the purchase of Sabbath provisions from a wealthy, attractive woman who lived by herself. There was no one else in her grand house, and she gave me a hug and a kiss. I felt a strange fire. I went about stunned all that day. I wanted to shout and caper in the streets. . . . Today this is just a memory, but I will say this of the soul’s mysteries: a man is the sum of all the sin and fire in his bones.
The adolescent boy begins, surreptitiously, to read Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) literature and gradually loses his religious faith while continuing to practice it in public:
The Haskalah told me, “Be strong, be a man, and acknowledge that you and your ancestors have lived foolishly.” It taught me to study the sciences and give up my belief in God. At first I felt afraid and stripped of my most precious belonging. Soon, though, I made bold to think that I alone saw the truth and other Jews were blind. . . . My friends advised me to leave town for a city where I could pursue my studies. My father kept berating me. . . . I hated the Jews who prayed all the time, hated their long clothes, hated the Sabbath. . . . But though inwardly I, the enlightened Shimon Ben-Moshe, lived in a world apart, I still put on my t’fillin, prayed in the synagogue, and washed my hands ritually before eating.
Ultimately, the narrator takes his friends’ advice and leaves both his native town and his native land:
And so I went from Kiev to Brody, and from Brody to Königsberg, and from there to Leipzig, and on to Basel. I wandered from country to country. I sat in the lecture halls of a university without knowing a thing about life or the world. I struggled not to starve while never planning for tomorrow. I had friends and knew nothing about people. I sought the secrets of the soul in the books of the poets and its laws in those of the philosophers.
Berdichevsky himself did not leave Russia so quickly. First came a year at the Lithuanian yeshiva of Volozhin, a vaunted center of talmudic learning that was also a notorious breeding grounds for the heresies of Haskalah thought; a return to the Ukraine, where he began his literary career as a journalist in the Hebrew press; two youthful marriages, both ending in divorce against the background of his religiously suspect views and behavior; and a stay in Odessa in 1889-90, where he worked as a Hebrew teacher while learning German. Only then did he set out for studies in the West, at first at the University of Breslau, and then at the Universities of Berlin and Bern, earning his doctoral degree from the latter in 1896 with a dissertation on the relationship between ethics and aesthetics.
Shimon Ben-Moshe does not get as far as a doctorate. His studies founder and he sinks into self-doubt and a sense of purposelessness. The student life he envisioned as a liberating adventure turns out to be a drab, lonely existence in rented lodgings and reading rooms. “I had thought I would be a valiant campaigner in the intellectual wars,” he writes, “but all I did was fall by the wayside. . . . My despair grew greater all the time. My soul yearned for a ‘Yea’ and could only say ‘Nay.’ I was in need of love and friendship and had nothing but my own doubts.” Although he has ceased to practice Judaism and sought to put it behind him, it refuses to stay there. “Each time I tried pressing on, I saw the wreckage of Sinai before me. It was wherever I went. Wherever I lay down to rest, the bad dreams of my people lay down with me.” He is at a mental impasse. “I had heard it said that man does not live by bread alone, but I say unto you: the life of the spirit torments man, too. I had heard it said, ‘Work and ye shall live,’ but I worked and no life came.”
If the last two sentences remind one of the vatic prose of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, this is probably because Shimon has been reading it. Although there is no mention in “Between the Hammer and the Anvil” of Nietzsche, his work, little known before then, became popular in Europe in the 1890s. The drastic if short-lived reversal of mood that Shimon now undergoes, as if he had been granted a sudden epiphany, is more suggestive of a literary than a real-life experience and hints at the influence of Zarathustra‘s dithyrambs:
One clear morning all was alive. Resurrection! Let the sun shine! A thousand years count for nothing beside the light and purity of the morning! . . . Wrong is he who complains of the tedium of life. Listen to the day’s song, seize the world with both hands, let us pray to the God of the thunderclouds!
It was storming outside. The wind was howling. I thought, “I can’t get out of bed.” Yet lo, I did and I had something to live for.
But this euphoria passes quickly. Nietzsche is no match for the burden of Jewishness that Shimon can no more cast off than can the Jewish people. If there is indeed a God, he reflects bitterly, “He has chosen us among all peoples to torture us. . . . We want to repair the world and cannot even repair ourselves.” His depression returns until one day he learns of a new movement, his ignorance of which reflects how isolated he has been from Jewish life.
Walking with a friend in the city park one day, I opened my heart to him. He had only one thing to say: We must return to the land of our fathers and make it our own!
I looked at him in amazement. All my torment melted away. . . .
From then on, I, too, was one of the dreamers. Every time I saw a flag, I wished it were the flag of Zion. Every rally I attended made my heart rally for its people. What no single one of us could do by himself, we could all do together.
Berdichevsky’s own “Nietzschean” and Zionist phases remain to be discussed. In Shimon’s case, the second of these fades as quickly as the first. Zionism, he concludes once his initial enthusiasm for it has waned, is all empty talk. Waving flags and attending rallies in Europe is easier than settling in Palestine, and all Herzl’s advent has done is to replace the synagogue and prayer book with Zionist congresses and their speeches. “I dreamed one night,” he says sarcastically, “that the Jews were still scattered over the face of the earth, and that they and their wives and children were chanting [in the words of the Shmoneh Esreh prayer], ‘And may our eyes see Thee return to Zion in Thy mercy.’” What has been is what will be.
Shimon marries: if the Jews cannot build a home in Palestine, he will at least build one for himself. This, too, however, is a mistake: his marriage, like Berdichevsky’s first two, soon falls apart. (Berdichevsky’s third marriage to Rahel Ramberg in 1902, on the other hand, was a happy one.) God’s words to the serpent in the Garden of Eden, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman,” should have been addressed, Shimon muses, to Adam. The whole episode, he tells the reader, “fills me with such shame that I can’t say any more about it. You’ll have to understand on your own.”
We do and we don’t understand. Although Shimon is only in his forties,
I’ve grown old before my time. Life has stranded me in the job of an assistant in a library. I work every day from nine a.m. to two p.m. Then I return to my room on the outskirts of town. My bed is there, my books are there, my world is there.
When I think of my old dreams and aspirations, I can’t believe any of it. What is the past to me? What is the present? They’re all the same graveyard, on their tombstones a language I don’t even understand.
His life is for all purposes over. There is no fire left in his bones.
The loss of religious faith resulting from its encounter with modern critical thought, most often in the form of the writings of the Haskalah, is a major theme in the Hebrew literature of the late 19th century. Its subjects are young Jews, often in their teens and frequently yeshiva students, who are “banished from their father’s table” (the rabbinic phrase is the title of a book on the subject by Alan Mintz), and from the strict but warm world of tradition that has nurtured them since childhood, by their own inquiring minds. Some sense in advance that the meaning and coherence they are about to give up is as great as the freedom they will gain. One thinks of the adolescent Yirmiyah Feiermann, the narrator of the Hebrew novelist Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner’s Winter, one leg still in the study house and the other already outside it, fighting a rear-guard action “from the depths of the struggle for my spiritual existence,” as he puts it, to retain the beliefs he has grown up with; or of the same study house revisited by the twenty-one-year-old Bialik after leaving it:
On your threshold I stand one last time,
Beggared and like you forlorn.
Do I weep for your ruin or mine?
Or is it for both that I mourn?
Or of Mordecai Ze’ev Feierberg’s short novel Whither?, published in installments in Ahad Ha’am’s Hashilo’aḥ in 1899, the year of its twenty-four-year-old author’s death from tuberculosis. In a climactic scene, Naḥman, the novel’s protagonist, stands with the congregation in the synagogue of his father, its rabbi, on Tisha b’Av, the fast day commemorating the destruction of the Temple. The destruction he himself is grieving for, however, has been wreaked on him by the books of philosophy he has been secretly reading. He prays to be able to pray like the Jews around him:
Give me back my God, the God of the Jews! The God of Aristotle can do nothing for me. He is a figurehead, a king without a kingdom, not a God who lives. . . . Give me back the God who is near to me and I to Him! The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Moses and the prophets, the God of all this holy congregation that is melting in its tears for the destruction of Jerusalem while its heart trusts and hopes that God will rebuild Zion! . . . Take what you want from me—heaven and hell, my share in the world to come—but give me back my light, my heart, my soul, my people, my God!
One may ask why such spiritual anguish is rarely found in Haskalah writers like Avraham Mapu and Yehudah Leib Gordon, though they, too, were perfectly conscious of having intellectually outgrown the faith of their fathers. Even Peretz Smolenskin, who systematically blamed the Haskalah for the damage done by it to the Jewish psyche, never spoke of it from a place of personal bereftness. A rare exception was Moshe Leib Lilienblum (1843-1910), who wrote in his autobiography of the year that witnessed, at the age of twenty-seven, the final collapse of the religious beliefs he had struggled for years to prop up:
My entire mental treasury, all the property I had accumulated in a lifetime, had been plundered all at once. . . . I was like a philosopher who has lost his system, a business whose account books have been burned. . . . The God who had always been my shepherd was now the God of Spinoza. I felt alone and abandoned in life. I had taken the final intellectual step and my heart sank. My mind was a blank. I was terrified.
But Lilienblum, too, quickly got over his crisis. Within a few months he had taken the job of editor of the Odessa Yiddish weekly Kol Mevaser and thrown himself back into the hurly-burly of the Russian Jewish life he had never left.
It is only starting with Berdichevsky, born two decades after Smolenskin and Lilienblum and one before Bialik and Feierberg, that we find characters like Shimon Ben-Moshe in Hebrew literature. And this is because it was only in the period of Berdichevsky’s coming of age in the 1880s that East European Jewish life began to change dramatically. Until then its institutions, despite the Haskalah’s unrelenting critique of them, had remained fundamentally intact, and the great majority of Jews, Ḥasidim and Misnagdim, Maskilim and anti-Maskilim, had continued to live within their framework as before. It was not until the ’80s that worsening anti-Semitism, mass emigration, growing assimilation, and the incipient movements of Zionism and Jewish socialism began seriously to affect the world of Russian Jewry, threatening to tear and even shred its very fabric.
As adversarial toward this world as the Haskalah had been, it had hoped for its improvement, not its destruction; the prospect of its disappearance never occurred to men like Mapu or (at least until the end of his life) Gordon—and because it didn’t, their own place in it seemed secure to them, too. Although fiercely opposed by its conservative wing, they remained snugly within the confines of the Jewish community, participating in its life, remaining—if only for appearance’s sake—at least partly observant of its religious rituals, and never contemplating leaving it; nor, short of the unthinkable act of religious conversion, was there anywhere they might have left it for. Precisely this is the tragic situation of the rebel Yakov-Ḥayyim in Smolenskin’s “A Donkey’s Burial”: cast out by Jewish society with nowhere to go, he is forced to live in a lonely shack outside of town with his child and wife, who consents to being baptized after his death.
Such was no longer the case when Berdichevsky was reaching adulthood. Jews were now leaving Russia in droves; many more had begun to move from the small towns of the Pale of Settlement to its cities, where Russification was rapid and Jewish communal structures were weaker; for the first time, the possibility of living outside of these structures existed for a religiously disaffected young Jew. Yet choosing to do so, which often meant cutting one’s ties with uncomprehending and unforgiving parents and with everything that once had been home, could well sweep one away, not only from the synagogue and study house but from Jewish life entirely. Without the synagogue and study house, indeed, what remained of this life? Although secular or semi-secular Jewish coteries existed in the 1880s in East European cities like Odessa and Warsaw, and even in some smaller towns, a fully functioning secular Jewish society did not. The very concept of it was nebulous. How could a people without a territory that had always defined itself by its religion turn its back on it while remaining itself?
Shimon Ben-Moshe’s short-lived enthusiasm for Zionism is great because he suddenly glimpses how such a thing might be conceivable; once he concludes that the Zionist movement is going nowhere, his last hopes perish. Not only is there no answer to why he should go on being a Jew, there is none to how he can be one even if he wants to. And at the same time, he cannot help being one. As Berdichevsky relates of a similar but more fictionally developed character, Mikha’el, the protagonist of his story “Two Camps”: “Nothing was left in him of his people—but he was still his people’s son.” Shimon’s Jewishness cannot be rooted out. He cannot kill it by an act of will. He can only try starving it to death by living apart from his fellow Jews, which is what we see him doing at the story’s end. Psychologically, however, this means starving himself to death, too.
When Berdichevsky left Russia in 1890 to study, first in Germany and then in Switzerland, he was part of a growing trend. Unlike Russian universities, which admitted few Jews, German and Swiss ones accepted them on an equal basis and even allowed them to matriculate without a high-school diploma. By 1900, an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 young Russian Jews were enrolled in German and Swiss higher institutions of learning with another several hundred in France. (Germany and Switzerland were preferred destinations because of the closeness to German of Yiddish, making the former a relatively easy language for East European Jews to master.) University cities like Zurich, Bern, Breslau, and Berlin had lively Jewish student colonies. A group of Berdichevsky’s early stories, written in the late 1890s when he first turned to Hebrew fiction, consists of character sketches drawn from this milieu.
But the Mikha’el of “Two Camps” wants no part of it. A student of philosophy and history at the University of Breslau, he is lonely but wants friends who are German. Looking down from a bridge one winter day on a crowd of ice skaters below, one a dark-haired and complexioned girl he cannot take his eyes off, he laments that
Not one of the skaters knew him. Though he now spoke their language and was studying their thought, he was a stranger in their midst, an outlier. . . . And yet he felt that this thought was his own. The root of his soul was drawn to it; he sought their company, wanted to be one of them.
Mikha’el is an internationalist: he believes in “complete equality among all people and nations,” and feels that in leaving his White Russian shtetl he has gone “from darkness to light.” He prefers working mornings in a bookbindery to the better-paying job of giving Hebrew lessons to the children of Breslau’s Jewish bourgeoisie because he thinks Hebrew has no future. He has even managed to lose the t’fillin and prayer book that he brought with him from Russia, “so as to be rid of the baggage of Judaism.” When a Jewish professor who knows his background hands him a generous sum of money with the request that he study a daily chapter of the Mishnah in memory of a dead relative, he is hurt to the quick: “He was in Germany, the land of freedom; he had sacrificed everything for his religious liberty—and here he was being asked to mutter words in some dark corner like a superstitious kabbalist!” And yet something of his Orthodox upbringing remains with him. So great is his scorn for the Reform Jews of Breslau that he draws the curtain on his window on Saturday mornings to avoid having to see them on their way to their temple.
Mikha’el lives in a rented room. One evening he finds himself locked out of the apartment by its owner, who has gone off somewhere, and is invited in by the upstairs neighbors, a German tailor, Markus, and his Polish wife, Maria-Jozefa—who, born to a family of déclassé nobility, looks down on her husband. Though the two quarrel in front of him, he feels comfortable with them because they respect him as a student and have nothing against Jews. As they are talking, their daughter Hedwig walks in: she is the same seventeen- or eighteen-year-old he had watched skating from the bridge. Mikha’el stares bashfully at the floor and hurries to take his leave as soon as he hears his landlord return. Yet from then on, he begins to drop in on Hedwig and her parents, and he and she fall shyly in love.
Hedwig is not, Mikha’el learns, Maria-Jozefa’s biological daughter: she was adopted as a child when her real mother, a washerwoman who bore her out of wedlock, could not take care of her. Yet her illegitimacy, and the Catholic faith she has been raised in, only stoke Mikha’el’s ardor for her. They feed into an old fantasy:
In his fights with the [Jewish] religious fanatics back in Russia, he had imagined marrying a Christian woman just to spite them. Now, scornful, too, of the moral conventions of Europe, he was entranced by the thought of linking his future to this child of foreign gods born in sin. He would cast off the bonds that still held him and be totally free! His was the last generation of its kind; let theirs be the first. . . . He and she would go far away. He would write no more to his parents and old friends. He would never read another Hebrew book or take any interest in Jewish life. He would live with her in an unfettered paradise, liberated from patriarchal legacies and their punishments.
Winter passes. Then spring. Mikha’el’s relationship with Hedwig grows stronger: they plan a civil marriage so that he need not convert. Meanwhile, however, his sexual energies have no release. A near-seduction by an older woman, a friend of Maria-Jozefa’s, ends awkwardly. It is summer, a Friday night, a time when Mikha’el still feels, despite himself, “something of the poetry of religious emotion.” Walking the streets of the city, he encounters a woman sitting alone on a bench. He sits beside her; their hands touch; she asks him to come home with her, and they have sex. When it is over,
Mikha’el sat, embarrassed, on a stool, staring desolately ahead of him.
He didn’t understand what he was doing in this place.
He didn’t know what to do next and looked about in confusion. He rose to go.
Softly, she asked him to stay for a while and have tea. She had never known anyone like him before, she said, lighting the hob.
They talk. Mikha’el asks the woman about herself. She tells him she was an orphan raised by relatives until they threw her into the street. The dialogue proceeds with the inexorability of a Greek tragedy:
“How old were you then?”
“Fourteen. For two years, I worked for a laundress. She worked me to the bone, so I began taking in wash on my own.”
“But why should a young gentleman like you care?”
“Don’t mind me. I mean well.”
“I gave birth. I was ill much of the time.”
“Where was your husband?”
“I didn’t have one. . . . It was just some damned Jew.”
“What happened to him?”
“He ditched me.”
“And the child died?”
“Where is it?”
“But why do you ask?”
“I gave her away. I was weak and poor. I couldn’t bring her up properly.”
“Do you ever see her?”
“Rarely. From a distance.”
`”Where does she live?”
“Here. In Breslau.”
“And you don’t visit her?”
“I’m not allowed to. She doesn’t know who I am.”
“That must be hard on you.”
“What can I do? She comes from another people. . . . It’s God’s punishment.”
“And her parents, the ones she has now . . . are they well-off??”
“No. They’re tailors. ”
“He is. She comes from nobility.”
“And . . . her name . . . it’s . . .”
“Maria-Jozefa. But what’s wrong? You’re shaking all over!”
It is hard to say at what point Mikha’el begins to suspect the worst; perhaps only upon hearing the word “tailors.” A few seconds later, he rushes into the street with a cry of pain. He has fouled himself! He has fouled Hedwig, fouled her purity! He should throw himself into the river, be swallowed by the earth! He should poke his eyes out so that he can never see her again! He is a scoundrel. All his ideals are a façade. He is a damned Jew. “Yes, that’s what she called him . . . her mother . . . her mother. . . . ”
For three days, Mikha’el shuts himself up in his room. Then he packs his things, goes to the railroad station, and buys a ticket for “somewhere far away.” Wherever it is, it cannot be far enough.
His horror is understandable. He has not, like Oedipus, unwittingly had sex with his mother, but by having it with the mother of his fiancée, he has done something symbolically equivalent. The Hebrew Bible that he knows well considers this incest: “And the man who possesses a woman and her mother, this is lewdness. He shall be burned in the fire.” Although Mikha’el only thinks of blinding himself, this is, as Alan Mintz points out in writing about “Two Camps,” what Oedipus actually does.
And yet on second thought, is not Mikha’el overreacting? The Bible aside, he has committed no crime; a symbolic mother is not a real one, nor is it against the law to be picked up and taken to bed by a lonely woman. The chances of Hedwig’s finding out about it are next to nothing: she and her mother, whom she would not recognize, have no contact, and she and Mikha’el are planning to leave Breslau once married. Why do something so devastating as disappearing forever without even telling her? By any reasonable yardstick, this is far worse than anything that has happened with her mother.
Mikha’el is in fact acting hysterically. Moreover, his hysteria is Jewish. It is not just the reaction of someone whose instinctive frame of reference is the punitive “patriarchal legacy” that he prides himself on having rejected. It is that of someone who takes Hedwig’s mother’s not necessarily anti-Semitic remark of “it was just some damned Jew” to apply to himself. (Ironically, of course, Hedwig, the “Christian woman” of Mikha’el’s fantasies, now turns out to be half-Jewish, as has been foreshadowed by his noticing her dark looks from the bridge.) And by running out on Hedwig just as her biological father ran out on her mother, Mikha’el has earned the adjective. He is a damned Jew and will forever be one.
Most telling is the penance he imagines:
Flog yourself! Lie on the ground where everyone can trample on you! Stretch out on the synagogue floor and be stepped on by the whole congregation! Submit to the synagogue. . . . Back to God, man!
Mikha’el, a student of history, must know that this was the fate of Uriel da Costa, the 17th-century son of Spanish conversos who returned to Judaism in Amsterdam, grew disillusioned with it, was excommunicated for expressing anti-rabbinic views, recanted because he could not endure his social isolation, and was readmitted to the Jewish community after being publicly flogged and trod on by its members. He must know, too, that da Costa, unable to live with his humiliation, shot and killed himself.
At the end of “Two Camps,” what was said of Mikha’el at its beginning—“Nothing was left in him of his people—but he was still his people’s son”—proves only half-true. Yes, he is still his people’s son—and everything of his people is still in him. The only way for him to cease being a Jew would be, as it was for Uriel da Costa, to cease being entirely.
“Two Camps” was printed separately as a slim book in 1899, one of several volumes of Berdichevsky’s fiction to come out that year. There were only a few periodicals at the time that might have accommodated the story’s nearly 15,000 words, most prominently Ahad Ha’am’s Berlin-based monthly Hashiloaḥ, at which Berdichevsky had served for a while as an editorial assistant, and the annual Warsaw Lu’aḥ Aḥiasaf, and both would have been likely to reject it for its sexual frankness, uncommon for the Hebrew fiction of its day. What was truly bold about it, however, was not the sex between Mikha’el and Hedwig’s mother, no details of which are provided, but its sympathetic portrayal of a woman hungry for companionship and physical love who gives herself to a stranger. Ahad Ha’am would no doubt have objected to this on moral grounds, just as he would have objected to Mikha’el’s Jewish negativity, which he would not have found compensated for by the story’s ending. He had made Hashiloaḥ‘s policy toward literature clear in a statement of purpose that appeared in its first issue in 1896.
There were, this statement asserted, four areas in which Hashiloaḥ proposed to concentrate. The first three were Jewish historical scholarship, journalism about the contemporary Jewish world, and reviews of books with Jewish content. The fourth was Hebrew belles-lettres—specifically, works of prose and poetry that “faithfully depict our [Jewish] situation in different times and places.” Works of purely artistic merit that did not “enhance our national consciousness,” Ahad Ha’am wrote, would not be considered for publication. This would have ruled out a Hebrew story like “Two Camps,” which was hardly Jewishly “enhancing” by Ahad Ha’am’s lights, and it triggered a public exchange between him and Berdichevsky that grew into a broader controversy.
It was Berdichevsky, then working at Hashiloaḥ, who fired the opening shot. Ahad Ha’am’s statement of purpose, not seen by him in advance, surprised and dismayed him. Although he was aware of Ahad Ha’am’s objection to Hebrew fiction that failed to serve “positive” Jewish goals, he hadn’t expected it to be made an editorial policy, and he wrote a letter of protest that he asked Ahad Ha’am to run in Hashiloaḥ‘s second issue—which, to his credit, Ahad Ha’am did.
Berdichevsky’s “Open Letter to Ahad Ha’am” was a call for a Hebrew literature that would deal with all aspects of human life rather than be limited to subjects of “Jewish” interest, and that would be free of demands that it serve this or that concept of the good of the Jewish people. “My dear Ahad Ha’am!” he wrote:
The minute we limit our scope to what is “Jewish,” we acknowledge that everything else is not “Jewish.” . . . We divide life into two realms, what is ours and what lies beyond it, and we widen the fissure in the minds and hearts of young Jews.
This “fissure” or conflict between one’s Jewish identity and the pull of the outside world could only be resolved, Berdichevsky argued, by expanding the frontiers of Jewishness until they were congruent with the world’s, a role best played by imaginative literature. “You are an intellectual,” he wrote,
and so you make light of imaginative writing and fail to see its value for individual and national life. . . . We want the Jew and the human being in us to be nourished by a single source. We want the fissure to be healed.
Hebrew literature, Berdichevsky was in effect proposing, should replace Y.L. Gordon’s Haskalah adage of “Be a Jew at home and a citizen abroad” with “Be a Jew in all life has to offer.”
Ahad Ha’am responded to this in the third issue of Hashiloaḥ, in an essay entitled “Need and Capability.” In theory, he stated, he had no quarrel with Berdichevsky; he, too, was for a Hebrew literature that explored the entire human condition. At present, however, Hebrew had neither the linguistic resources nor the literary talents required for such a task. “We want! We need! But can we?” Ahad Ha’am asked. “This is a question the younger generation doesn’t pose and can’t be expected to, since no one is posing it in regard to our national goals, either.” Drawing a parallel between his positions on Hebrew literature and on Zionism, he wrote:
We keep veering precipitately from the slow but steady path. We either expect too much or too little of ourselves, and in the end all comes to nothing because the distance between high-minded ends and meager means is too much for us.
Until Hebrew writers could produce great poetry and fiction of universal value, Hebrew readers would have to seek these elsewhere. Meanwhile, let Hebrew specialize in what it did best and deal with themes rooted in Jewish experience, of which it was an unparalleled repository.
Berdichevsky replied to this in turn. Now, however, taking up Ahad Ha’am’s gauntlet of “national goals,” he went further. He had been reading Nietzsche, and in a series of brief, aphoristic essays that he published during the next several years he began to call for a Nietzschean “transvaluation of values” in Jewish life that would not wait for literature to blaze the trail for it. What was needed, he proclaimed, was not, as the Haskalah had argued, a thorough reform of Judaism, but a radical break with it.
When it came to Judaism, indeed, the Berdichevsky of the late 1890s went a step beyond Nietzsche. The latter, in blaming Christianity for making war on all the healthy, natural instincts of pre-Christian man in the name of a “slave morality” driven by guilt and a sense of sin, had included in his indictment the Judaism that Christianity grew out of; yet he had distinguished, basing himself on the 19th-century Higher Criticism’s judgment that the “priestly code” in Leviticus was a late addition to the Bible, between the life-affirming religion of the early biblical period, which he professed to admire, and a life-denying sacerdotal phase that followed. Berdichevsky made no such distinction. The problem with Judaism, he argued, was not that it had taken a wrong turn at some point in the past, not even one so distant as the rise to power of a cultic priesthood in the mid-1st millennium BCE. The problem went back to Mount Sinai itself. It was already there that the heavy hand of the Law had come to rest on all vital spontaneity.
God was buried beneath the Torah, the world beneath a book. Man stifled his senses and became a guardian of parchment. . . . An entire people rebelled against nature. An ancient tribe went looking for a country and found a tome of commandments. Day turned to night; thunder and lightning boomed and flashed; signs and omens cowed the best in us. . . . When Moses descended the mountain, no prophet arose to snatch away the tablets of the Law and cry to the people in the wilderness: “Back to nature, back to your mother!”
One can easily see in a passage like this Berdichevsky’s own resentment, writ large, of his early loss of a mother and subjection by a father to long years of dull study. Consciously or not, he was projecting his childhood experience onto a vast historical screen. But he was also projecting the experience of a generation. Such rhetoric appealed to many young Hebrew readers of the age because they, too, felt they had been snatched from the maternal warmth of the home when barely out of infancy and delivered to a harsh male regime of study and ritual observance that robbed them of childhood’s spontaneous joys. This made Berdichevsky’s invocation of an ancient, idyllic, religiously matriarchal past that was the lost childhood of the nation both startling in its strangeness and subliminally recognizable:
In the time when we worshiped many gods, burning our incense to them on the hills and mountains and building our altars to the Queen of Heaven [the prophet Jeremiah’s term for the Canaanite goddess Astarte]; when we pranced like young rams and reveled in light and in the votaries of light; then came the one God from the desert to give us an eternal scripture into whose occult sinkholes we sank and never stopped sinking.
There had never been such a frontal attack on Judaism in Hebrew before, not even in Gordon’s poem “Zedekiah in Prison” or in the militant secularism of Eliezer Ben-Yehudah (1856-1922). Overnight, Berdichevsky became a cause célèbre. His polemical exchange with Ahad Ha’am was closely followed. The talk in Hebrew-reading circles in Eastern Europe, the Hebrew writer Ḥayyim Dov Horowitz wrote from there, was “Berdichevsky, Berdichevsky, Berdichevsky!'”And just as Nietzsche idealized the pre-Christian past to hail the coming of a post-Christian future, so Berdichevsky now spoke of a future that would be post-Jewish. With Judaism no longer an intellectually viable faith among the young, the Jewish people would perish if it did not reinvent itself:
The period we are now in has no parallel in anything previous. The fundamental conditions, internal and external, that have enabled us to survive for so many centuries have collapsed. . . . Not for nothing do we fear that we have left familiar territory and are faced with the collision of “to be” with “not to be.” We will either be the last Jews or the first Hebrews.
Stirring language though this was, though, what did it mean? If a Jew and a Hebrew were two manifestations of a single identity, one born at Sinai and the other buried beneath it and reborn upon its ruins that were now about to entomb the first, what did such an identity consist of? And if the contrary was true—if Hebrews and Jews were two entirely different peoples—why should Jews care if they were followed by Hebrews or not? Peoples, like individuals, strive to survive as themselves. “Survival” as another is extinction.
This point was made by Ahad Ha’am in Hashiloaḥ, from which Berdichevsky had by now resigned. Although, Ahad Ha’am wrote, there were elements in Nietzsche’s philosophy that were compatible with Judaism or Jewishness (like other Hebrew writers, Ahad Ha’am indiscriminatingly used the term yahadut for both), such as the parallel between the Nietzschean Übermensch and the Jewish concept of the Chosen People, Nietzsche’s belief that “the physical life needs to be liberated from the restraining power of the spirit” was not one of them. It was no wonder that Hebrew literature’s self-proclaimed Nietzscheans
feel an “inner fissure” when they exclaim: the transvaluation of values! New values for old! The sword in place of the book—instead of the Prophets, [Nietzsche’s] “blond beast!” This past year, especially, we have heard on a daily basis about the need to tear everything down from top to bottom and rebuild. What we don’t hear is how you can simultaneously smash the national foundations of an ancient people and construct a new life for it after having denied its essential nature and killed its historical soul.
The question was a good one, even if Ahad Ha’am’s understanding of Nietzsche was not. (The Übermench-Chosen People equation was far-fetched, and Nietzsche certainly never believed that the mental life mattered less than the physical.) But Berdichevsky was in any case not quite the Nietzschean he was made out to be. Nietzsche’s thought had given him a framework in which to push his critique of Judaism to the limit; beyond that, it was not central to his own. If it had any relevance to the question of Jewish continuity posed by Ahad Ha’am, this was only insofar as Nietzsche considered thinking in terms of essences a lazily generalizing habit of mind.
This was precisely how Berdichevsky now answered Ahad Ha’am. Jewish life, he declared, did not have an “essential nature” and never had had one. It was simply the sum total of all the Jewish lives that had been lived and of the innumerable contrasts and inconsistencies between them:
Ahad Ha’am’s Judaism is an abstraction, a conventional notion of what Jews are. But we are Jews pure and simple, with all the different thoughts and opinions that Jews have.
You warn us that our views are incompatible with being Jewish. But the question is: what is Jewish? What is this eternal Jewishness in which we share?
Giving examples of how Jewish tradition was never unitary and often contradicted itself, Berdichevsky went on:
We are told: observe Judaism! We reply: we are Jews and that’s enough. You have chosen for yourselves a suitably high-minded Judaism by virtue of which we exist and alone have the right to exist. But we are not interested in an existence that is predicated on living tradition-bound lives. The Jewish people is an ongoing process, not a cosmically predetermined formula. We are a people that has thought this, that, and the other thing, but it is not thinking any of them that has made us a people
No abstract Judaism of any kind can be our guide. We are Hebrews and we will serve our own hearts.
Ivrim anaḥnu ve’et libeynu na’avod! Berdichevsky’s readers would not have missed the defiant allusion to Moses’ declaration to Pharaoh, “Thus saith the Lord, the God of the Hebrews: ‘Set my people free that it might serve me.’” It was not Jewishness that produced Jews. It was Jews who produced Jewishness, and every Jew would help produce it in his own way.
Roughly at the time of his marriage to Rahel Ramberg in 1902, the subject matter of Berdichevsky’s fiction changed. It ceased to be the uprooted lives of young Jews who had left the Russian shtetl for the cities and universities of Europe, and instead became the shtetl itself. This no doubt owed something to his marriage and settling-down: he was now a husband and father and no longer a student and wanderer. It also, however, reflected a desire to record a world that was, by the turn of the century, under severe stress and doomed, so Berdichevsky believed, to vanish or be fundamentally altered. Despite his physical and mental removal from the shtetl, his emotional ties to it had never been cut, and a successful visit to Dubova with his wife soon after their marriage, his first since leaving Russia a decade earlier, helped reconcile him to his memories of it.
The shtetl Berdichevsky wrote about was that of his childhood in which traditional ways, relatively unaffected by modernity, still prevailed. Neither described satirically in the manner of the Haskalah, nor romanticized as it was by the Yiddish author I.L. Peretz (1852-1915) and the Hebrew author S.Y. Agnon (1888-1970), its outward harmony is fraught with inner conflicts. Perhaps the most common motif in Berdichevsky’s shtetl stories, with their wide variety of characters and situations, is that of disruption—of a person, action, or event that shatters an accepted mold of behavior and sends shock waves through a community that must struggle to contain it, often at a high price to those directly involved.
A good example of this is his “A Generation Passes,” set in a town called Lodozino. The town is undergoing a slow social transformation: its old class of wealthy Jews is on the decline and a new group of nouveaux riches has accumulated savings, opened shops and businesses, and become economically dominant. And yet while everyone in town is aware of the change, the old social relationships continue. By a kind of undeclared compact, Lodozino’s down-at-the-heels gentility goes on controlling the town’s communal institutions, is accorded the show of respect it has always received, and refrains from mixing with those it considers its inferiors—until one day a parvenu horse trader named Ayzik-Hirsh, the crude and violent son of a blacksmith, persuades the once wealthy Menasheh-Shlomo, now fallen on hard times, to marry off his well-bred daughter to his own, Ayzik-Hirsh’s, doltish son in return for rescue from financial ruin.
It is the town’s first “intermarriage”—and Lodozino, to its surprise, accepts it with equanimity and even celebrates with relief the passing of a fictitious social order. Menasheh-Shlomo alone, mortified for himself and his daughter, cannot come to terms with it. He withdraws into a world of unreality, convincing himself up to the day of the wedding that his daughter’s betrothal is a bad dream.
The day arrived. All day long Menasheh went about unbelievingly. He only awoke when the musicians began to play. Yes, it was real . . . it really was. It was the first day of the Jewish month, on which the Hallel prayer is said, and he thought of its verse, “Dear unto the Lord is the death of His pious ones.” Opening his tallis-and-t’fillin bag, he took out his sash and his prayer book, in which he found the deathbed confession. Then he went up to the roof. Put your house in order, man!
It isn’t clear if Menasheh hangs himself with his sash, the Hasidic gartl worn in prayer, or jumps from the roof, just as it isn’t clear if the story’s last words are addressed to him by himself or by the narrator. Such ambiguity is common in Berdichevsky’s fiction, in which the author slips in and out of the minds of his characters as if he were both their chronicler and alter ego, leaving us guessing whether a thought is his or theirs. In either case, Menasheh-Shlomoh has put his house in order as best he could. His daughter, whose wedding he will be spared from witnessing, will be unhappily married but well-provided for.
In some of the best-known of Berdichevsky’s stories, the disruption takes the form of flagrantly non-normative behavior that bears on his debate with Ahad Ha’am. One of these, “The Red Cow,” takes place in the town of Dashya. At first its narrator wonders whether he should even relate its upsetting incident at all, but he decides to go ahead. “The fact of the matter is,” he says,
that our generation is dying out and the next one won’t know who its ancestors were or how they lived in our world of Jewish exile. If it reads and is curious about them, let it at least know what their bright and dark sides were. Let it know that we were Jews, but also flesh-and-blood, with all that that implies.
In Dashya, many of whose inhabitants keep cows, lives a Jew named Ruvn who owns the handsomest and best milk-giver in town, a rare red Holstein. One year in which meat is scarce, Dashya’s Jewish butchers plot to steal and slaughter Ruvn’s cow and divide it among them. In the middle of the night, they lead it from its barn, drag it to a cellar, wrestle it to the ground, and slit its throat.
The cow let out a frightful, earth-rending bellow. Its blood spurted in a wide, fountain-like arc, glittering in the light of the lantern that hung from the ceiling. It spattered over the ceiling and the walls and the floor and the men’s pants and faces and hands, and still the cow went on struggling with its last strength. The ground around it was a sea of blood. Its killers heaved it onto its side, and after a while the red Holstein gave up the ghost. Man conquers beast!
One of the butchers took a sharp knife and plunged it into the dying cow’s belly. As its guts spilled out, the others were already skinning it, all but tearing the hide from its flesh. They did it with a hidden strength and a hard passion they never knew they possessed.
The cow was skinned. The butchers divided it up, cutting away the head and legs. One impatiently seized the fatty liver and threw it on some coals that had been lit in a corner. The men wolfed it down, blood and all, and licked their fingers hungrily, drinking as they ate from a large bottle of vodka that stood on the floor. They were like priests of the Ba’al ripping apart a sacrificial victim. And this wasn’t at Beth-El or Dan. It was in the Jewish town of Dashya. It didn’t happen in the ancient kingdom of Israel before the exile of the ten tribes. The year was five-thousand-six-hundred-and-forty-five.
The Jewish year 5645 was 1885, when Berdichevsky was a young man in the Ukraine, and it is possible that “The Red Cow” was based on an incident he knew of. The butchers’ wild bacchanal, however, is entirely the work of his imagination. They themselves are surprised by it: it comes from a place deep within them that they have had no inkling of. The narrator, whether a simple Jew or an Ahad Ha’amist intellectual, is embarrassed by the whole thing. Jews should not act this way. It is foreign to the essence of Judaism to indulge in orgiastic rites that evoke the worship of the forgotten gods of Canaan, the bitter foes of the biblical God who forbids blood-lusts and the eating of blood. Yet the butchers of Dashya, who have their own synagogue and are every bit as “Jewish” as the town’s respectable householders, don’t give a fig for essences. They are who they are. In “The Red Cow,” something ancient and anarchic that seems to break into the life of the shtetl has in fact always been there; it dwells in the Jewish psyche even if its presence there is denied; it is as old as the monotheistically suppressed cult of the Ba’al itself.
In others of Berdichevsky’s stories, the intrusion of archaic forces into small-town Russian-Jewish life is more benign but also more tragic. This is so in “In the Valley,” which tells of the fate of Hulda, a Jewish girl from a Ukrainian hamlet whose beauty has about it “something of a folktale.” Hulda is a strange, enchanted creature. Wherever she goes—and she likes, in an unheard-of fashion, to wander alone in the fields and hills, or by the river near her home—she is accompanied by “an echo of Eden before man sinned.” When she is sixteen, she is betrothed by her father, the miller Shmaryahu-Avigdor, to a presentable young man from a good family in a nearby town. Here, too, the climax of the story is a wedding. Hulda’s is held out-of-doors:
Twilight! The setting sun, reflected with the fields in the river, reddened the sky. A grand wedding canopy had been erected. Men and women held torches; dark clothes gleamed in their glow; trumpets blared. . . . Wrapped in a long shawl, the bride stood in the middle of it all like a Hindu goddess. The groom circled her the prescribed seven times. It was everything a wedding should be. The rabbi read the marriage contract and broke the glass. There were cries of “mazel tov!” Drums beat, cymbals clashed. A blaze flared up in the distance. Shmaryahu-Avigdor’s peasant friends, seeking to please him, had lit a bonfire of dry branches. Its flames colored the night like the flames in which, in olden times, human beings were offered to the gods.
Awaking the next morning, the bride and groom’s families cannot find Hulda. She turns up that afternoon in the river, not a human being sacrificed to the gods but a goddess sacrificed to human beings, drowned, perhaps of her own volition, for the violation of her sanctity. “And on the following day,” the narrator relates, “Shmaryahu-Avigdor and his wife harnessed two cows to a cart and put the drowned body on it and set out for town to bury it . . . and the cows lowed all the way.” The language at this point is close to that of the book of Samuel’s account of the return of the captured Ark of the Covenant by the Philistines, who have been punished for keeping it. (“And they took two milk cows and they tied them to a cart. . . . And they laid the Ark of the Lord upon the cart. . . . And the cows took the straight way and they lowed as they went.”) Hulda, like the Ark, is a numinous presence, a manifestation of divinity in a world that fails, with grim consequences, to recognize it.
Playing off a scene against a biblical text is a time-honored Hebrew literary technique that Berdichevsky resorts to often, as does his contemporary, the great Yiddish and Hebrew story writer and novelist Mendele Mokher Sforim. But while Mendele’s work is set in the shtetl, too, his use of the technique is different. His biblical allusions are comic; they clash with his neo-rabbinic prose and serve to emphasize, by their dissonance with the reality they refer to, how pathetically far Jewish life has fallen from its ancient grandeur. In Berdichevsky, echoes of the Bible are meant to be taken seriously. Its ancient myths erupt in his characters—who, because they are not conscious of acting them out, are defenseless before them. It is tempting to draw an analogy with the psychology of Jung, though Berdichevsky wrote nearly all of his shtetl stories before Jung’s appearance as a psychoanalytic thinker and could not have been influenced by him.
And yet a few of Berdichevsky’s shtetl characters are only too conscious of the past’s survival in them. One is Avram-Moshe in the story “The Lonely Ones.” A young Talmud student in the town of Polna who dreams of a life of heroic action, Avram-Moshe is the opposite of his fellow townsman, a young man his own age with the symbolically reverse name of Moshe-Avram. The latter is all action and no thought. The town brawler, admired for his courage and feared for his strength, he has no idea what to do with either of them. As the narrator observes drily:
He was not one of the biblical judges. No one was asking him to assume the kingship or lead his countrymen against the enemy. He was a tailor and a tailor’s son. He who could have done great things for his tribe sat sewing pants from fabric costing twenty kopecks a yard. The melancholy of a hero without a stage!
Meanwhile, the physically puny Avram-Moshe, under the influence of the Haskalah, has become a religious freethinker while continuing to feel born for the greatness that Moshe-Avram has no inkling of. But what greatness is possible in a town like Polna, whose Jews cannot think beyond “the several square feet of a store in the marketplace”? Avram-Moshe’s high ambitions weigh him down. “What had he been put on earth for? Why had he come into a fortune that he couldn’t spend a penny of?”
Moshe-Avram, chafing at his confinement to a tailor’s shop, quits his job, falls in with bad company, and becomes a petty criminal whom no one in Polna dares challenge. “Who was going to tell him what to do? One might as well go bind Samson!” For his part, Avram-Moshe takes to airing his heretical views and is driven from the study house and ostracized. And so:
When shadows fell and the sky grew dark in the east, Moshe-Avram sat listlessly by his window. What was he going to do tonight? Steal someone’s chicken or duck? He needed to hunt bigger game, make multitudes quake with his fists.
At the same time of day, Avram-Moshe languished in his room. . . . With whom was he going to do battle? Whom could he teach? Notion-store owners, sellers of buttons and threads? How was he to rally the tribes from Dan to Beersheba and deliver his message, his great message, to them?
“The Lonely Ones,” with its overly pat symmetries, is more of an allegory than a story. Great spiritual and physical powers, the powers of the people of the prophets and judges, live on in the Jews of the shtetl. Who, what, will unchain them?
Shimon Ben-Moshe, the protagonist of “Between the Hammer and the Anvil,” goes through a Zionist phase that does not last. This, too, is one of the story’s autobiographical elements, although it is, as it were, a prophetic one, because at the time the story was written, Berdichevsky’s Zionist period was not over. It was in fact at its apogee, 1903 marking the height of his written involvement with Zionism. This was a year in which he contributed weekly columns of commentary on Jewish affairs to the Warsaw Hebrew daily Hatsefirah, nearly half of which touched on Zionist issues.
It would be hard to think of another Hebrew writer of the age for whom Zionism was a more obvious cause to embrace. Everything in Berdichevsky’s work pointed to it as the one possible solution for the dilemmas of Jewish existence. His belief that Judaism had repressed the natural man and woman in the Jew, who must reconnect to them; that its traditional religious structure in the Diaspora was collapsing; that this forced Jews to live in two worlds, an increasingly attenuated one of their own and an increasingly dominant one that was not, and tore them psychologically in two; that growing assimilation would be the inevitable outcome; that the Jewish people, to survive, needed to remake itself by means of a post-religious, culturally self-sufficient revolution in its life; and that such a revolution, to be authentic and tap into the energies of the Jewish past, had to be a Hebrew one—who but Jews living in their own land could be capable of this?
Yet when one reads Berdichevsky’s writings on Zionism, one is struck by their note of reserve. As an idea, he was for it; as a movement, he had little faith in it. Although 1903 climaxed the clash in Zionist ranks between Westerners and Easterners, supporters of Herzl and supporters of Ahad Ha’am, and pro- and anti-Ugandists, he was equally dismissive of both camps. Like Ahad Ha’am, he thought Herzl out of touch with reality, a man under the delusion that grand assemblies and gestures could accomplish for a people what it was unprepared to do for itself. Herzl, wrote Berdichevsky, acted like a philanthropist wishing to give Palestine to the Jews as an unearned gift. Had he been a profit-oriented entrepreneur instead—had he settled in Palestine himself as did, say, Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, and like Rhodes developed farms, mines, and businesses that provided work and served as economic models—he could have achieved far more. While Jews leaving Eastern Europe might applaud other Jews for going to Palestine in the name of a national ideal, they knew ideals could not feed their families. “First give us the stones on which to lay our heads,” Berdichevsky wrote of Palestine in Hatsefirah, alluding to Jacob’s vision in the book of Genesis, “and then we can dream.”
But while agreeing with Ahad Ha’am that Palestine as it was lacked the economic capacity for large-scale Jewish immigration, and that Herzl was wrong in thinking that anti-Semitism rather than the inner crisis of Judaism was the main Jewish problem, Berdichevsky regarded Ahad Ha’am’s “spiritual center” as no less of a fantasy than Herzl’s Jewish state. The spiritual life of a people, he argued in his 1903 columns, could not be engineered or pre-planned. It grew out of material circumstances. Cultural and intellectual elites rested on broad social and economic bases; they needed a working society with all of its occupations and activities to nourish them and could create nothing of value unless interacting with it. “The upper realms need to rest upon the lower ones,” he wrote. Ahad Ha’am wished to construct a roof without a building.
Zionism was riven by internal dissent. Herzl had failed to obtain his charter from the Turks. The Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine, was demographically stagnant, departures nearly equaling arrivals. “Every ship full of Jews that sails from Palestinian shores,” Berdichevsky wrote in Hatsefirah, “gives the lie to utopian visions of all the shiploads yet to dock.” The “Gordian knot” would not be cut by resolutions passed at Zionist congresses. Only when Jews staked their futures on a life in Palestine forged with their own hands, with no expectation of outside aid, would anything change:
However we think of our people’s redemption, it will start with individuals and only with them. They may seem pitifully few in terms of the collective, but they will be the basis of anything real that the collective builds. . . . We have committees and organizations. We have projects for the great national future we dream of. We lack only one thing—the main thing: a nation’s work as performed by actual men and women for themselves, for their families, for their own needs. . . . Every culmination has its beginning. Show us each coin and we will tell you what we are worth.
Hebrew readers were not used to such language. Zionism had promised its supporters much and demanded little. Berdichevsky was telling it to promise nothing and demand everything. For the Jewish youth of Eastern Europe, this had great resonance; while adults may suffer from too many demands, the young, especially those in rebellion against adult authority, are more likely to suffer from too few. Berdichevsky’s call for what soon became known in Zionist circles as hagshamah atsmit, “self-actualization,” spoke to them and helped shape the ideal of the ḥaluts, the Zionist pioneer committed unconditionally to a life of hard work in Palestine. Many of the young ḥalutsim who injected new energy into the Yishuv when they arrived in it in the years after the failed Russian revolution of 1905 were motivated by reading Berdichevsky, though his economic opinions were far from the utopian socialism they sought to practice. One of them, by his own testimony, was David Ben-Gurion.
And here lies a puzzle. For the writer who called on Jews to take personal responsibility for Zionism and scolded Herzl for not settling in Palestine made no attempt to settle there himself. Nor, after his 1903 columns in Hatsefirah, did he encourage others to do so; when his friend Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner (1881–1921) consulted him about such a step in 1909, he advised Brenner to choose Germany instead. More than that: he never until his own death in 1921 even visited Palestine, although this was not a difficult thing to do in the early years of the 20th century. More even than that: in a particularly vituperative article, he mocked a visit there by someone else.
This was in 1913. The visitor was the Hebrew literary critic and historian Yosef Klausner, who had replaced Ahad Ha’am as editor of Hashiloaḥ a decade previously. Klausner spent time in Palestine in 1912 and found a Jewish community markedly more upbeat than the one Berdichevsky wrote about in Hatsefirah. Its Jewish population was growing and had passed 80,000. Tel-Aviv, founded in 1909 as “the first Hebrew city,” already had 2,000 inhabitants. The old Rothschild farming colonies were beginning to prosper and had been joined by the first kibbutzim. Armed Jewish guards were patrolling and defending Jewish fields. Hebrew had won its battle to become the dominant language of everyday life.
In a three-part series in Hashiloaḥ entitled “A World in Emergence,” Klausner reported glowingly, although not uncritically, on what he saw. Among the things that impressed him most was the dedication of the young ḥalutsim. “Their attitude toward physical labor,” he wrote, “is as to something sacred. They engage in it an ecstasy of purity and awe the ways Jews once engaged in study and prayer.”
Berdichevsky had never liked Klausner. He thought him shallow and pompous, and he had stopped contributing to Hashiloaḥ because of him. Now, he published an attack on his Hashiloaḥ series that was, for sheer venom, unmatched by anything he had ever written. Appearing in the Warsaw review N’tivot, it was not a substantively weighty piece; for the most part, it made do with deriding Klausner’s self-importance and penchant for overstatement, as when he compared the intersection of the newly laid out Ahad Ha’am and Herzl Streets in Tel Aviv to the rapprochement of Peter and Paul in early Christianity. In his final paragraphs, however, Berdichevsky turned his guns on Tel Aviv itself. Of Klausner’s description of a festive reception held for him at the city’s new Herzliyah High School, accompanied by singing and dancing, he wrote:
Klausner is dancing! He spins in a circle and hundreds of adorable boys and girls who speak only Hebrew and obey the Hebrew directions of their dance master sing and circle him merrily; their mood is infectious and he enters into it and sings along. Indeed, he feels “a complete Hebrew,” just like them. Yes, the Israelite hero Klausner . . . is dancing on historic ground with his own two historic feet while the whole Yishuv—the offspring of a supposed new generation, the bearers of our hopes—dances with him! Their forefathers placed an idol in the Temple and the Tel Avivians are dancing around it—and behold, the idol can speak, although it only speaks of itself. . . .
Peter and Paul, Ahad Ha’am and Herzl! We cringe in shame for your doings, we cringe in shame for your Tel Aviv!
One reads and cringes for Berdichevsky. What possessed him? What made him compare (oddly, it would seem, considering his former enthusiasm for Canaanite polytheism) the inhabitants of Tel Aviv, innocently welcoming a distinguished guest from Europe with an evening of Hebrew entertainment, with the ancient Israelites who danced around the Golden Calf and worshiped, according to a rabbinic legend, an idol in Solomon’s Temple? What made him write “your doings” (ma’aseykhem) and “your Tel Aviv” (Tel Avivkhem) with the Hebrew plural possessive pronoun, making it clear that he was expressing his opinion not just of Klausner but of Zionist Palestine? What?
Arguably, the anger in Berdichevsky’s tirade was also anger at and for himself. He, not Klausner, should have been the visitor to Palestine. It was he who should have been feted in Tel Aviv with Hebrew songs and dances. The ḥalutsim in their tents and fields were responding to his call, not Klausner’s.
And yet what kept him from visiting Palestine? Why wasn’t he heartened by developments there? Why had he no interest in seeing them?
He didn’t. When the Hebrew author Ya’akov Cahan requested of him in 1909 that he contribute to a Zionist anthology named The New Hebrew, he wrote back: “I’m sorry, but you’ve come too late. I feel nothing but despair [of Zionism] and have no desire to write about it, knowing as I do that we’re only sowing weeds.” He not only overlooked the good news from Palestine, he exaggerated the bad. Reports of a sex scandal in Jerusalem in 1911 caused him to note in his diary: “Although I never had much hope for the new Palestine, I didn’t think it would turn out so disastrously.” A minor scandal was a Zionist disaster.
Various reasons have been given for Berdichevsky’s loss of hope for Zionism, which was, for him, loss of hope for the Jewish future: his doubts whether the Jewish people had the will to implement it; his contempt for its politics and politicians; his fear, like Yehudah Leib Gordon’s, of its being captured by the rabbis. (“The Jewish religion,” he wrote in his diary in May 1905, “has sapped our people’s political strength and rendered it impotent by depriving it of the qualities needed for a national existence; we cannot return to our land as [its] propagators and hope to recover our health with its poison still in our veins.”)
Yet none of this explains why his pessimism grew greater just as the secular Zionist project in Palestine was taking off. There had to be a deeper reason.
Was it that, on an unconscious level, he did not want Zionism to succeed?
“We will either be the last Jews or the first Hebrews,” he had declared in 1898-99. But to Ya’akov Cahan, who took his anthology’s name from that declaration, he wrote ten years later: “I may as well tell you that the name The New Hebrew does not appeal to me. I never liked rhetorical titles.”
Of course, his declaration had been phrased rhetorically, too. Had its wording been, “We will be the last Jews unless we are also the first Hebrews,” it would have been less dramatic but more logical. It would also have been more in the spirit of secular Zionism.
Had he changed his mind about that? Did he resort to religious imagery in mocking secular Tel Aviv because, like Mikha’el drawing the curtain on his window in “Two Camps,” he had come to be as repelled by the shallowness of post-tradition as he was by the narrowness of tradition? Tradition would not let go of him. He couldn’t stop wrestling with it. In a sequence of meditations published in 1910 as Ḥorev, a biblical synonym for Sinai, he had sought to extract from biblical and rabbinic texts a universal religion based on the power of direct moral and spiritual experience, unmediated by the dos and don’ts of Jewish law. Ḥorev never attracted much attention. Perhaps by then Berdichevsky’s readers, wearied by all his twists and turns, had trouble following him—and indeed, Ḥorev, if followed, led away, via its Jewish texts, from Judaism entirely.
Everything of his people was still in him. Brenner, who wrote a long essay on Berdichevsky in 1912, stated that his sense of Jewishness was so great that he felt that “he and the Jewish people were one”—that he contained in himself, that is, every contradiction and conflict of Jewish history; there was no period, figure, or tendency which he did not feel was part of himself.
His identification with the Jewish people was total. But this meant that if, Jewishly, he had reached the end of the road, so had it. And he had—like Mikha’el, like Shimon Ben-Moshe—reached it. “Each time I tried pressing on,” Shimon says, “I saw the wreckage of Sinai before me.” Berdichevsky saw it, too. There was no going forward and no going back.
Such a man could not be the first Hebrew. He could only be the last Jew.
Which was what he wanted to be. He had already wanted to be it in 1903 when he had fought not to circumcise his son. This may have seemed to him at the time a matter of standing up to religion. But circumcision was not necessarily a religious act. It could be a badge of secular Jewishness, too. His friend Tsvi Malter considered it that. So did many Jews. Why couldn’t he?
He would be the last Jew. The Jewish people mustn’t outlive him, not even in his own son. Not even in a Hebrew-speaking Palestine.
The last ten years of Berdichevsky’s life, lived in Berlin, were devoted to scholarship. A man of immense Jewish erudition, he collected Jewish legends from a wide variety of sources and translated them into German in two anthologies, the six-volume Der Born Judas (“The Wellspring of Judah”) and the five-volume Die Sagen der Juden (“The Legends of the Jews”). He also wrote several German works, all published posthumously, in which he made the case for some quirky historical theses. In one of them, “Sinai and Gerizim,” he argued that there had been two different biblical traditions of divine revelation, one associated with Moses and one with Joshua, and that the Bible’s editors had concealed the rivalry between them. In others, he looked for the Jewish roots of ancient Christianity. He was still pursuing his anti-essentialist polemic against Ahad Ha’am. And yet, ironically, he who once had attacked Jewish life for putting the demands of the past before the needs of the present was now immersed entirely in the past himself.
The 19th-century bibliographer Moritz Steinschneider had famously remarked of Jewish historians that their task was to provide the remains of Judaism with a decent burial. Berdichevsky was now one of the pallbearers. To Brenner he wrote in 1912, explaining his refusal to meet with the young Agnon, then newly arrived in Germany and eager to be introduced to him, that he had not only stopped writing in Hebrew, he had given up reading what was being written in it:
I am in a state of absolute despair. . . . I know nothing at all about our younger Hebrew authors and feel at times that I don’t want to know. I am like a man who has been buried alive. What am I supposed to say to those who still think they are alive and want to live? Any honest conversation would only be an obstacle in their way, and I have no wish to be one.
Only at the end of his life, as part of a contract for the issuing of his collected works by the Hebrew publisher Abraham Stybel, did he return to Hebrew fiction. The outcome was several long stories and a short novel, Miriam. All were again set in the shtetl, the historical passing of which took on a frightful personal dimension when the Jewish community of Dubova was annihilated in 1919 during the widespread massacres of Jews by anti-Bolshevik forces in the Ukraine. Of its 800 members, 50 survived the slaughter. Among the dead were Berdichevsky’s father and brother.
Finished two days before he died of a worsening heart condition, Miriam can be read as a last will and testament. The heroine for whom it is named is a type we have met before in Berdichevsky’s fiction. Like Hulda in “In the Valley,” she is a dreamy, uncannily beautiful being, simple yet mysterious, as though coming from a realm that has not given her the words or even the thoughts to cope with the world she has been thrust into. Throughout much of the story, which follows her from childhood through late adolescence while often meandering away from her, she is not physically present; even then, however, her magical effect on whoever comes into contact with her, or even sees her from afar, is lasting. Although men, especially as she grows older, are powerfully drawn to her, they are also confounded. Even as they desire her, their desire is nullified by a feeling of awe.
Miriam is a mystery also to herself, puzzled by her sense of unconnectedness to her surroundings. Orphaned at a young age and taken in by a kind uncle, she has been given, like most girls in the shtetl, no religious education, and she feels closer to the Russian literature she reads than to the Judaism practiced around her. Turgenev and Dostoyevsky open worlds for her that the shtetl has no idea of. She is not in rebellion against it like some of her friends; she is not by nature a rebel. She is a quiet, self-contained observer, yearning for something without knowing what it is.
Much in Miriam is familiar from Berdichevsky’s earlier fiction: the interweaving of the narrator’s consciousness with that of his characters, who at times seem to be thinking the thoughts of a single, endlessly cogitating mind given to strange reveries and gnomic utterances; the sudden eruptions in their lives of mythic forces coming from no one knows where; the broad canvas of types ranging from wealthy merchants to poor laborers, pillars of the community to reprobates and outcasts, stern traditionalists to freethinking Maskilim—about one of whom, the tubercular Naḥum Sharoni, the narrator says, “I must confess that I owe many of my thoughts to him.” Naḥum, shortly before dying, shares these thoughts with his friend Yeruḥam. “There’s a reason,” he says,
that everyone hates us. The eternal hatred for an eternal people! It comes from our religion. Our prophets drew a line between nation and nation, tribe and bribe. All their preaching was destructive. It fostered hate. It will go down in infamy.
Yeruḥam protests. “But the prophets are sublime! There’s no one like them. They’re our pride among the nations.”
Naḥum said nothing. He looked at his friend in despair and shook his head.
Despair, we have seen, is an emotion that Berdichevsky associated with himself. Let us put aside literary-critical caveats about not identifying authors with their characters. Naḥum Sharoni is Berdichevsky’s dying voice—and it is a frightening one. The celebrated Hebrew author whose family had recently been murdered by anti-Semites was blaming the Jews for their murderers. Their guilt went back to the Hebrew prophets who, by distinguishing between Israel, God’s chosen, and the rest of the world even as they castigated Israel for its sins, set the stage for all the hatred of Jews to come.
Miriam’s uncle dies suddenly. She does not know what to do or where to go. She has been reading the Christian ethical works of Tolstoy. Their words run through her mind—or through the narrator’s—or through a universal consciousness:
The day of God comes to pass through His son. Open wide the windows to the Kingdom of Heaven, cast off the idols you have made. Let each man know the next man’s sorrow. Let him share his bread with the distant and lowly and put away all ties of blood and carnal pleasure. Every rich man is poor.
Miriam thinks of Dr. Koch, an elderly, unmarried physician who lives in town. Although a Jew by birth, he is an ex-“cantonist,” a Jewish boy impressed into long years of military service in the days of Tsar Nicholas, and he has long forgotten everything he once knew about Judaism. His only religion is now his medical calling: he works long hours in his clinic, charges his patients, Jews and Christians alike, no more than they can afford, and often does not charge them at all. Miriam makes up her mind. “It happened toward evening,” we are told.
Miriam left her lodgings with a small bundle under her arm. She went to Dr. Koch’s front yard, waited for the last patient to leave, and slipped into the waiting room, leaving her bundle in the vestibule. The old man rose from his long day’s work and held out a compassionate hand. She lowered her eyes and said, “I’ll be your servant. I’ll help you with your patients and do all you ask.” He kissed her on her forehead and said, “You’ll be my daughter. Your kindness to me is great.”
The novel ends with this scene. But what, exactly, has it ended with? Not with Christianity, despite its New Testament allusions. Koch has never become a Christian. But neither is he any longer a Jew. He is beyond all religions, beyond all differences among men.
Has Miriam found what she is looking for? The answer, to the extent that the endings of novels ever have answers, would seem to be yes. At the very least, she has been redeemed, as Berdichevsky sought to be redeemed in Ḥorev, from the burden of Jewishness.
The Hebrew poet and critic Simon Halkin wrote of Berdichevsky that he was the most tragic Jewish writer of modern times. But not even my uncle, a great lover of Berdichevsky, dared notice—but how could he not have noticed? dared say—how far the tragedy in Miriam goes.
There are historical forces to which individuals are subject. Emanuel Berdichevsky was given a good Jewish education by his father. He worked for many years as an editor at a Jewish encyclopedia that was terminated by the Nazis before its completion and settled in Palestine, with his mother, in 1935. There he changed his family name to Bin-Gorion: the name, that of a leader of the rebellion against Rome that ended with the destruction of the Temple, under which Berdichevsky had published his German books. Emanuel translated several of these books into Hebrew and wrote several of his own, worshipful accounts of his father and his work. He died in 1987, a few years after our conversation. |
Robot Backups and Batteries
Robot operators need to know the importance of batteries and backups to the robot system, and how these items can keep you from losing your robot mastering. A service call to come in to master the robot will mean unplanned downtime for your robot. And this can happen if your batteries fail.
What is Robot Mastering?
Mastering the robot is done to find the zero joint position value. When programming a robot’s movement, specific tool-center-point (TCP) positions are setup. These TCP positions are based on that zero point set for each robot joint. Setting this zero point is called mastering. If your robot loses this set value, the TCP positions might no longer be accurate.
Battery failure is one way the robot will lose its mastering values. If you have a robot backup, all this information can be loaded back to the robot, and the robot can get back to work quickly. If not, the robot must be remastered. The problem is, remastering can also make all the programmed TCP positions incorrect because those positions were based on the original mastering point. So basically, all points may need to be retaught. This is also why you should not decide to master your robot to improve or fix an issue.
The mechanical robot unit has four batteries and the controller has one battery that need to be changed. New batteries are installed during a typical PM, but if you do not perform an annual PM, batteries can fail. This is how the mastering can get lost. Motion Controls Robotics has had experience with this exact issue happening. So it is important to make sure to change the robot batteries.
One way to solve the problem of lost mastering values is to make sure you always have an updated backup available to load to your robot. This way even if there is battery failure, you can simply replace the battery and load the backup information.This keeps you from having hours of downtime in your manufacturing. Doing a robot backup takes about 5 minutes and a regular USB flash drive. The video below explains exactly how to perform a robot backup. Anytime changes are made to the robot settings, a new backup should be stored, because it is not just the mastering values that are saved.
The steps in the video go through how to create a directory on the flash drive to save the backup. If you skip this step, the content on the USB Flash Drive will all be deleted.
Steps described in video for doing a USB robot backup. If you have a iPendant touch, you can also use the touchscreen to follow these directions.
- Insert the drive into the slot on the controller
- Using the teach pendant start on the main screen.
- Select the MENU button and then when the menu screen pops up using the arrows navigate to FILE.
- On the right-side menu also select FILE by hitting enter.
- File Options show on the top screen and the header changes offering an option for UTILITIES |UTIL| select utilities when menu pops up hit Enter to Set Device
- On the next menu select Option 6 – USB Disk (UD1) using the down arrow key and then select Enter
- Return to UTILITIES |UTIL| and select this time arrow down to 4. Make DIR
- Select and Enter input type option and then using the top header, that now has letter options, name the directory – press again to scroll through letters. Then Enter when finished
- Now select from the header buttons |BACKUP|
- Use the up button to select All of Above from the menu and then select Enter
- Finally select Yes from the header bar
- The screen now reads Backing up #/# files and you can follow the backup progress.
- Return the teach pendant, remove the USB flash drive, and store it in a safe place.
*For best results the USB should be as small as possible because when backing up the whole drive is read (Try to stay with 2GB or less).
Performing preventative maintenance on robots is essential to keeping them running efficiently and preventing unscheduled downtime. Visit our Preventative Maintenance page for more information about what is included in our PM service and use our 10% off form to schedule a service. |
Gtechniq Crystal Serum Light is the prosumer version of the world famous Gtechniq Accredited Detailer Crystal Serum Ultra. It offers 80% of professional Serum Ultra’s performance, but if applied incorrectly can be machine polished from your vehicles paintwork.
When it comes to adding gloss, resisting swirls, contaminant and dirt repellency, Gtechniq Crystal Serum Ultra and Serum Light are the pinnacle in paint protection.
Gtechniq Crystal Serum Light forms an ultra- durable, high-gloss, slick to the touch, chemically bonding inorganic layer of 9h optically clear ceramic. Once applied, gloss levels will remain in the upper 90th percentile for significantly longer when compared to traditional paint protection products, and cleaning your car will be a breeze
The high density ceramic layer is resistant to chemicals ranging from pH2 - pH12. This characteristic also makes bonded contaminants such as tree sap, tar, and hard water spots, easy to remove
Unlike mainstream wax and organic polymer coatings, Serum and Serum Light can resist much higher and lower temperatures. They resist temperatures as low as -40o to as high as +250°c.
Crystal Serum Light comes with a 5 year guarantee when applied by a Gtechniq Accredited Detailer
- To apply Crystal Serum Light (CSL) make sure your vehicle is indoors and can stay indoors for 12 hours after application, do not apply in direct sunlight
- Only apply the product at a temperature between 5°c and 25°c
- Shake well and wear gloves
- Wash and decontaminate your paintwork thoroughly prior to application. If required, polish your paintwork, either by machine or hand, to remove any imperfections
- Spray Panel Wipe into a microfibre cloth and wipe down each panel in small sections
- Soak the application pad with 3 full measures of CSL from the pipette and work the liquid into the pad to get an even saturation
- Replace the lid on the bottle and set aside - do not keep the bottle in your hand as this promotes premature curing
- Apply in overlapping strokes to an area roughly 2ft by 2ft, or work to the bodylines of the vehicle
- Immediately remove residue with an MF1 cloth - you may need to buff the same area several times, but avoid doing it with too much force. We recommend the use of 2 cloths at any one time. Make sure the cloths are rotated during residue removal to prevent CSL curing in the cloth- this can make buffing residue difficult
- Inspect the surface for residue with a bright, diffused light source
- If you remove residue and it cureds fully you should polish the area and reapply CSL
- As soon as you finish, put you MF1 cloths in water, wash and dry them as soon as possible
- Wait approximately 2 hours after applying CSL to apply EXO Ultra Durable Hydrophobic Coating, or C2 Liquid Crystal
- Store in a cool, dry place
- Use within 3 months of opening |
Much evil soon high in hope do view. Out may few northward believing attempted. Yet timed being songs marry one defer men our. Although finished blessing do of. Consider speaking me prospect whatever if. Ten nearer rather hunted six parish indeed number. Allowance repulsive sex may contained can set suspected abilities cordially. Do part am he high rest that. So fruit to ready it being views match.
Ask especially collecting terminated may son expression. Extremely eagerness principle estimable own was man. Men received far his dashwood subjects new.
Fat son how smiling mrs natural expense anxious friends. Boy scale enjoy ask abode fanny being son. As material in learning subjects so improved feelings. Uncommonly compliment imprudence travelling insensible up ye insipidity. To up painted delight winding as brandon. Gay regret eat looked warmth easily far should now. Prospect at me wandered on extended wondered thoughts appetite to. Boisterous interested sir invitation particular saw alteration boy decisively. |
I grew up with my parents and sister in Smyrna, GA. My dad was a Church of God minister, and he and my mom pastored a church in Winston, GA. When I was 12, my dad felt led to resign the church and take our family to Mount Paran Church of God in Atlanta. God had a plan as this is where I met my husband, Ricky. I started working at Mount Paran North in February of 1994 as the church receptionist. I then became the Senior Pastor’s administrative assistant. In August 2017, Dr. Kirk Walters was appointed Senior Pastor at Mount Paran North and I became his executive assistant. God has richly blessed Ricky and me over the years. We have two wonderful children, Chad and Carleigh, a lovely daughter-in-law, Ana, and a remarkable son-in-law, Mike. We have nine precious grandchildren, Peyton, Carl, Katy, Michael, Julia, Lucy, Asher, Jolene, and Remy. And as a bonus, I have the most amazing German Shorthaired Pointer, Callie. I cannot thank God enough! |
Commercial Lockout Service | Mount Vernon, NY | Mount Vernon Locksmith Service
Do you have a professional locksmithing partner for your business? If not, you need to find one today! Businesses are often a coveted target amongst criminals, owing to the vast amount of value they hold; from expensive assets, technological infrastructure, data, confidential information, to trade secrets. The sensitive nature of the information and the high value of the assets contained, make business security highly important. High-end security gadgets and gizmos can only get you so far. Security begins with your locks and that’s why you need the expert insight of a locksmith to help secure your business.
Mount Vernon Locksmith Service is a prominent and established locksmithing firm that has provided expert insight on security to several commercial establishments including educational institutions, offices, shops, restaurants, industries, hospitals, among others. Our value-for-money services coupled with our in-depth technical expertise has made us a highly sought-after commercial locksmith in the Mount Vernon, NY region.
Reliable and trustworthy locksmiths
As stated above, businesses need to secure themselves from all quarters – and yes, that means locksmiths as well. Hire an unreliable locksmith from an unknown firm and you’ll inadvertently be putting your entire security framework at risk. With us, you don’t have to worry about that. All our locksmiths undergo stringent background checks and hold the credentials sought out in a locksmith. We’ve established a code of ethics that all our team members abide by. Your privacy, confidential and sensitive information will be upheld in the strictest of confidence.
We are available 24/7
With a large number of businesses catering to a global clientele, the standard 9 to 5 work timing is no longer prevalent. And we don’t see why we should stick to the standard hours either. If you face a lock & key emergency in the middle of the night, you can count on us to bail you out of the trouble. We have a commercial locksmith team on standby 24/7. You can also hire us for overnight work so that there’s zero disruption to regular business activities.
Free security consultations
Are you worried that your current security setup might not hold up against modern-age threats? Stop worrying and act now! We offer free consultations that can help you get an expert perspective on your present security framework. If found lacking, we’ll suggest measures that can bolster your security level. From state of the art locks to improving the door hardware to setting up hierarchical master key systems, all our solutions are customized to fit your business’ specific requirements.
Our other solutions:
- Commercial lockout assistance
- Advanced lock installation
- Key cutting service
- Tailor-made business security solutions
- Safe installation/unlocking
- File cabinet lock installation/ unlocking
- Keyless entry systems
- Magnetic lock deployment
- Push bars installation/repair
- Master and sub master key setup
- Lock repair/replacement
- Garage door services
As a business owner, you might find it hard to keep track of your locks, keys and security, and forget to call a locksmith for periodic upkeep, amidst other pressing concerns. Leave that to us! We provide contractual inspection and maintenance services and can take care of any repairs/maintenance/upgrades required from time to time.
Want to know what our commercial locksmiths can do for you? Reach out to us today.
Copy Key in Mount Vernon, NY
Gone are the days when you would take any key to a local locksmith shop and avail a quick copy key service. With technology advancing at a rapid pace, modern keys have turned really sophisticated and impossible to duplicate or reproduce. Every commercial establishment uses such high-security keys within its premises to protect sensitive business information from falling into the wrong hands. Have you lost the keys to your file cabinet or workplace chambers and need a new one? Do you want to create a spare key to avoid emergency situations? Don’t rely on amateurs and choose only credible locksmiths like Mount Vernon Locksmith Service. click here to read more
Entry Doors Repair Or Replace in Mount Vernon, NY
Entry doors are the most prominent feature of any commercial or workplace unit and must be maintained regularly to facilitate smooth entry and exit of employees and clients. Unfortunately, they are prone to damage with years of use and may end up catching a glitch, causing a host of costly problems like lockouts. If your doors are not working efficiently, call Mount Vernon Locksmith Service for entry door repair or replacement service. click here to read more
Keyless Entry Locks Commercial in Mount Vernon, NY
Ever been enticed by a keyless entry lock, commercial type? Do you wish your workplace had a secure and convenient entryway? If you are reading this, you may just be in luck as we have the answer to all your needs. click here to read more
Commercial Locksmith 24 Hr in Mount Vernon, NY
Locks and keys are tricky little devices that may stop functioning without a prior warning. And there are no prizes for guessing what could happen when a lock gets jammed or keys misplaced. Commercial setups, offices, and workplaces cannot function without locks and keys and an overnight emergency could lead to a big loss of productivity. Fortunately, if you are operating in Mount Vernon, NY, you can always call Mount Vernon Locksmith Service! click here to read more
Commercial Eviction Service in Mount Vernon, NY
No landlord wants a tenant who misbehaves with neighbors, does not pay the rent on time or inflicts damage on the property. But unfortunately, many landlords have to suffer under the hands of unruly tenants who simply refuse to comply with the rules. If you are a commercial landlord, the situation is a hundred times worse since there is a lot at stake. Mount Vernon Locksmith Service understands your position and extends its services to get you out of your predicament. click here to read more |
When should anterior fontanelle close?Asked by: Clifton Lindgren I
Score: 4.5/5 (31 votes)
What happens if anterior fontanelle doesn't close?
Soft spot that doesn't close
If the soft spot stays big or doesn't close after about a year, it is sometimes a sign of a genetic condition such as congenital hypothyroidism.
Does anterior fontanelle close first?
In humans, the sequence of fontanelle closure is as follows: 1) posterior fontanelle generally closes 2-3 months after birth, 2) sphenoidal fontanelle is the next to close around 6 months after birth, 3) mastoid fontanelle closes next from 6-18 months after birth, and 4) the anterior fontanelle is generally the last to ...
When should I worry about my fontanelle?
If you notice a bulging fontanelle along with a fever or excessive drowsiness, seek medical attention right away. A fontanelle that doesn't seem to be closing. Talk with your doctor if your baby's soft spots haven't started getting smaller by her first birthday.
How do you know if your fontanelle is bulging?
A bulging fontanel means that the soft spot looks bigger than usual. The normally soft area may swell up taller than the rest of the skull. The baby's head may appear to change shape, or the soft spot might look misshapen. Sometimes, the baby's whole head looks bigger.
What does normal fontanelle look like?
Your baby's fontanelles should look flat against their head. They should not look swollen and bulging or sunken down into your child's skull. When you gently run your fingers over the top of your child's head, the soft spot should feel soft and flat with a slight downward curve.
What age is a female of all 3 major sutures are closed?
Full obliteration may never occur. Suture closes normally between the ages of 30 and 40 years old.
At what age does soft spot close?
Infant and toddler health
This allows the skull to be molded during birth. The smaller spot at the back usually closes by age 2 to 3 months. The larger spot toward the front often closes around age 18 months. It's normally slightly depressed and pulsates.
What happens if fontanelle is pressed?
A baby's soft spots are called fontanelles. They allow your baby's brain to grow larger at a fast rate over their first year of life. It's important to avoid pressing into their soft spots, as it could cause damage to their skull or brain.
When should I be concerned about my baby's head shape?
Let your doctor know immediately if you notice anything unusual or different about your baby's head shape, like: your baby's head shape is still misshapen 2 weeks or more after birth. a bulging or swollen spot on your baby's head. a sunken soft spot on your baby's head.
What are the signs of craniosynostosis?
- A full or bulging fontanelle (soft spot located on the top of the head)
- Sleepiness (or less alert than usual)
- Very noticeable scalp veins.
- Increased irritability.
- High-pitched cry.
- Poor feeding.
- Projectile vomiting.
- Increasing head circumference.
What causes fontanelle to sink?
A sunken fontanel occurs when the soft spot on a baby's skull becomes more deep set than usual. One of the major causes is dehydration. The human skull is made up from several bones that are connected by tough fibrous tissue called sutures.
What happens if I accidentally press on my baby's soft spot?
Can I hurt my baby's brain if I touch the soft spot? Many parents worry that their baby will be injured if the soft spot is touched or brushed over. The fontanel is covered by a thick, tough membrane which protects the brain. There is absolutely no danger of damaging your baby with normal handling.
How do I know if I hurt my baby's soft spot?
If you notice swelling/bulging of the soft spot and/or bruising around her eyes or behind her ears, it may be due to a concussion. Call 911 immediately. Other signs of a head injury or trauma requiring immediate medical attention include: Nonstop crying.
What happens if the soft spot closes too soon?
When a suture closes and the skull bones join together too soon, the baby's head will stop growing in only that part of the skull. In the other parts of the skull where the sutures have not joined together, the baby's head will continue to grow.
Can a baby's soft spot be too big?
It is normal for infants to have these soft spots, which can be seen and felt on the top and back of the head. Fontanelles that are abnormally large may indicate a medical condition. A wide fontanelle occurs when the fontanelle is larger in size than expected for the age of the baby.
Can a 2 year old still have a soft spot?
In general, pediatricians and parents can only feel 2 soft spots at birth. Even then, we can usually only feel one spot after a baby is about a month of age. 90 % of soft spots (the anterior fontanelle) close between about 7 and 19 months of age. The soft spot is often a diamond shape.
At what age is the skull fully grown?
To make room for the brain, the skull must grow rapidly during this time, reaching 80% of its adult size by the age of 2 years. By age 5, the skull has grown to over 90% of the adult size. All sutures remain open until adulthood, except for the metopic suture which usually closes between 6 and 12 months of age.
What are the 6 Fontanels?
- Anterior Fontanelle. The anterior fontanelle is the largest of the six fontanelles, and it resembles a diamond-shape ranging in size from 0.6 cm to 3.6 cm with a mean of 2.1 cm. ...
- Posterior Fontanelle. ...
- Mastoid Fontanelle. ...
- Sphenoid Fontanelle. ...
- Third Fontanel.
Which fontanelle is last to close?
The posterior fontanelle generally closes 2 to 3 months after birth; The sphenoidal fontanelle is the next to close around 6 months after birth; The mastoid fontanelle closes next from 6 to 18 months after birth; and. The anterior fontanelle is generally the last to close between 12–18 months.
How do you know if a baby is dehydrated?
Dehydration occurs when an infant or child loses so much body fluid that they are not able to maintain ordinary function. The warning signs can include dry skin, tongue and lips, rapid breathing, fewer wet diapers and tearless crying.
Will dent in baby head go away?
When a baby is born with a head dent or skull abnormality, the symptoms will usually resolve on their own within 6 months. In some cases, helmet therapy may be recommended.
How do I hydrate my newborn?
Offer a bottle or breastfeed frequently, especially if your baby isn't taking in very much at each feeding. Wait on other drinks. Do not give your baby an oral rehydration fluid (e.g., Pedialyte), water, juice, or soda for illness, vomiting, or diarrhea without talking to your doctor first.
At what age is craniosynostosis diagnosed?
But as your baby grows, a misshapen head could be a sign of something else. The earlier you can get a diagnosis—ideally, before the age of 6 months—the more effective treatment can be. Craniosynostosis is a condition in which the sutures in a child's skull close too early, causing problems with head growth.
What happens if craniosynostosis is left untreated?
Left untreated, craniosynostosis can result in further cranial deformity and potentially an overall restriction in head growth, with secondary increased intracranial pressure. It can also lead to psychosocial issues as the child interacts with peers during development. |
Probably the most horrifying thing about the Nazis is the fact that, no matter how much some try to cover it up, the philosophy itself (or some variation) seems to be the inevitable consequence of progressivism. It’s all very well to say “Never Again” with regard to the Jews—and it’s much easier to say than to actually enforce, as we see in Europe and increasingly in the U.S.—and then to neglect the Tutus, Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, Christians in China, the Middle East and elsewhere, and of course all the populations who stand against Communists when they come to power.
There’s a curious moment in this movie where the filmmakers track down a woman involved in this fairly horrific, dehumanizing experiment and she reveals that both she and the doctor in charge were kept in camps during WWII. As we walk by her photos with prominent left-wing politicians (e.g., the Obamas and Clintons) we are treated to an excuse that sounds much like Eichmann’s: Why, she was barely involved in this experiment and only for a little while.
The story behind Three Identical Strangers is one that goes from wondrous to weird to horrifying, and if you remember it (as I do) you probably never got past the “weird” phase. That is, the three men involved sort of dropped out of the media limelight before we learned the horrifying aspects of it. Basically, you have the story of a guy who goes to college his freshman year and discovers that he’s well known and very popular—but everyone is calling him by the wrong name.
After a short while of this, a clever third party puts the pieces together and the two boys go to visit what turns out to be mysteriously-popular-boy’s identical twin, adopted from an early age. Well, that’s exciting and the two compare notes and hit it off and make the local news. But they aren’t long in the local news before the story is seen by their identical triplet!
The amazing story skyrockets the trio into fame, fortune, sex, drugs and rock-and-roll (and as we all know that story seldom ends well).
A cursory grilling of the adoption agency reveals a furtive “Oh, we always separated twins so that they’d be more likely to adopt,” an excuse that sounds plausible but of course pisses off the parents who would’ve adopted all three of the boys.
All’s well that ends well, right? The boys are happy discovering their similarities and that, despite their different upbringings, they have a tremendous amount in common. Weird, though, that one was adopted by a working class couple, one by a middle-class couple and one by a wealthy couple. Weird also that they each have an older sister. And further, that each was visited year after year by an evaluator who gave them IQ tests and monitored their behavior.
Almost like it was all arranged from the get go.
Yeah, it just gets creepier and creepier. Quite apparently, the adoption agency in question was working with psychs (-iatrists and/or -ologists) conducting experiments on identical siblings by placing them in different environments. They find an evaluator who also gives the “I was barely involved” excuse though they manage to break that one down. We begin to detect some shame in him, especially as we look back over what he did know and could have easily prevented simply by telling the parents.
I am disinclined to blame all the boys’ problems on this nefarious experiment. Although it didn’t help, the hedonistic life-style of the early ’80s was probably not the best for, well, anyone but least of all some young men who had a family history of emotional instability. At one point the moviemakers try to find out whether or not the study specifically targeted those with a history of emotional issues, but the details (and results) of the study are tightly controlled by The Powers That Be. (Also, you’re at an adoption agency. The odds are higher than average that such issues are going to exist, I should think.)
On the three point scale:
- Subject matter. Interesting, worthwhile, but ultimately soaked in a kind of futility.
- Presentation. Simple and straightforward. If you remember things like “Donahue” and Studio 54, the stock footage is kind of fun.
- Slant. I’m gonna call this one pretty “flat”: Obviously there’s an advocacy for the triplets (and the other separated twins who suffered under these experiments) and general lament about transparency, but it’s largely politics-free and doesn’t lionize or demonize anyone.
The aforementioned futility (point 1) comes from the lack of transparency (point 3) and the fact that they can’t get any answers about what was going on. But even more, the idea that there could be any answers from a study like this reminds me of the (incredibly stilted) arguments that were popular a decade or two ago: If the Nazis learned something from their experiments on their victims, is it wrong to use that information?
First of all, no, that’s dumb, knowledge is knowledge, and we aren’t so bloody smart that we can afford to throw any of it away.
Second of all, it’s even dumber because there’s absolutely no way to trust anything the Nazis said about what they were doing.
In this case, though, you have one of the typically dumb, non-scientific premises of psychs, which is that “if we separate twins at birth, we can measure the impact of environment versus hereditary.” Oh, you can, huh? What about the 9 months that the two of them spent in utero? You know, the nine most important months in an organism’s life? Not only is there a huge environmental impact there, it’s different depending on the twin and probably even more exaggeratedly different with a triplet.
It’s D.O.A. It can teach nothing.
The old Jewish lady who apparently internalized Nazism, on the other hand, she had it all figured out: “You haff no free will! Sorry!” And this is always the end game of progressivism: You have no free will, and therefore you need them to control you. You know, like they did with these three guys.
Check it out. |
The Shadow Brokers may remain a complete mystery as the NSA leak is winding down with the group continuing to remain anonymous to the FBI.
Federal agents descended on the suburban Maryland house with the flash and bang of a stun grenade, blocked off the street and spent hours questioning the homeowner about a theft of government documents that prosecutors would later describe as “breathtaking” in its scale.
The suspect, Harold Martin, was a contractor for the National Security Agency. His arrest followed news of a devastating disclosure of government hacking tools by a mysterious internet group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. It seemed to some that the United States might have found another Edward Snowden, who also had been a contractor for the agency.
“You’re a bad man. There’s no way around that,” one law enforcement official conducting the raid told Martin, court papers say. “You’re a bad man.”
Later this month, about three years after that raid, the case against Martin is scheduled to be resolved in Baltimore’s federal court. But the identity of the Shadow Brokers, and whoever was responsible for a leak with extraordinary national security implications, will remain a public mystery even as the case concludes.
Authorities have established that Martin walked off with thousands of pages of secret documents over a two-decade career in national security, most recently with the NSA, whose headquarters is about 15 miles from his home in Glen Burnie, Maryland. He pleaded guilty to a single count of willful retention of national defense information and faces a nine-year prison sentence under a plea deal.
Investigators found in his home and car detailed description of computer infrastructure and classified technical operations in a raid that took place two weeks after the Shadow Brokers surfaced online to advertise the sale of some of the NSA’s closely guarded hacking tools. Yet authorities have never publicly linked Martin or anyone else to the Shadow Brokers and the U.S. has not announced whether it suspects government insiders, Russian intelligence or someone else entirely.
The question is important because the U.S. believes North Korea and Russia relied on the stolen tools, which provide the means to exploit software vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure, in unleashing punishing global cyberattacks on businesses, hospitals and cities. The release, which occurred while the NSA was already under scrutiny because of Snowden’s 2013 disclosures, raised questions about the government’s ability to maintain secrets.
“It was extraordinarily damaging, probably more damaging than Snowden,” cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier said of the Shadow Brokers leaks. “Those tools were a lot of money to design and create.”
Yet none of that is likely to be mentioned at Martin’s July 17 sentencing. The hearing instead will turn on dramatically different depictions of the enigmatic Martin, a Navy veteran, longtime government contractor — most recently at Booz Allen Hamilton — and doctoral candidate at the time of his arrest.
Prosecutors allege Martin jeopardized national security by bringing home reams of classified information even as, they say, he once castigated colleagues as “clowns” for lax security measures. Soon after his arrest, they cast aspersions on his character and motives, citing a binge-drinking habit, his arsenal of unregistered weapons and online communication in Russian and other languages.
The agents who searched his house that August 2016 afternoon found a trove of documents in his car, home and a dusty, unlocked shed. The 50 terabytes of information from 1996 to 2016 included personal details of government employees and “Top Secret” email chains, handwritten notes describing the NSA’s classified computer infrastructure, and descriptions of classified technical operations.
Defense lawyers paint him as a compulsive hoarder whose quirky tendencies may have led him astray but who never betrayed his country.
“What began as an effort by Mr. Martin to be good at his job, to be better at his job, to be as good as he could be, to see the whole picture at his job, became something more complicated than that,” public defender James Wyda said at a 2016 detention hearing. “It became a compulsion.
“This was not Spycraft behavior,” he added. “This is not how a Russian spy or something like that would ever conduct business.”
It’s unclear how Martin came to the FBI’s attention, but a redacted court order from a judge suggests agents may have been looking for a Shadow Brokers link when they obtained search warrants for his Twitter account and property before the raid.
The December 2018 ruling from U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett notes that the FBI was investigating the online disclosure of stolen government property. It cites a Twitter message from an account allegedly belonging to Martin — @HAL_999999999 — that requested a meeting with someone whose name is blacked out and stated “shelf life, three weeks.”
In a likely reference to the Shadow Brokers disclosures, investigators said tweets from Martin’s account were sent hours before stolen government records were advertised and posted online. Investigators also alleged that Martin would have had access to the same classified information as what appeared online.
The recipient of the message is redacted, although Politico reported it went to the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, which in turn notified the U.S. Kaspersky declined to discuss the Martin case.
The roughly 20 officers who stormed Martin’s home did so with dramatic force, arriving with a battering ram and a “flash bang” device meant to cause temporary disorientation. State troopers shut down the road as agents interrogated Martin for four hours.
Martin was never charged with disclosing information and was accused only of unlawfully retaining defense information. The Shadow Brokers, which two weeks before Martin’s arrest surfaced on Twitter with the warning that it would auction off NSA hacking tools online, continued trickling out disclosures after Martin was in custody, a seeming indication that someone else may have been responsible.
Even so, his case refocused public attention on repeated government failures to safeguard some of the nation’s most highly classified information, with Martin one of several contractors accused of mishandling or spilling government secrets. Most notable is Snowden, a fellow Booz Allen contractor facing U.S. charges and living in Russia.
The NSA has since done more to protect its network and security and increased the monitoring of its employees, said security and counterintelligence director Marlisa Smith.
“I won’t tell you we’ve erased the risk of insider threat, it will never be down to zero, but we’ve worked very hard to mitigate and minimize the risk,” Smith said.
Booz Allen scrambled to respond to Martin’s arrest, hiring ex-FBI director Robert Mueller to investigate. Since Martin’s arrest, the company said it has added policies to improve its review process of employees at hiring and to ensure managers are more in touch with their subordinates.
As for the mystery of who or what is behind the Shadow Brokers, there’s little certainty that the government will ever publicly resolve that lingering question, especially given the classified nature of the theft and the embarrassment it caused the U.S.
“I don’t know if anybody knows other than the Russians,” said former NSA computer scientist Dave Aitel. “And we don’t even know if it’s the Russians. We don’t know at this point; anything could be true.” |
Latest release By UN1CYCLE – hyperspace ft. onlinemonkey Mp3 Download
Here is another hot new song by UN1CYCLE. Entitled “hyperspace ft. onlinemonkey”. NOTE: Our main motive is to bring the latest hits from around the world to your door for your online streaming.
Enjoy this one below, and also remember to let us know what you think of the new track using our comment box below. |
Download subtitles for breaking bad season 5 episode 16 for different languages french, english, spanish. Breaking bad saison 4 french torrent 23 may 2018walt celebrates another birthday. Breaking bad is an american neowestern crime drama television series created and produced by vince gilligan. Animal kingdom season 4 full episodes watch online guide. Piratestreaming serie tv complete e film in streaming gratis. The basis of the american comedy tv series the office went to the eponymous british series, fronted the bbc on tv from 2001 to 2003.
Les 30 secondes qui ont peutetre tue downton abbey le monde. The show aired on amc from january 20, 2008, to september 29, 20. Breaking bad reactions season 5 episode 14 ozymandias. Breaking bad season 5 episode 14 ozymandias s5e14 full hd. Watch the mentalist online free in hd, compatible with xbox one, ps4, xbox 360, ps3, mobile, tablet and pc. With the shocking conclusion to season 3, many downton abbey aficionados wondered whither, and whether, the series could go on. An associate complicates walt breaking bad saison 4 french vostfr hdlight 1080p hdtv, 15. Ou et comment telecharger des series tv gratuitement, rapidement. Voir film voir films et series en streaming vf et vostfr en illimite, film streaming vf gratuit, voir film streaming, film complet, voir film streaming gratuit vf. Follows teenager clay jensen, in his quest to uncover the story behind his classmate and crush, hannah, and her decision to end her life. Breaking bad saison 3 episode 12 streaming papystreaming. The big short 6 jared vennetts pitch to front point partners jenga blocks scene duration. Original minisodes is a web series based on the television series breaking bad. Air forcesponsored investigations into uforelated phenomena in the 1950s and 60s, known.
Watching the contents online is really easy as we made sure you get to watch what you search for free and without any hassles. Serie streaming film en streaming gratuit illimite vf vostfr. Imagine, create, and play together with millions of players across an infinite variety of immersive, usergenerated 3d worlds. Voir film voir films et series en streaming vf et vostfr en. So yes, you are paying more per episode than you would have for season 1 for instance. Breaking bad saison 4 episode 10 en streaming voir breaking bad saison 4 episode 10 vf en streaming gratuitement. Top 10 international tv shows to watch in india nov 2019 a list of 10 titles updated 4 months ago editors picks. Ne jouez pas avec mes nerfs vince gilligan et cie ne jouez pas avec.
A dastardly ploy for sure, but the series is good enough that i bought it anyway. All 19 songs featured in medium season 4 soundtrack, listed by episode with scene descriptions. Kiyannas loud mouth tests everyones limits, and west coast enemies attempt to bury the hatchet. Jan 09, 2020 bts filmed bon voyage season 4 back in september and now were anxiously awaiting its release heres everything we know about it so far latest update. Streaming dragon ball super streaming simpson streaming breaking bad streaming the 100 streaming orange is the new black streaming suits streaming american horror story streaming. Dame checks on a troubled briana who makes a brutal decision no one saw coming. Sommaire1 house of cards s4 ep5 en streaming chapter 441. On trouve du hd ou sd, vostfr ou vf, avi, mp4 ou mkv. The fourth season of the american television drama series breaking bad premiered on july 17, 2011 and concluded on october 9, 2011. Find out where breaking bad is streaming, if breaking bad is on netflix, and get news and updates, on decider. Apr 23, 20 a fan made movie style trailer for season 1 of amcs breaking bad. Initiation saison 1 french hdtv the turning vostfr webrip x264 2020 les meteorites french webrip 2020 deux french webrip 2020 sonic le film truefrench webrip 2020 like a boss vostfr webrip x264 2020 the gentlemen french webrip 2020 le meilleur reste a venir french webrip 2020 the plot against america. Dvd breaking bad season 4 was on one of my nephews christmas list torrentz fast and convenient torrents search engine.
The official site for amcs criticallyacclaimed series breaking bad. Tanisha gets to the bottom of the blowup that sent susan home. Please note the last 16 episodes of the series are split between this season 5 and what is now sold as breaking bad the final season. The series was broadcast in the united states and canada on the cable channel amc and premiered on november 6, 2011. Waaah pour mettre 1 10 a breaking bad tu dois vraiment avoir des gouts. You can find the hottest american, british, canadian, korean and other free tv shows. Watch the mentalist online full episodes in hd free. Visit tunefind for music from your favorite tv shows and movies. Breaking bad episodes, seasons breaking bad season 4 episodes. On february 17, 2009, five mini episodes, which were more comedyoriented than most full episodes, were made available online before the premiere of the shows second season.
Watch supernatural episodes online season 15 2020 tv guide. Season 4 demonstrates that there can indeed be life after matthew for the noble earl and countess of grantham, their daughters, soninlaw, grandchildren, mother, and ever loyal staff. Series en streaming vf et vostfr film streaming, series tv. Goofs oleg only wears a singlet on his torso when cooking in the kitchen of hans diner. Breaking bad season 1 episode 1 the video tape youtube. French stream voir film streaming complet en streaming. You can find specific show content by clicking the menu system at the top of the screen. Dylan minnette, katherine langford, christian navarro, alisha boe.
Box cutter directed by adam bernstein written by vince gilligan july 17, 2011 2. Season 4, episode 23 full episodes just when angela and romeo take a chance at love, angelas world falls apart when tragedy strikes and shocks all. Piratestreaming e il miglior sito dove vedere serie tv e film in streaming in alta definizione. The complete fourth season was released on region 1 dvd and region a bluray on june 5, 2012. Regarder the walking dead streaming saison 10 en vf et. History talk 0 season 1 season 2 season 3 season 4 season 5a season 5b. Tanisha shares a look back at the bad girls clubs most memorable moments. Search torrents on dozens of torrent sites and torrent trackers. Tvguide has every full episode so you can stayuptodate and watch your favorite show supernatural anytime, anywhere. We bring you a comprehensive and up to date spoiler service on all the major us tv shows and movies.
Inside breaking bad michael slovis and the breaking bad crew break down the logistics of. Better call saul season 4 episode 8 watch online the. Hell on wheels is an american dramatic television series created and produced by joe and tony gayton. It was set and filmed in albuquerque, new mexico, and tells the story of walter white bryan cranston, an underemployed and depressed high school chemistry teacher who is struggling with midlife crisis and a recent. Jane the virgin saison 1 episode 4 streaming sur full serie vf, vostfr. Downton abbey entamera ainsi sa quatrieme saison avec deux. Cpasbien torrent, c pas bien, cestpasbien, cpabien, cpas bien, cpasbien. Extreme download series hd vostfr 1080p better call saul saison 05 vostfr 1080p. Piratebay proxy, kickass unblocked and more torrent proxies. French stream voir film streaming complet en streaming vf gratuit. Stitchers cb01 serie tv gratis in hd e sd streaming e download link.939 649 1391 888 62 166 1282 1572 427 425 706 234 1667 794 669 873 1396 1542 23 590 1459 1494 1278 1400 1271 1313 978 596 1111 731 1203 571 |
ECU flash for 2017-2019 Yamaha YZFR1/R1M
Engine - Stock, Exhaust - Graves Half-system, Air Filter - Stock or OE Replacement
Developed with the Graves Half system exhaust using 93 (avg) octane rating. Other Full exhaust systems may also be used, although gains and fueling my not be as precise as with the developed configuration. Flash removes all OEM hp restrictions, increases RPM limit to 14,000 from 13,500. Disables O2 sensors, eliminating closed loop cruising lean condition for smoother throttle control and feel. Removes High RPM High Throttle position throttle blade limit in all power mode while keeping power modes as originally intended. Improved ignition mapping for better on/off throttle response and peak power.
Changes Fuel Maps
Changes Ignition Maps
Changes Throttle plates Map
Changes Velocity stack switch over
Option Disable PAIR valve
Option Less engine brake
Option EXUP servo can be disabled and removed
Option Disable O2 sensor
Option Disable steering damper
Option Activate radiator fan @ lower temp
*Flashing is performed on your ECU. We do not exchange ECU's. Once purchased download work order to send in with your ECU. |
Utilities for customising CiviCRM's behaviour and appearance in single site and multisite installs.
Call to Action (CTA) button styler allows administrators to highlight buttons and menu items in…
Load CSS files without coding
Provides the necessary CSS classes in ACF WYSYWIG editor to allow for complete styling of…
Add custom styling to your Contact Form 7 forms in Elementor with this easy-to-use plugin.
Wrap your intro text in a DIV element with the class "intro"
Easy email opt-ins with Gravity Forms. Display them horizontally, at the end of every post.
Diystyle is a custom plugin for Vita WordPress theme |
Robert Fanciullo (B’23) on Consulting with an Argentinian Vineyard and Exploring Different Work Cultures
Robert Fanciullo (B’23) is a student in the Undergraduate Program studying finance with a minor in government at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. This past March, Fanciullo traveled to Mendoza, Argentina, as part of McDonough’s signature Global Business Experience (GBE) trips.
McDonough undergraduate students have the option to participate in a GBE course where they take part in consulting projects with Fortune 500 companies and startups to learn about how businesses operate in different parts of the world. Working in small groups, students partner with executives to find solutions that address complex business challenges.
Through Fanciullo’s recent GBE experience, he worked with an Argentine vineyard to evaluate the potential for an import-export business in Mexico that would facilitate distribution onward to the United States. Fanciullo shared some of his favorite experiences while traveling abroad and what he learned through working with an international client.
First, tell us a bit about yourself. Why did you choose to pursue your undergraduate degree at Georgetown McDonough?
While deciding which undergraduate program to attend, Georgetown McDonough stood out from the rest due to several factors. Most important was the university’s commitment to its Jesuit values. Coming from a Jesuit high school in New York City, continuing in the Jesuit tradition was one of my distinct criteria for college choice. McDonough combines both the Cura Personalis mantra of the university along with one of the strongest academic undergraduate business programs in the country. Alongside values and educational caliber, McDonough boasts one of the nation’s strongest alumni networks, which is a critical factor in order to succeed in internship and job searches. Ultimately, choosing to study at Georgetown was a perfect culmination of both my personal and professional values.
In regard to your GBE, what was the main objective of your project and what did you hope to accomplish?
When initially connecting with our client from Argentina, our team was tasked with assisting the vineyard in establishing an import-export business in Mexico to facilitate imports into the United States more efficiently. We actually ended up recommending a different strategy and I think the client vineyard is changing plans as a result.
What were some of the main takeaways from your time working on the project both on campus and in Argentina?
As opposed to the way that business is handled in the United States, Argentinian work culture is starkly different. While working with our client, we discovered that business in Argentina is handled in a very informal manner, which changed the way our team interacted with our client and presented our findings. Overall, we created a strong final deliverable for the client due to our ability to work across cultures.
Walk us through one of your days in Argentina. What were your favorite experiences of the trip?
One of my favorite experiences during the trip was our first client meeting and then a hike and dinner in the mountains. While Zoom meetings are a great method for communicating across large distances, nothing is better than meeting with people face to face. We walked our clients through the final deliverable outline and addressed their last-minute concerns.
After our client meeting, the class gathered for lunch, where we had a traditional Argentine Pork Milanese — a fried cutlet symbolic of the country’s deep Italian heritage. Then, we headed off to our mountain hike in the foothills of the Andes. We ended the day with dinner overlooking a vineyard and the Potrerillos Reservoir before heading back into Mendoza.
What did you learn while abroad? Was there anything, both professionally and academically, that surprised you?
One of the crucial lessons I learned while abroad is the way in which cultural perceptions permeate all activities within a society. This applies to both the professional and academic nature of business dealings with our client as well as with our student guides at the University of Mendoza.
How important has global travel been as it relates to your time at McDonough?
Because COVID-19 limited travel opportunities over the past few years, it was especially important for me to participate in a global experience during the remainder of my time on the Hilltop. The GBE course was the perfect fit, with travel planned during our spring break and the bulk of the coursework completed before we left for Mendoza. |
Online casino gambling is actually that you will find a regarding reasons to. Even if include never gambled before, internet gambling is the wave into the future. You will be able to learn all be needing to gamble online. You will find that you will find lot of various things that you’re going to be able learn and experience when you are online.
Check out the interface within the game you wish to play in the online casino you have selected. The interface has to be user advantageous. It must be easy to understand and conduct. You cannot take five days in order to understand this can. You should be able to press the ‘play’ and ‘deal’ buttons in the drop of every hat. It has to be mastered as a way to enjoy the gambling experience and not lose money as great.
The pay is not surprisingly something that keeps people coming backed. While it is not a guarantee that gambling will pay you well, is actually something supplies you the opportunity to win mammoth. Whether you wish to earn a few bucks or eating out everyday do it professionally, gambling online can assist you to get prior to the game on a financial.
You know that you need gambling addiction help while driving towards the Casino, or perhaps while you’re gambling. You do not get help for gambling, naturally need.
Most casinos only allow visitors aged 21 and above. Taking along anyone too young for casinos can only cause you hassle and discomfort through fact you can have to have your younger companions in other regions.
In accessory for this, it is usually a good thing to play casino games because provides you an escape from your problems for just several hours. The good thing is gather have end your where you can do this advice. You just have to have a personal computer available and internet access. Furthermore, this proves that there is nothing impossible while using internet. This just proves how innovative man could be once to assist their intelligence for the good of the humankind. You won’t go wrong if you use the technology for your good of others.
Roulette. Means for “small wheel” if translated from France. The players have got a choice either to put their bets on a number, it’s tough range of numbers, or red or black, is actually important to also possible to bet on whether the quantity is odd or . Then a croupier spins a wheel in one direction, while a ball spins in the opposite direction and at an increased risk Online casino where it stopped determines the receiver.
Since Acquired now spending some of my summers in Reno I decided that the smart money move would patronize the so-called local casinos that cater on the local population rather style over the tourist casinos on the strip. A problem here being that the shrewd locals were receiving superior reward cards too better over-all deal as opposed to stupid tourists who patronized the piece.
One involving bonus I’m going to always benefit from of is a cash back bonus. A cash back bonus can be a bonus that reimburses your deposit amount if you lose. Your are performing not should claim the bonus a person lose your deposit measure. The great thing about this subject bonus actuality if won by you you can withdraw your winnings without meeting any style of rollover requirement. In do lose you stimulate your deposit back and you can keep playing. The bonus given back will require a rollover amount but this “free”money. Would likely not have singapore online casino to play with without claiming via personal money back bonus so Do not think mind within being should roll it over. Think about online casino bonuses that offer genuine.
It is very that you appear through each the information on the review so that you can make use of the information help you determine the casino is one you want to play found on. The reviews likewise usually have access to a list of this games which played. Finally you can look at forums and other players personal reviews with the casino that will help you choose which online casino will fit best with you. |
Big Brother Naija star, Khloe has tackled popular aphrodisiac seller Jaruma after she asked who her plastic surgeon is.
Recall that Khloe had in 2020, admitted that she underwent a butt lift surgery. Jaruma who complimented the reality show star on how the surgery turned out, noted that Khloe has never tagged her surgeon to her post even though he did a good job.
The aphrodisiac seller also wrote;
I WILL BLOCK U IF U DONT KNOW THE CORRECT ANSWER!!!!! NOT EVERYTHING IS A JOKE…..!!!!! NOT EVERYTHING IS FOR U TO RUBBISH COMMENTS….!!!!! Pls tag & mention the plastic surgeon
Responding to this, Khloe told social media users to be careful as they risk having their bodies “spoilt” by surgeons.
The reality show maintained that no one asked her to add weight, and further disclosed that she went to the surgeon with her “fat ass and small belly”. She also revealed that the reason she added weight before her sugery, was because she was ‘eating like a fool’.
Insisting that no one knows her surgeon and she only knows what she did to achieve the body she now has, Khloe warned Jaruma to keep her name out her mouth and go find her own doctor, following things she allegedly said about her before now.
She also wondered why one will speak bad of another person and say they hate them, and then turn around and ask for their doctor. |
Relocating to a brand-new place can be a mix of emotions – interesting yet overwhelming. Beginning fresh in a various location is interesting, however the anxiety of loading your whole life as well as relocate to your new home can be daunting. Having a dependable moving partner can be extremely helpful in this situation. Man With A Truck Movers and Packers in Bellevue, WA, are committed relocating experts who can make your transition to your new destination problem-free. They use excellent services that are economical and also ensure a smooth relocation.
Reliable Moving Experts: A Requirement, Not Just a Choice
Moving, whether to a brand-new office or home space, entails much more than simply physical transportation of possessions. Its regarding delegating a component of your life to someone else –– somebody that needs to be dependable and also compassionate to the emotions attached to your properties. Man With A Truck Movers and also Packers recognizes this belief as well as surpasses being a moving firm. They handle the function of a companion in your pleasing journey.
With a team of very trained professionals, Guy With A Vehicle Movers and also Packers ensure that your items are taken care of with miraculous treatment. Delicate products are jam-packed securely, furniture is dismantled and reassembled appropriately, as well as all your ownerships are filled and also unloaded safely. Their commitment to integrity remains in regards to managing your possessions and also keeping to their guaranteed timelines. This ensures you have one less point to stress over throughout the disorderly moving process.
Affordable Moving and Packing Company: Quality That Fits Your Spending plan
When hiring a moving firm, one typical concern is the price. Relocating expenditures can quickly collect, creating stress and anxiety concerning surpassing your spending plan. Luckily, Guy With A Truck Movers and Packers radiate hereof. They are dependable moving experts and an economical moving and packing firm in Bellevue.
Affordability, however, means something aside from compromising on quality. Man With A Vehicle Movers and Packers understand that every relocation is unique, as are the requirements. Whether youre relocating to a small apartment or a sprawling office space, they customize their services to match your requirements without straining you economically. The transparent prices version ensures you recognize the preliminary expenses, removing final shocks.
Male With A Truck Movers and also Packers: A Call You Can Count On
Structure trust in the moving sector is a difficult task that demands a continuous dedication to client satisfaction and a background of effective actions. Thankfully, Man With A Truck Movers and Packers has actually completed simply that over the years, earning a credibility for dependability and affordability in Bellevue, WA.
What establishes them apart is not simply their technological competence yet additionally their customer-centric technique. They make the effort to understand your specific relocating needs as well as deal with any type of concerns you may have. Their team is not just proficient at lifting boxes however also at relieving the stress that includes relocating. This combination of skill and also concern has actually earned them a devoted customer base and various favorable reviews.
Solutions That Cater to Your Every Need
Man With A Truck Movers and Packers offers a detailed variety of solutions that cover every element of the relocating process. They are your all-in-one relocating solution, from packing your belongings thoroughly to loading, transporting, unloading, and even aiding you set up your brand-new area. Their solutions expand beyond household relocate to commercial moves, making certain that services can transfer flawlessly without disrupting their operations.
Additionally, they offer extra solutions like packing products, storage services, and even suggestions for a stress-free action. This devotion to being a trusted moving partner reveals their dedication to making your enjoyable experience as smooth as feasible.
Moving is a substantial life occasion; having the appropriate partner can make all the difference. Guy With A Vehicle Movers as well as Packers is an affordable moving and packing company in Bellevue, WA. They are known for personifying the essence of reliable moving experts and also have actually gotten a strong reputation in the industry as a result of their commitment to high quality and also customer-centric approach.
So, the following time youre faced with the prospect of relocating, keep in mind that theres a reputable and also affordable remedy in your yard –– Man With A Truck Movers as well as Packers. With them, your moving journey can be workable as well as unforgettable for all the appropriate reasons.
Man With A Truck Movers and Packers | Washington
512 141st Ave SE |
When was the last time you planned your property renovation? Or, probably, you are suitable about to do that in the nearest upcoming? If so, then you will certainly require the very best design and style tips that will make your home at ease and attractive.
In fact, there are no common policies to satisfy the design needs and tastes of each and every residence operator. This is due to the fact every single man or woman has his/her possess design and style tastes and suggestions on how to make an condominium/property relaxed and pleasing. Inventive people, who like to experiment and check out some thing new, typically realize success in the course of action next their instinct and style. But what about individuals owners, who simply cannot boast their layout style and even now want to make their households tasteful and effortless to dwell in? The good news is, there are numerous design and style strategies that have received attractiveness because of to their affordability and functionality.
1. Never Hurry to Decide on the Hues
Numerous individuals commence their inside style organizing with the alternative of a colour scheme. Perfectly, this tactic looks comprehensible, but home designers concur on the truth that there is no need to hurry with the choice of a color palette. There are so a lot of hues that differ in density and shades that it really is actually hard to make the best option proper from the start off. Colours that glance fantastic in one particular house could not go well with the inside of a new residence. This depends on the model, lights sources, furniture and even decor factors. Consequently, you ought to decide on the shade palette of your new home soon after you come to a decision on the rest of the features.
2. Will not Get A lot of Home furniture Things
If you desire of generating your residence cozy and purposeful at the identical time, there is no need to have to obtain also lots of household furniture items. Rooms that are overwhelmed with furniture, don’t have adequate space for shifting. Choose only people furnishings you will essentially use every day. This will also enable save your price range.
3. Hang the Pics Properly
Do you know that all the masterpieces in galleries and museums are hung on the eye stage of website visitors? This is all over 145-152 cm from the floor. Abide by the very same rule, when hanging photographs in your home. If you are not guaranteed about the preference of a appropriate position, choose a photo of the wall. You are not able to even consider how instructive it might be. You can mark the position, where by you are heading to hang a picture or even a number of of them to see, where they will fit better.
4. Highlight the Crucial Points
When it arrives to the interior, there are usually primary and secondary merchandise to be put in a room. It can be crucial to pick out a piece of home furnishings or numerous of them, which will be the focal points of your interior. The relaxation of the components will be secondary, serving to create the impact of unity with other furnishings.
5. Overview Your Collection
One particular of the 1st things you should really do when organizing home renovation is reviewing the collection of furnishings and decor elements you have at your disposal. Recall that those items that appeared great in the past inside, may not fit the new just one. So, really don’t hang a photo, which does not mix very well with the rest of the decor elements, even if this is a current from another person distinctive. It truly is better to find a further area for this merchandise than to make it a element of the inside it would not match at all.
6. Add Additional Light
The far more light there is in a area, the a lot more spacious and comfy it looks. This is the rule, which won’t have the exceptions. There is no need to have to include excess lighting equipment, if there is enough organic light in a room. Having said that, if your property is found on a shady road or you just wish to make it additional roomy, then it makes sense to obtain more lighting fixtures. Many of them, by the way, might contribute to the normal atmosphere of your household.
7. Be Courageous!
Regardless of all the interior layout strategies and guidelines, there is only just one detail that can give your house classy and distinctive look. This is the unique contact. Define your strategy and layout principles extensive prior to you truly get included into house renovation. Do not be fearful to experiment. This will give you the understanding of what is effective effectively and what isn’t going to. Make abnormal combos that could look awkward at initially. Authorities underline that these suggestions often establish to be the very best and the most unanticipated answers! |
March 25 is a significant day in Greek history. It commemorates the beginning of the Greek War of Independence in 1821. This historic event, known as the Greek Revolution, is a testament to the indomitable spirit of the Greek people and their constant striving for freedom and self-determination.
At the beginning of the 19th century, Greece was under the oppressive rule of the Ottoman Empire and had endured centuries of foreign domination and cultural oppression. Beneath the surface, however, a fervent desire for liberation simmered, fueled by a deep-seated pride in Greek heritage and a yearning for independence.
The spark that ignited the revolution came on March 25, 1821, when Greek revolutionaries raised the banner of freedom and began a heroic struggle against their oppressors. Led by visionary leaders such as Theodoros Kolokotronis, Athanasios Diakos and Laskarina Bouboulina, the Greek people rose against overwhelming odds, determined to reclaim their homeland and restore their dignity.
The Greek Revolution was not only a military uprising but also a cultural and ideological awakening that shook up the Greek nation. Poets and intellectuals, including Rigas Feraios and Lord Byron, lent their voices to the cause and called for solidarity and international support for the Greek struggle.
Indeed, the Greek Revolution of 1821 was not just a military conflict. It was deeply rooted in a broader cultural and ideological movement that mobilized the Greek nation for independence. Poets, writers, and intellectuals played a central role in shaping the history of the revolution, fostering a sense of national identity and rallying support at home and abroad.
One of the most influential figures in the run-up to the Greek revolution was Rigas Feraios, a visionary Greek intellectual and revolutionary. Feraios was a poet, philosopher, and political thinker who formulated a vision of Greek liberation and unity in his writings. His revolutionary manifesto, the “New Political Constitution of the Inhabitants of Rumeli, Asia Minor, the Aegean Islands and the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia”,” called for the overthrow of Ottoman rule and the establishment of an independent Greek state. Feraios’ ideas inspired an entire generation of Greeks and laid the foundations for the later revolutionary movement.
Another prominent figure who championed the Greek cause was the English poet Lord Byron. Impressed by the Greek people’s struggle for independence, Byron traveled to Greece in 1823 to offer his support.
Byron’s passionate commitment to the Greek cause captured the imagination of people across Europe, turning the Greek War of Independence into a romantic cause célèbre.
Poetry and literature also played a decisive role in mobilizing support for the Greek revolution. Greek poets such as Dionysios Solomos, Andreas Kalvos, and Aristotelis Valaoritis wrote rousing verses celebrating the heroism of the Greek fighters and lamenting the suffering of the Greek people under Ottoman rule. These poets lent a touch of nobility and idealism to the revolutionary struggle and inspired ordinary Greeks to join the fight for independence.
In addition, the Greek diaspora played an important role in supporting the revolution financially and ideologically. Greek communities in Europe and the United States organized fundraising campaigns, lobbied foreign governments, and spread propaganda in support of the Greek cause. The diaspora’s efforts helped to garner international sympathy and support for the Greek revolution, turning it into a global struggle for freedom and justice.
The war was brutal and protracted, characterized by fierce battles, heroic deeds, and unimaginable sacrifices. From the mountains of the Peloponnese to the coasts of Crete, the Greeks fought with unparalleled courage and perseverance, facing adversity with unwavering determination.
Although the Greek revolutionaries faced formidable opponents and internal divisions, they persevered, driven by an unshakeable faith in their cause and a fervent belief in the righteousness of their struggle. Their determination paid off on 25 March 1829, when the Treaty of Adrianople recognized Greece as an independent nation, marking the culmination of years of sacrifice and struggle.
In conclusion, I would like to say that the Greek Revolution of March 25, 1821, is a testimony to the power of the human spirit to overcome oppression and injustice. It is a reminder that courage and determination in the face of adversity can lead to victory. |
The first social network dedicated to aerial photography, Dronestagram, has teamed up yet again with National Geographic to bring us the 3rd annual International Drone Photography Contest. More than 6,000 images were submitted worldwide, from both talented professional photographers and amateur drone enthusiasts. After much deliberation, the judges chose three winners for each category: Travel, Nature/Wildlife, and Sports/Adventure. In an interview, Dronestagram co-founder Guillaume Jarret spoke about the judges' evaluation by explaining the basic requirement for consideration and recognition. “A good drone photo is a picture that you immediately identify as a drone photo,” he told International Business Times. “It is taken at a low altitude, near the target of the picture, and you must see on the picture that it is impossible it has been taken with another device than a drone. Drones can capture images in places that are impossible to reach with another flying device.”
The winning photographs are all at once awe-inspiring and visually lyrical—images of clouds as they surf the skies like waves; the serpentine curve cut into a mountain by a single snowboarder; the accordion-like chain of camels' shadows projected onto a beach. But the photos also show us how small we are in the world. They show us the patterns of our everyday lives that are impossible to view from the ground. Drone technology allows photographers such as Michael Bernholdt (1st Prize Winner of the Nature/Wildlife category) to turn the satellite lines etched on Google Maps into technicolor digital snapshots. Viewers and photographers alike are privileged for a moment to look down on Earth from a bird's-eye view. For a moment, we're ungrounded. For a moment, we fly.
Sponsors including National Geographic, Go Pro, and 3D Robotics, offered up amazing prizes (which can be viewed in full detail on Dronestagram's website), awarded to the winning photographs seen below.
Above photo: 1st Prize Winner – Category Travel: Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, Umbria, Italy by fcattuto
1st Prize Winner – Category Nature Wildlife: Kalbyris Forest Denmark by Mbernholdt
1st Prize Winner – Category Sports Adventure: Moab Rock Climbing by Maxseigal
2nd Prize Winner – Category Sports Adventure: Complejo Acuático Norte de Santander by losmanesdeldrone
2nd Prize Winner – Category Travel: Cable Beach by Todd Kennedy
3rd Prize Winner – Category Travel: Summer camp of Gran Canaria by Karolis Janulis
2nd Prize Winner – Category Nature Wildlife: Swarm of sheep by Szabolcs Ignacz
3rd Prize Winner – Category Nature Wildlife: Piton de la Fournaise, Volcano by Jonathan Payet
3rd Prize Winner – Category Sports Adventure: Chugach Mountain Range, Alaska by High Angle Shot |
Traditional Metal Braces
Traditional metal braces are the most common type of braces and are smaller and more comfortable than before. We offer a variety of colored elastics that are added around the braces so you can customize your look to reflect your own unique style.
Clear (Ceramic) Braces
Ceramic braces are made of clear materials for those patients who are wanting a more esthetic option. They are less visible on the teeth than metal braces and can be a great option for patients who prefer something more discreet.
How Do Braces Work?
Braces work by adhering directly to the teeth using dental composite. The braces place a gentle, constant force on the tooth to move it into a corrected position over time with the help of the archwire, which connects each of the braces. Since the braces are attached to the teeth this allows them to work around the clock, even while you are sleeping. |
Welcome to our landing page. Please note that this site is currently under construction. In the meantime, we invite you to watch the video below to learn more about the One Church merger.
The purpose of the Advisory Board is to offer strategic feedback to the senior pastors at One Church @ Bethel’s Family and One Church @ Harvest Point. Members of the board provide guidance and participate in task forces to advance the mission of One Church without being involved in its day-to-day operations.
Brandon & LaToya Bolden
Brandon and LaToya Bolden have been members of The Church at Bethel’s Family since October 2019. They have been happily married for 4 years and believe kingdom marriage is a blessing and gift from God. They serve together as 9th-grade Home Group Leaders in Bethel’s Youth Ministry. In addition, they enjoy participating in the Marriage Ministry. Brandon is also active in the Deacon’s Ministry, Men’s Ministry, and Men’s Choir. LaToya enjoys attending events hosted by the Women’s WOW Ministry. Brandon is an Account Manager in Sales and LaToya is a 7th-Grade Math Teacher. Serving on the One Church’s Advisory Board is a privilege and honor as we strive and thrive as one body and one church.
Clark & Priscilla Booker
Deacon Clark Booker has been involved in church leadership since 1995, holding various positions including Church Administrator and Men’s Ministry Director. He has a passion for mentoring men and has successfully taught classes as small as one person and as large as 500. He currently serves as Leadership Training Director and Facilities Director at One Church at Bethel’s Family. He is married to Priscilla Booker, who is the Women’s Ministry Director and a graduate of the College of Biblical Studies. Priscilla is known for inspiring, encouraging, and empowering women in Houston, Texas.
Gevenia Bradford founded Bradford Etiquette and Protocol to promote civility through contemporary etiquette and protocol training. With over 30 years of experience in corporate management and quality improvement, Gevenia offers customized training for individuals and organizations. She is a certified Corporate Etiquette and Protocol Consultant and holds degrees in Computer Information Systems and an MBA. Gevenia is also an active member of her church and believes in serving others.
Pastor Otis & Katherine Carey
Otis Carey and Katherine Carey are a dedicated couple from Houston, Texas. Otis is a Mission Pastor and retired Police Sergeant with over 26 years of experience as a Deacon and in the United States Army. Katherine is the President of Bethel’s Global Reach, Inc., a 501(c)3 missions organization, and has been a missionary for 13 years. They have three children and six grandchildren, and their goal is to make a positive difference in the lives of those they serve.
Scottie & Joni Clark
Scottie and Joni Clark have been married for 17 years and have three children: Dillan, Ethan, and Arden. They are originally from LeCompte, Louisiana, and now reside in Richmond, TX. Scottie and Joni have been members of Harvest Point since its inception and were a part of the church’s launch team. They
have served and taught in the Men’s Ministry, Women’s Ministry, Student Ministry, and Children’s Ministry. Joni works full-time as an Geologist for BP and Scottie is part of the staff of One Church at Harvest Point. Scottie and Joni’s passions include spreading God’s Word and serving others.
Micheal G. Davis
Michael G. Davis, also known as @CeoCoachMike, is a board-certified Master Practitioner of Success Coaching, NLP, TT, EFT, and Ht. He has grown Brooks & Davis Real Estate Firm from 2 individuals to 140+ sales agents and real estate student affiliate members. With over 232 hours of training as a business and life coach, he has helped his clients achieve 214% increases in the number of transactions and massive increases in their sales production. Davis operates with uncompromising standards and focuses on efficiency using multiple systems and processes. He is an extreme advocate for those he serves, making running their business easier and more profitable, freeing their time, managing stress, and ensuring they are spending their money and time responsibly. Davis is an expert in coaching and shares his expertise through weekly webinars and blogs.
Tyrone & Chimere Davis
Tyrone Davis is a servant leader who serves as Children’s Pastor and Leadership Ministry facilitator. He also works as a Project Manager and is married to Chimere Davis, who serves as Ministry Administrator and Ministry Liaison for the Children’s Ministry. They both serve at One Church @ Harvest Point.
Shameka leads a team that drives sales and manages operations for over 21,000 clients. With over two decades of banking experience, she focuses on problem-solving and building relationships to improve client and employee experiences. She is passionate about mentoring and career advancement within the organization.
Scottie & Joni Clark
Brian Gordon is the founder and Co-CEO of Finish Line Tax Solutions. He began working in his mother’s janitorial service at nine years old and later started his own successful auto detailing business. After leaving the detail world, he launched a career with 24 Hour Fitness and eventually launched his own tax company. Dr. Teandra Gordon is a licensed marriage and family therapist, author, and speaker. She is the author of the book Purpose-Filled Parenting and currently works at BrainAbouts and Harvest Point Counseling. The Gordons live in Pearland, TX with their five children.
Marlin & Malika Herring
Marlin and Malika Herring are members of One Church @ Harvest Point in Pearland, Texas. They have two children and are actively involved in the Marriage Ministry. Marlin works in IT in the energy sector and enjoys sports and golf in his free time. Malika is a corporate litigation attorney and serves in various ministries at the church, including prayer and business advisory. She also enjoys bible study, book club, Tae Kwon Do lessons, and learning to play the piano.
Dr. Terrence & Eardie Houston
Dr. Terence Houston is a clinical pharmacist with over 20 years of experience. He is the owner and Chief Operating Officer of Alpha Omega Infusion Services, which provides home infusion therapies. Terence is also a Deacon and Elder at multiple churches and has served on global medical missions in Haiti and Kenya.
Dr. Eardie Houston is an international speaker, author, and successful corporate pharmaceutical industry professional. Together, Terence and Eardie own Alpha Omega Infusion Services and have authored children’s books, and created a marriage and family support platform called “Living Life with the Houstons”.
James & Mary Houston
James and Mary Holston are a devoted couple who serve in ministry together at One Church at Harvest Point under the leadership of Dr. Lawrence Scott. James retired after a 21-year career in the US Army and has 17 years of ministry experience. Mary has been actively serving in ministry for roughly 20 years and is a devoted wife and homeschooling mother of three. Together, they lead the Marriage Mentorship and Counseling Team and are passionate about serving wherever the Lord calls them.
Kory & Elan Fontenot
Kory Fontenot is the Missions Lead at the Church at Harvest Point. He loves serving others and has led trips to places like Haiti and Africa. Kory is happily married with three kids and enjoys photography in his free time. He has a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Master of Divinity and a Doctor of Ministry. Currently, he serves as a Senior Chaplain at Houston Methodist Hospital.
Dr. LeArtis Lister
Dr. LeArtis Lister is a chiropractor who is passionate about helping people reach their full potential. He has a Bachelor of Science degree from Texas Southern University and a Doctor of Chiropractic degree from Texas Chiropractic College. Dr. Lister specializes in individual patient care and utilizes various chiropractic techniques. He is dedicated to improving the quality of life for his patients and is an active member of One Church.
LaMonica Love, a licensed attorney and business management consultant, excels in strategic thinking and leadership. Her practice areas include business planning, real estate, transactions, risk management, and corporate governance. She balances her work with family life, including her partner Michael and children Blake and Blaire. She has also served with several community organizations, including the Women’s Ministry and Project NEXT.
DeAndre & Pamela Massey
DeAndre and Pamela Massey were raised in single-parent homes in Houston. They learned to be grateful for what they had and to work hard. They both graduated from Sharpstown High School in 2001 and received college degrees from the University of Houston. They worked in banking and finance and medical fields to pay for their education. They have a passion for coaching people’s skills and educating communities on managing their finances. They are Young Adult leaders for One Church at Bethel’s Family, serving 18-35-year-olds with God’s word. They have been married for 18 years and have five children. They are committed to serving God and creating a legacy for their family.
Winston & Ethel McClure
Deacon Winston and Sister Ethel McClure believe in seeking God’s will in marriage. They teach according to the Bible and their own experiences. The couple has 3 grown sons and one granddaughter. They serve in various ministries and are certified in marriage counseling.
Steve & Melanie Miller
Steve and Melanie Miller have been married for 26 years and have 3 children and 4 grandchildren. They have been members of Bethel’s Family for 27 years and have served in various ministries. Steve is currently overseeing the network, phone system, and website for One Church at Bethel’s Place and Bethel’s Family Christian Academy. Melanie is currently the Children’s Choir Director and serves on the Worship team.
Rodrick & LaShawanda Moore
Rodrick and LaShawanda Moore are accomplished leaders in their respective fields. Rodrick champions simple solutions that benefit both humanity and the environment, while LaShawanda excels in strategic planning and change management. Together, they are a powerful couple supporting each other’s careers while also balancing their roles as parents to four children. LaShawanda is also a National Speaker, Author, and founder of several successful businesses, including Elevate Success™M and Live Out Loud Nonprofit. She is dedicated to helping others realize their potential and transforming lives, one person at a time.
Donald & Diana Rucker
Donald Rucker married to Diana for 34 years with 2 children. We are members of Bethels Family Church since 2006. Donald serves as a deacon and sings with the Mighty Men of Bethel. Diana serves with the Women’s Ministry and mentors with My Sister’s Keeper. The Ruckers are thankful to be part of a God-led church that glorifies Him in every way.
Dwayne Saunders works in the Pastoral Care and Baptism ministries at One Church @ Harvest Point. He has supported NASA’s Human Space Flight communications for 30+ years and advocates for diversity in the workplace. He enjoys spending time with family and friends and attending sporting events, theater, and listening to music.
Hasting Stewart and his wife Jackie are proud members of the Harvest Point family since 2016. Together they have three children, Hasting III, Payton, and Jordyn. Hasting graduated from the University of Memphis and is presently the Head of Media and External Relations for the Norwegian energy company, Equinor. Hasting has always been called to serve in an advisory role, regardless of the environment or situation. During his leisure, he enjoys reading, watching sports, and spending quality time with his family.
Pastor Terry and Johnelle Stroud
Terry Stroud received a degree in Chemical Engineering, while Johnelle earned a Finance degree and an MBA. They became members of Bethel’s Family in 2006 and have participated in various ministries such as Youth, Children’s, Singles, and Discipleship. Previously, they served at New Hope MBC, where Terry was an interim pastor and involved in ministries such as Youth, Young Adult, Greeters, and Praise Dance. They also worked as expatriates for three years, leading the Angola International Christian Church in Angola, Africa. Currently, Terry instructs classes on New Member Orientation and Spiritual Gifts. Terry and Johnelle have been married for 19 years and are proud parents to Brandon, Blake, and Jessica.
Yolanda is a member of Harvest Point since 2014. She is happily married to Gregory Thomas and they have a son named Parker Ray. Yolanda completed her BBA in Accounting from Texas State University and her MBA from the University of Houston – Victoria. She loves to assist creatives in managing the business side of the music industry. Yolanda accepted Christ when she was only 10 years old and has served on different usher boards, youth and college ministries throughout her spiritual journey.
Edgar White attended TSU but left to attend tech school and became a technician in the cable TV industry. He worked for Compaq Computers and Hewlett Packard for over 25 years while earning a degree in Business Management and obtaining a state license for insurance adjusting. He currently works as a facility manager at Bethel’s Place, providing support and guidance to community members in need.
Paula Whitfield and her spouse, Robert, have been part of the Harvest Point community since 2014. They have two kids named Robby and Myles. Paula graduated from Howard University and currently owns a franchise (Fastest Labs of Central Houston) and works as a business consultant. Paula’s passion is entrepreneurship, and she enjoys assisting others in expanding their businesses. Previously, Paula was involved with the Connect team and now serves as the Children’s Guest Services Lead. In her free time, Paula loves traveling with her family and spending time with her companions.
James Williams has been a member of Harvest Point since 2018. He and his wife Tiffany have two children, Janae and Joshua. James is a graduate of both Dillard University and St. Thomas University. He has been in the oil and gas industry for 22 years and currently holds the position of Sr. Director at BP Castrol. In his free time, James enjoys traveling and playing golf. Prior to joining Harvest Point, he worshipped and served at New Light Christian Center. |
Designed to be Mystique’s most spacious room, the Holistic Villa can host up to four persons in its airy interiors that feature a large living area, and two cave-style bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, while the expansive private terrace features an infinity pool and a jacuzzi.
Free standing villa located at the highest point of Mystique, with large living space, two bedrooms featuring “The Luxury Collection” beds, both with en-suite bathrooms. Large private terrace with infinity pool, outdoor jacuzzi and sunbeds, open-air dining area and panoramic sea views to the Caldera and the volcano.
Individually controlled air conditioning
Wireless Internet access
Multiline telephone with voicemail & cordless phone
Refrigerated private bar
Coffee and tea-making facilities
Hypoallergenic pillows upon request
White bathrobes & slippers
KORRES all natural bath amenities
Make up mirror
Flat screen TV with satellite channels
Housekeeping service twice daily |
How do you use lockpicks in Oblivion PC?
How to Pick Locks in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. All locks have up to five tumblers that must be set in the “up” position. Move the lockpick with the mouse, click on a tumbler, then click the mouse button again before it reaches the top of the lock to latch it into place.
How do you get the unbreakable lockpick in Oblivion?
0. The Skeleton Key is an unbreakable lockpick that increases your Security skill by 40 pts whenever the key is in your possession. You can receive this key by completing Nocturnal’s Daedric quest.
Does the Skeleton Key break Oblivion?
Though the Skeleton Key is unbreakable, it is wise to keep a few lockpicks on hand in case the Hero is arrested. The Key is not counted as a lockpick and will be removed if the Hero is put in jail.
Is lockpicking illegal?
There is no law or regulation on lock picking, so it is legal as long as one has permission from the owner of the lock to pick the lock in question. Lock picking tools can be freely bought and sold. There are several clubs where lock picking is practiced as a sport.
How does lock picking work?
When you turn the lock, the bolt extends into the notch in the frame, so the door can’t move. When you retract the bolt, the door moves freely. A deadbolt lock’s only job is to make it simple for someone with a key to move the bolt but difficult for someone without a key to move it.
How do I pick a Master Lock?
The easiest way to pick a Master Lock is by raking it. This is done by first tensioning the core and using a lock pick to bump all of the pins to the shear line. Master Locks can also be picked with a variety of makeshift tools including paperclips, bobby pins, soda cans, and even chicken bones.
What happens if I dont return the Skeleton Key?
The Skeleton Key can be used like a regular lockpick and can be kept indefinitely, provided it’s never returned to the Twilight Sepulcher, during the mission “Darkness Returns.” In addition, the Lockpicking skill will still increase when a lock is opened (removed in patch 1.4, back by 1.9).
What happens if you dont return the Skeleton Key?
There’s no penalty for keeping the key, except that you can’t continue the guild questline. You don’t get kicked out – rather, like most missions in Skyrim, you have virtually unlimited time to complete a quest.
Where can I find lockpicks in Oblivion?
– Shady Sam, Outside the Imperial city, keep walking along the walls until you see him. – Skeleton Key. Unbreakable lockpick, do Nocturnal’s quest (Shrine North of Leyawiin.) – Open Spells. – The Dark Brotherhood Merchant.
How to get lockpicks in Oblivion?
The Thieves Guild fence Tonilia carries around thirty picks for sale.
Where can I buy lock picks in Oblivion?
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
How to pickpocket in Oblivion?
The first perk can eliminate the chance to fail when picking keys,gold and 0 weight&value items. |
What year did Branson flood?
Branson, MO May 06, 2011 – The recent heavy rains in the Ozarks have the Branson area’s lakes, rivers and streams running high and above flood stage in some areas. Several homes and residents are still dealing with the aftermath of the floods.
Does Branson Missouri flood?
Living in the Ozarks, flood preparedness is a top priority as many areas are prone to flooding. Benson said since moving to Branson he has experienced some minor flood events.
How deep is the White River in Branson Missouri?
Through the Boston Mountains and the Ozark Plateau of southern Missouri, the White River is deeply entrenched in narrow gorges; much of its middle course is a valley more than 500 feet (150 m) deep.
What river runs through Branson?
the White River
The source of the White River is in the Boston Mountains of northwest Arkansas, in the Ozark-St. Francis National Forest southeast of Fayetteville. The river flows northwards from its source in northwest Arkansas, loops up through southwest Missouri through Branson, Missouri.
Does Lake Taneycomo flood?
The lake levels at Beaver, Table Rock and Bull Shoals are full, and if it rains more, these lakes could flood. Chris Berndt, the emergency management director, says the Corp of Engineers would not have a chance to dump water out, which would cause some areas along Lake Taneycomo to flood.
Does Forsyth MO flood?
reopens after flooding. FORSYTH, Mo. (KY3) – After months of being closed, because of flooding Shadowrock Park in Forsyth, Mo.
What river is Branson Landing on?
What lake is Branson Landing on?
The Taneycomo lakefront in Historic Downtown Branson is also home to Branson Landing, a shopping, dining, attraction and lake excursions paradise complete with a beautiful one-mile lighted boardwalk and a fountain show.
Can you swim in Lake Taneycomo?
Lake Taneycomo offers a variety of recreational activities including hiking, sightseeing, hunting, fishing, swimming, boating, and water skiing. People accessing Lake Taneycomo are able to visit area restaurants, accommodations, shopping, and shows in the Branson area.
What is underneath Table Rock Lake?
Oasis currently rests under 100 feet of water near the bottom of Table Rock Lake. The underwater village is a popular technical dive for scuba divers.
Is Shadow Rock Park flooded?
Shadow Rock Park remains flooded, City of Forsyth expands other park.
What is the lake level at Bull Shoals?
654 feet above
The level of the lake fluctuates regularly with a normal pool level elevation of 654 feet above sea level, which is locally known as powerpool. However, the lake regularly fluctuates between an elevation of 630 to 680 feet.
When was Branson Landing built?
Branson Landing has become Branson, Missouri’s most visited attraction since opening in June 2006. The success of the Lifestyle center draws over 5 million visitors annually to experience the shopping, dining and entertainment attractions.
How deep is the deepest part of Table Rock Lake?
220′Table Rock Lake / Max depth
Table Rock Lake is located in Taney County, Missouri. This lake is 43,100 acres in size. It is approximately 220 feet deep at its deepest point.
What river runs through Branson Landing?
Are there catfish in Lake Taneycomo?
Fishing At Lake Taneycomo Known for world-class trout fishing (rainbows and browns), Taneycomo is a widely diverse fishery. Catfish, crappie, bass, sunfish and walleye are also favorites here and thrive in the cold, nutrient-rich water of the White River.
How cold is the water at Taneycomo?
The water that is used to generate the electricity is drawn from Table Rock Lake at a depth of about 140 feet which, without sunlight penetration, has a constant temperature of about 45 degrees F year round.
Is there a town at the bottom of Table Rock Lake?
Are there towns under Table Rock Lake?
TABLE ROCK LAKE, Mo. — A small Ozarks town that was once a tourist destination is now underwater but not forgotten. The village of Oasis, along the banks of Long Creek, was mostly destroyed by a flood in 1957.
How deep is the deepest part of Bull Shoals Lake?
210′Bull Shoals Lake / Max depth |
My Sweet Fm Online Exclusive Free fuck naked pictures of model RitaReyes.
Indulge in the thrill of seduction, where every glance hints at the lavish life we can create together. I'm not just a cam girl, I am a sexy woman who knows what she wants and how to demand it. Put my perfect feet in high heels and have a taste. Let's explore the secrets of the perfect orgasm, as we delve into the wonders of masturbation together. Behind my glamorous exterior lies a world of sensuality, waiting to be uncovered. Take in the art of seduction as I reveal my sexy secrets, but always in a way that leaves us both wanting more. Let's enjoy every moment together, and maybe, just maybe, you'll see me squirt from the pleasures you bring me. |
USF Dance Ensemble
The USF Dance Ensemble is comprised of students who perform original dance works each semester in the USF Dance Ensemble Concerts.
Contact - Dance Program at (415) 422-3888
Choreographers for the fall concert are guest choreographers from the Bay Area who are aligned with the Performing Arts and Social Justice mission. Past guests have included nationally recognized artists such as AXIS Dance Company, Sean Dorsey, Erika Schuch, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Tandy Beal, Jo Kreiter, Randee Paufve, Christian Burns, Maxine Moerman, Catherine Galasso, Laura Arrington, Chris Black, Nol Simonse, Scott Wells, Nicole Klaymoon, Fog Beast, Alex Ketley and Monique Jenkinson/Fauxnique. This concert is performed in the Studio Theater on Lone Mountain.
In the spring we work with choreographers who are on faculty in the Dance program. These pieces showcase a variety of dance styles including ballet, modern, hip hop, West African, and more! This concert is performed in the Presentation Theater.
Participation is by audition at the beginning of each semester. If chosen to be in a piece, students can receive credit through Workshop in Dance Production (DANC 480-01). Students in the USF Dance Ensemble can receive up to 4 units for their participation in weekly rehearsals and concert production week. |
Supporting Color Palette
Based on the university’s differentiating concept “San Francisco Advantage,” USF’s color palette reflects The City’s unique blend of history, culture, and lifestyle. The personality of USF’s color palette conveys the adventurous youthful optimism and independent progressive spirit that has been reflected in the school since its founding in 1855. These colors are intended to be an accent and complement to USF’s primary identity colors.
Color is essential to the University of San Francisco style. This selected palette provides a foundation for color consistency across diverse types of applications and layouts.
Use these colors when choosing a secondary color scheme to complement the university’s school colors. |
The bitterness between congress and DMK has gathered more steam and momentum recently after the cross voting in local body election where the congress party has defeated DMK candidate and supported AIADMK.
It is well known that DMK cannot come to power without the help of congress party in Tamil Nadu. Although congress party does not have great vote share in the state but minority polarization is more towards congress than to DMK and hence DMK will be the natural beneficiary of congress alliance.
Since the existence of DMK today is happening purely due to its cadre base than due to the present leadership, people are very doubtful of DMK’s ability to run the state. Further the dynastic coterie of DMK has alienated the real leaders in DMK and now the DMK has reduced to a club of several families around one family.
The real strength of DMK today is congress, VCK, left and other alliance partners and without the alliance, DMK at best can only see day dream of coming to power. In this political scenario, all the alliance parties also have lots of stakes. If they miss the chance, all those political forces would reduce to 11th player in the match or a mere spectator in Tamil Nadu politics. Therefore VCK, congress etc., are likely to ask for power sharing in the state and DMK has to agree to the terms and conditions of congress party and VCK, otherwise must be prepared to forgo its prospects to come to power.
Rotational chief minister arrangement, all the alliance parties of DMK may insist and smartly the congress party also may limit DMK to contest only minimum number of seats so that DMK can rule the state only with the support of the alliance parties. Only then the alliance parties can limit the freedom and independence of DMK in the state. People are sick and tired of DMK and have started to see the governance of EPS as good and development centric. Even those who may vote against AIADMK are looking for an alternative to DMK and the general perception is that DMK is not the natural beneficiary of anti-AIADMK votes. The percentage of people who do not want DMK is much higher than those who dislike AIADMK in the state.
If we look at the marriage of DMK with congress from the days of UPA 1 and 2, it is clear that the marriage had occurred only due to hefty dowry in the form of cabinet berths, freedom and opportunity for various scams; the best example being 2G allegation and again in 2019, the dowry DMK got from the marriage with congress was minority vote.
Since the marriage was focused majorly on profit and the profit alone was the rider of the relationship, such relationship is bound to break when there is no profit. Naturally such marriage is bound to gift sour honeymoon.
What the DMK and congress are experiencing today is nothing but sour relationship because neither of them had profited anything from each other in from the recently held local body election. In fact, the cross voting by both DMK and congress had helped AIADMK win in several places.
Before even DMK started to treat the congress party as its junior partner, congress appears to have outsmarted the DMK and started to give sleepless nights to DMK. Today the congress can not only ensure the defeat of DMK but also can facilitate the decomposition of the DMK in Tamil Nadu.
In 2021 if DMK fails to form government in the state that is going to be the end of DMK. 2021 is the last chance of DMK and if people remain together and defeat DMK, the state can be permanently saved from DMK, many feels.
To save the state from further ruining by the dynastic and family centric politics and DMK fooling the people in the name of Dravidian ideology, Super Star Rajnikanth must enter the political framework of the state.
Whatever is the reality, the state must be first saved from the family politics and only then further development programmes of the state can be achieved. Between EPS and DMK, EPS ranks much above DMK chief and EPS is seen as the re-incarnation of late MGR and Amma.
When Super Star enters the scene, naturally the Super Star will be first and only choice because he is the best, honest and committed and the Super Star alone can save the state from negativity and hate politics. Certainly Super Star shares most of the values and beliefs PM Modi and in simple expression, Super Star will be Modi of Tamil Nadu with reference honesty, sab ka vikas and corruption free governance. |
Nigerian music composer and talented artist, Ayox, has just released an impressive single titled "Early 20s". This song is a must-have addition to your Playlist, showcasing Ayox's incredible talent. It serves as his latest single for the year 2023, and it definitely does not disappoint.
The track "Early 20s" is the opening song on Ayox's highly anticipated project, "Last Son of a Widow". This project consists of a total of 8 tracks, each showcasing Ayox's unique style and musical prowess.
For the production of this amazing record, Ayox enlisted the help of Djibril Kagni and Karlyteros. Together, they have created a captivating sound that will leave you wanting more.
So don't wait any longer, give "Early 20s" a listen and get ready to be blown away by Ayox's incredible talent. Share it with your friends and loved ones, and let the music take you on a journey of emotions and pure enjoyment. This is a song that deserves to be heard and appreciated, so sit back, relax, and enjoy the magic that Ayox has created.
What do you think about this song?
Drop Your Comment
Be the first to comment on this post |
South African singer-songwriter and music star, Golden DJz, comes through with a new single which is titled "DiKhoneng".
The song "DiKhoneng" is an amazing record that should definitely be added to your Playlist. This track marks Golden DJz's latest release for the year 2023.
As part of the highly anticipated project, "Amapiano Fest," this impressive record stands out as one of the standout tracks.
Moreover, Golden DJz collaborates with the talented artists Nkanyezi Kubheka and SCOTT, who deliver some scorching verses on this track.
Get ready to immerse yourself in the captivating sounds of "DiKhoneng" and experience the musical brilliance of Golden DJz.
What do you think about this song?
Drop Your Comment
Be the first to comment on this post |
Nigerian businesswoman Bo Hair has taken to social media to throw a subtle jab at her former best friends, Hilda Baci and Ama Reginald, following their fallout.
This comes after Ama’s sister came forward to confirm that the influencer and the celebrity chef are no longer on good terms after months of speculation due to them not being seen together anymore.
She also warned those claiming that they fell out because Ama had an affair with Hilda’s boyfriend to stop because it is false. She stated this in a series of posts shared on Snapchat and averred that their family is not known for betrayal and infidelity.
Following the saga, Bo Hair went online to throw shades at Hilda Baci and Ama Reginald for failing to maintain their friendship despite kicking her out of their friendship group.
The drama has been a long one. A few months ago, Bo Hair called out Ama for snatching her best friend, Hilda Baci, from her.
At the time, Bo Hair, who was heavily pregnant, said she was deeply hurt by Ama’s decision to remove her from the group and monopolize her friendship with Hilda.
Reacting to the news that they are no longer friends, Bo Hair shared a video of herself and her daughter to throw shades at the two former besties, emphasizing that her daughter is her best friend.
Watch the video below, |
elite singles login
Sign Up & Login EliteSingles Dating Site
EliteSingles is known as one of the best dating sites for educated individuals, and I’ll explain why in this article. Read EliteSingles reviews, register, and log in to learn more about the dating site and the simple steps to create an account so you can begin meeting educated and upper-class people.
I’ve never come across an online dating site as professional as EliteSingles, which treats every member with respect and always makes sure you get the love relationship you want.
Every month, thousands of people share their tales of meeting their soul mate on EliteSingles, and because you’re reading these reviews, there’s a strong possibility you’ll be one of them if you follow the advice I’ve given.
EliteSingles provides you with the resources you need to meet someone who is a good match for you and your personality. It comes with a number of tools that will assist you in getting ready for online dating.
Features Of EliteSingles Dating Site
- Free Registration
- Easy to use
- Safe and secured
- Genuine, professional members
- 85% highly educated singles
- Intelligent Match Making
- Expert Profile advice
- 24/7 customer support
Does EliteSingles Offer Free Service?
Yes! EliteSingles provides a free account that can be created in just a few minutes. If you utilize the free account, however, you will be limited to some services.
You can do the following with a free service:
- Upload photos
- Send Smiles and likes
- Receive Partner suggestions
- View your personality test results
How To Sign Up For EliteSingles Account
Follow the steps below to register for free on EliteSingles.com
- From your browser, go to the official website of EliteSingles at www.elitesingles.com
- On the page, select your gender and the gender you are looking for and click on “Get Started”
- Then Enter your legitimate email address and create a password (it must be at least eight characters long, contain both letters and numbers, be different from your email address, and not contain the words “EliteSingles”).
- Check the box to agree to its terms & conditions, then click on Get Started
EliteSingles Members Login
Logging in for members is a smart idea if you want to have access to the dating site and participate in other activities on the platform. If you follow the steps indicated above, you’ll be OK.
- Simply go to www.elitesingles.com and click on “login for members” at the top right side of the page
- Then enter your registered email address and password in the space provided for it
- Click Login and you will be directed to the EliteSingles page.
Elitesingles Mobile App Download
You can use EliteSingles on your phone or tablet if you have an Android or iOS device. Thanks to the app, it is now easier to access the dating site from anywhere and at any time, and to start a discussion with other people.
To download “EliteSingles” for your device, go to your mobile store and search for it. Then, on the Install Or Download Link, click to properly download the app to your mobile phone.
EliteSingles’ main goal is to assist its members in finding a committed and loving relationship as soon as possible. You may attract whomever you choose for a love relationship if you follow the procedures suggested in this article. |
In Company of One, around page 8, I wrote:
It was a hackathon that led to the creation of Facebook’s “Like” button, which arguably connects its ecosystem to the rest of the internet.
It seems like a fairly innocuous sentence. While it’s factually true and fits into the overarching story, there’s a huge failure by omission on my part.
What I failed to mention is that the Like button is awful. It’s an awful feature from an awful company, from an awful type of product, run by horribly awful leadership. Let me explain.
First, Facebook keeps getting into hot water because of the lines they’re willing to cross to make money. It’s not just Facebook, most massive (tech) companies do it, but it’s easy to single them out because they’ve made so many morally gross decisions. Like selling user data, exploiting teens who are feeling anxious or insecure, and even paying teens a pittance to watch and track their every move online. And, this is just what they’ve been caught doing. Who knows what they’ve gotten or are currently getting away with? Even with the bad PR, Facebook’s profit is unscathed, showing that we’re willing to trade our privacy and data for “free” use of their platform.
Second, the Like button specifically creates intermittent reinforcement to heighten our desire for social approval. This has been studied numerous times by behavioural psychologists, as a way to shortcut our dopamine system and make us take part in that behaviour far more than we should. As in, wanting social approval is a deep human need (we’re social creatures) and getting it at random intervals from people liking our status updates on platforms like Facebook, keep us anxious and compulsively seeking more.
Studies are finding that on average we spend 4 hours a day on our phones, checking them every 12 minutes—on vacation (it’s far more if it’s a work day). A lot of this has to do with “social” media platforms being built specifically to encourage checking them as often as possible for those bursts of dopamine.
Third, these platforms being called “social platforms” or “social media” seem to be a huge misnomer. Research indicates using them increases—not decreases—loneliness and depression. The Like button specifically heightens anxiety and decreases feelings of self-worth. We use these platforms because we seek validation and human acknowledgement and interaction, but never get it. So we come back (at least every 12 minutes). Looking for self-worth on these platforms is a false dichotomy—how can we increase “self” from external factors? How we can place any part of worth in the number of clicks we get on a heart after our updates?
Facebook’s own former president, Sean Parker, said their platform was “exploiting vulnerability in human psychology”. Facebook is easy to point at but every other platform like theirs, from Twitter to their Instagram, works the same way. Sean continued, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.”
Interactions on these platforms feel like social interaction but since they’re not we continue to crave it and continue coming back. They shouldn’t be called “social networks” because they’re more exploitive than social. “Exploitive networks” sounds harsh, but it’s more honest.
Which begs the question, what do we do now?
Exits en masse sound great, as do digital detoxes, but going back to a Luddite life without tech seems a touch too far. Personally, I’ve spent years thinking about this subject. I don’t want to support or use platforms that are detrimental not only to my own mental health but to our greater social fabric. So I’m not on Facebook or Instagram. But I do use and enjoy Twitter (mostly because I use the platform to start conversations that continue off of Twitter). I really don’t have the answer to how we should deal with or use these platforms.
My favourite take on acknowledging and existing in a world where “social” media exists is from Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times. He suggests we do three things to deal with any new platform (or technology) that comes out.
- Look at the business model, not just the product. If they don’t charge the users, they’re making money some other way. Probably selling the data you’re freely giving them. So before joining another network or picking up a new piece of tech, consider how and where the money flows.
- Stop feeding giants. Players in any market or industry that create monopolies undermine consumer choice and ruin innovation. But also, it’s harder to be moral or ethical if you’re required to rapidly grow and dominate at all costs (I wrote a whole book about this, as you probably remember).
- Slow down. Early adopters of anything don’t have the full story, full picture, or know the ramifications of using something. Plus, early versions of anything tend to be filled with bugs and security issues. Adopt new tech and platforms late, only after more information is available.
I would add a final point, specifically in regards to “social media” and that’s to be aware. Specifically, be aware of:
- If you’re happier or sadder after using a platform.
- How often you’re using the platform, and if any free second you have defaults your behaviour to check in or refresh.
- If you’re feeling anxious when you’re not using the platform and why.
- If it’s sparking joy. Just kidding, but be aware of what benefits, if any, you’re getting from the platform.
- How you can use the platform as a tool for what you need, and not let it use you simply as a data-product to line its coffers.
These platforms like Facebook, with their “Like” buttons could easily save the world by connecting us all and showing us how similar we all are. Or, they could ruin democracy and everything good that exists, and turn us all into compulsive labourers of their technology, mindlessly feeding personal data to the algorithms for access, pulling their slot machines again and again.
If we’re craving human interaction, maybe we should stop looking for it through likes and what the algorithm gives us. Maybe instead of constantly wanting to refresh or check in we can slow down and listen. Maybe instead of using every free minute or every bit of space in the day we can relish in the beauty of actual solitude. Maybe having regular and lengthy doses of giving ourselves the space to think could be crucial for resilience, introspection and even creative insight.
And, maybe, instead that line in my book should read:
It was a hackathon that led to the creation of Facebook’s “Like” button, which arguably gives us more anxiety than we need and drives detrimentally compulsive behaviour, exploiting our freedom.
It doesn’t flow as nicely in the overarching story, but it’s a lot more accurate. |
See the end of this post for details about the Landfalls audiobook giveaway. It ends July 14, 2016.
[This giveaway has ended. Congratulations to Sandra G. of Woodland, CA, for winning an audiobook!]
Before my book came out, I was a writer who spent a lot of time writing. Now I’m a published author, and I spend a lot of time doing things connected to writing or to my life as a writer but that don’t involve actual writing. If I wanted to, I could easily spend all of my time doing writerly stuff instead of writing. I call it “writering.”
This was understandable—necessary, even—in the weeks right before and the months right after Landfalls came out last August. Book store events, book club appearances, presentations at conferences and schools and book festivals and pretty much anywhere someone would lend me a stage, author interviews and more author interviews, literary shindigs—I logged a lot of car miles and air miles, signed a bunch of books, and generally did everything I reasonably could to find more readers. And mostly I had a blast. I’m that apparently rare species: the extroverted writer. I like meeting people, I enjoy public speaking, I love dressing up and going to parties.
But it’s been almost a year since the book came out, and high time for the writing/writering balance to tip back in favor of writing. And mostly it has. But I’ve really had to fight for it, which means I’ve had to fight myself and my knee-jerk impulse to say “yes” to every damn thing.
Because it turns out that even after you stop scheduling book appearances and hankering after publicity, stuff just keeps coming up. Invitations and requests of all sorts—to attend literary events and judge contests and read applications and blurb or review other writers’ books. All of these invites and requests are flattering, and most of them are appealing.
Some are no-brainers: I just say yes. Would I be willing to participate in a conference on historical fiction at the Huntington Library, where Hilary Mantel will be the keynote speaker? Oh my God, yes! (Forthcoming in May of 2017.) Can I serve as juror for an arts foundation that funded me while I was working on my book? Of course.
And others are also no-brainers. The out-of-the-blue e-mail asking for feedback on the attached short stories? Um, how to say this nicely—no. The Comic-Con invite from someone who appeared to know little to nothing about my work then seemed offended when I asked what other writers might be on the panel in question? No thank you.
But there’s a vast in-between where it’s hard to decide whether something is worth the time and expense—and what does “worth” even mean in this context?
I recently made a presentation at a writers conference. It didn’t pay anything—not even my travel expenses, which involved a round-trip drive of over 100 miles. I’m not sure I sold a single book. And I’d spent about 15 hours preparing an 80-minute talk that I gave twice, time I could have used working on my next book.
The numbers didn’t add up at all. In the days before the event, I was kicking myself for having said yes.
And yet: I had a great time. The participants were terrific: engaged, smart, articulate, good-humored. Maybe some of the folks I met will go home and buy my book. Maybe not. Maybe this will lead to a future invite to a conference that does pay its presenters. Or not. Or to some pleasing outcome I can’t even guess right now.
As for the time I spent in preparation, driving, presenting, then presenting again—it’s okay. For one thing, it’s possible I’ll be able to reshape some of the material for a future presentation. But it also forced me to think through some thorny questions about writing, questions I haven’t finished figuring out. That was good for me.
Still, I really need to be saying “no” more often. The other day I got all the way through composing a “yes” e-mail in response to a request and was about to press “Send” when I suddenly realized something: I loved the idea of saying yes to the requestor, someone I quite like, but I didn’t actually want to do what was being asked, which promised to be time-consuming and would, of course, pay nothing.
I said no. It took me much longer to write the “no” e-mail than it had to write the initial “yes” e-mail. And I worried about disappointing a nice person. But I did it, and my friend was very understanding, and I spared myself many hours and much stress.
One thing that’s really helped me with this whole writing/writering balance is that I hired a writing coach for the year. Does that sound hokey or even a little pathetic? Maybe. I don’t care. I’m incredibly fortunate in being able to afford some outside help, because I really need it.
My coach has helped me set both short-term and long-term goals for my writing, and I’m obligated to check in with her weekly with an accounting of my time and any pages I’ve produced. She’s also a genius reader, so I’m receiving amazing feedback on new work.
Among the excellent side-effects of this arrangement is that it forces me to evaluate potential “writering” endeavors against the need to account for them with my coach. When I find myself thinking, “Oh, I kinda want to do this, but I really don’t want to tell her about it,” I know I’m on thin ice.
Sometimes, if you don’t have much common sense, you need to outsource it.
Writers who don’t have the means to enter into formal arrangements like this can still benefit from setting up informal arrangements with friends who understand and respect them and their writing goals.
I did something like this a few summers ago when I was writing the first draft for what turned out to be the longest chapter in Landfalls: I asked a friend if I could be on the hook to e-mail her five pages a week until I was done. It worked; I dutifully churned out the pages, we met once a week for lunch to talk about my writing and hers, and I finished the chapter.
And with that, I’m now going to return to my own proper writing. Even though it involves “writing,” composing blog posts and newsletter copy, it seems to me, falls more into the writering category than the writing category.
Ironic, really, to indulge in “writering” in order to talk about how I’m trying to do less of it.
The Landfalls audiobook giveaway:[This giveaway has ended. Congratulations to Sandra G. of Woodland, CA, for winning an audiobook!]
Perfect for that long car trip this summer!
I’m giving away one copy of the Landfalls audiobook and will mail it free of charge to any address in the U.S. Between now and 11:59 pm Pacific Time on July 14, leave a comment below indicating your interest in receiving the audiobook. Don’t put your e-mail address or mailing address in the comment field! (You’ll have to provide your e-mail in order to post a comment, but it won’t show up on the site.) I’ll post the name of the winner on July 15.
P.S. Not seeing a comment field? Try re-loading the page here. Or leave a comment elsewhere on this blog noting your interest in the audiobook. I’ll get it & enter your name in the drawing. |
Criterion Art Deco Backpackers is a unique, Spanish Mission/Art Deco style building, located in the heart of Napier and just 1 minutes’ walk from the information center.
Originally built as a luxury hotel in 1932, after the famous Hawke’s Bay earthquake, the Criterion has been refurbished and offers guests free continental breakfast, a spacious kitchen area, relaxing lounge with satellite TV, billiards table and table tennis.
Guests staying at Criterion Art Deco Backpackers can watch the stunning sunsets from the veranda. Free WiFi is available as well as free local phone calls.
Bluff Hill Lookout is 0.8 mi from Criterion Art Deco Backpackers. The nearest airport is Hawke’s Bay Airport, 3.1 mi from the accommodations.
Own your own business within the CBD? To have access to all the membership benefits, register today. |
Last week, one of my favourite websites, Refinery29, published an article featuring the perspectives of some young women who went gluten-free. I thought I’d share my take on g-free living by filling out their survey and why I chose this lifestyle.
Are you completely gluten-free?
Yes. I am very strict since I was diagnosed as a celiac. If I slip up, I notice it right away… and in the end, it’s never worth it!
What made you decide to go gluten-free?
Last summer, I was really pale and lethargic. Throughout my teen years, I suffered from cramps and indegestion. I cut out all fatty and greasy foods, dairy and sugars from my diet but I was still hunched over all the time after eating and always looking for the nearest restroom. For years, my doctor would blame nerves or anxiety, but I was a happy, carefree teenager! I was diagnosed with Grave’s disease (a hyperthyroidism disorder, another auto-immune disease like celiac disease) two years prior, and even though I was on my way to remission, I was still feeling sick and losing weight. My doctor decided to do a celiac blood test and lo and behold! The gluten sensitivity test turned out to be positive. I immediately and drastically changed my diet, cutting out all wheat products. Within a couple days, I immediately noticed a difference and have been 100% gluten-free ever since.
Take us through a typical day of meals for you on a gluten-free diet.
For breakfast, I usually eat Rice Chex cereal with 2% milk (I love dairy…) and some fresh berries or bananas mixed in. In colder months, I usually make a loaded omelette filled with gouda, ham, tomatoes, peppers and mushrooms, since I love savoury breakfasts.
For lunch, I eat either a green salad with chicken and/or chickpeas or I make gluten free sandwhich wraps using Food For Life tortilla wraps. Gluten-free deli meats like May Family Farms (in Canada) are readily available. In general, they are more expensive because they don’t have cheap fillers like flour!
For dinner, I eat with my family and it usually consists of a typical Eastern-European meal like schnitzels fried in Kelloggs Corn Flake Crumbs, roasted chicken, steaks, sausages or grilled chicken. My sides are usually rice, but we are a big potato family. If I eat out, I try to go to Korean, Japanese or Thai restaurants that cater to my diet without changing the whole meal.
What’s the hardest thing about being gluten-free?
Eating out. Many times I get frustrated by not being able to eat at the newest restaurant or the Italian fare in Toronto. I’ve learned that I usually end up ordering the most expensive thing on the menu (hello steak or whole fish of the day), but in the end, I’m happy to be able to enjoy dining in one the most culinary-inclined cities in North America. I even managed to travel through Italy for three weeks, eating my weight in gluten-free pizza by researching and planning ahead. And never hesitate to ask! Your server is there to help you.
What do you like about being gluten-free?
I like that I eat healthier now. My old metabolism couldn’t keep up with my old diet of eating a dense white bagel for breakfast. My diet used to be entirely bread-based, and now it’s the opposite of that. I’ve learned to adapt, and learned to cook gluten-free for myself in a strange foreign country. I have learned so much about food, nutrition and labels, that I even know how to read food labels and ingredients in Dutch, German, French, Italian and Hungarian. Ahh the joys of travelling gluten-free. It’s opened my eyes to a supportive community and set me up to be healthy for life. My grandma suffers from osteoporosis, and I’m so grateful I might be able to dodge that same fate.
Have you noticed a difference in your health or the way you feel since going gluten-free?
Immediately. My life literally changed after only a week of living gluten-free. My symptoms were nearly gone and only come back if I eat something dubious. After doing some further research, I learned that celiac disease often brings out other thyroid-related auto-immune diseases. I read the list and my jaw-dropped when I saw Grave’s disease listed. Since then, I’m more confident I can keep my health in check with my new diet and way of life.
Do you ever cheat?
Only by accident. In Europe, flour has a different composition than in North America, and I was able to eat spelt and kamut pasta (in low doses). Since returning to Canada, I can’t stomach spelt bread, and it’s probably for the best. This might not be considered cheating, but I recently found out I can handle drinking Bud Light and Corono, that boast less than 20ppm (parts per million) gluten in one bottle of beer. Celiacs can supposedly handle that much in one day, but keep in mind that 20ppm is less than one breadcrumb! That’s why it’s crucial to never cheat and be aware of what goes into your mouth.
What gluten food do you miss the most?
French baguettes and almond croissants. Paris was a hard trip for me, Parisians really do walk around town holding breadsticks under their arms. If it weren’t for Laduree, I might have given in!
What kind of advice would you offer to anyone who is considering gluten-free?
If you think you have it, do a blood test before cutting it out of your diet. There’s no sense in depriving your body of fibre and grains just to lose weight or make things easier. The blood test usually reveals the intolerance and it’s well worth the money for the special test. If you or anyone in your family suffers from osteoporosis, thyroid disease, crohn’s and colitis, take a blood test! You might be surprised, or you might be relieved, either way, it’s good to know for sure.
What are some of your favorite gluten-free brands/foods?
In Europe, I fell in love with Schar products. My favourite were their Spekulaas (gingerbread cookies shaped like windmills) and they are coming to US stores like Wegman’s in time for Christmas. (Cue cross-border shopping trip!) I also loved Schar’s flour mixes that are unfortunately a European exclusive. In North America, Bob’s Red Mill Pancake Mix is so delicious and easy to make. Udi’s makes amazing cinnamon raisin bread, bagels and hot dog buns! For little treats, you can’t beat Glutino’s version of the classic Oreo.
But above all, I enjoy eating richer, more authentic foods and exploring Asian cuisine!
Where are some of your favorite places to eat gluten-free?
I could write a book about my gluten-free adventures in Europe (coming to a newsstand near you…) but in Toronto specifically, I love Hero Certified Burgers. They make amazing hamburgers, and I love that they only charge 79 cents extra for the gluten-free bun. For mainstream pizza, Pizza Pizza revamped their gluten-free crust and it’s now delicious and only $10. As for restaurants, I love Riz, a pan-asian restaurant that even serves gluten-free spring rolls! Off the Hook is a cute little fish and chips joint on the edge of Greektown that serve gluten-free battered fish, and have a selection of g-free beers to compliment. Toronto is full of Indian, Thai and Japanese restaurants, so I’m always experimenting too.
Can you offer some advice about eating out at restaurants when you are gluten-free?
1. Call/email ahead. If you’re going to a venue that might not be the most gluten-free friendly (French, Italian, generic), call ahead and notify them of their allergies and what options they have for you.
2. Ask your server right away for a gluten-free menu. If they can’t offer you one, ask them to check with the chef which items can be modified or are g-free already. It’s easier making a choice from an already narrowed-down list than taking a shot in the dark and frustrating your server (or date).
3. Steer towards foods that are more naturally prepared like steak, fish, salads and rice dishes. It’s way more likely these items are gluten-free.
4. You don’t even have to skip dessert. Ice-cream or creme brulee are usually gluten-free, and are always my favourites.
5. Don’t feel like you’re high-maintenance. No one would scoff at dietary needs of a diabetic, so you shouldn’t feel ashamed of (politely) asking for food that can accomodate your dietary needs.
What are some of your tried-and-true gluten-free recipes?
My favourite recipes used Schar flour, and if you can get your hands on some, here is my formula for yummy french crepes!
– 110g of Schar Flour Mix B or C
– 250 mL of milk
– 1tbs of butter or vegetable oil (I prefer butter or margarine)
– 1 large egg
1. Melt the butter in a microwave
2. Mix all the ingredients together, slowly adding the flour in.
3. Set your stove to a medium heat, and In a buttered crepe pan, spread a thin layer of the batter.
4. Cook for a few minutes and flip it to the other side until both are golden brown.
5. Taste the “first pancake” and adjust batter by adding more milk or flour mix.
6. Enjoy with some maple syrup, fresh berries or nutella!
There’s a lot of controversy around the idea that gluten-free is not a healthy lifestyle. What do you have to say about that?
I can’t imagine stuffing our faces with genetically modified white wheat at every meal is a healthy lifestyle either.
I will be sharing more recipes, gluten-free restaurants and tips on a new section on my blog, Off the Grain. |
Hours of Operation: 24/7 Emergency Service
Phone: (239) 302-5700 Fax: (954) 973-4131 2900 S. Horseshoe Drive, Suite 1400
Naples, FL 34104
While we have been proudly serving Naples and Marco Island for years, our success in the restoration industry is a direct reflection of our commitment to our customers and their satisfaction with every job that we do. We have inspired loyalty within our ranks, and many of our upper management and technicians have been with our company since we first opened our doors. Our owner Michael Panster ensures that no technician or member of our team goes into the field without extensive training and education in their specific niche of the industry, often extending beyond the qualifications and requirements to obtain their IICRC-Certifications, which is the organization responsible for quality standards and training through the restoration and recovery industry.
Though we have so many great attractions throughout our area that can draw people in like the Naples Zoo, The Baker Museum, and the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge, we know that the greatest attraction to our area is our sprawling beachfront and sunny climates. With such a densely populated area with homes, condos, apartments, businesses, and municipal properties, we stay ready 24/7 for all potential emergencies and disasters that could affect your home or business.
As a locally owned and operated team, the same communities we serve every day are the ones that we live in too. We give back every way that we can to help better these communities, its people, and to help those in need far beyond disaster relief. Not only do we work with many of the associations and Chambers of Commerce throughout the area to maintain an understanding of the needs of local business and properties, but we also help with direct involvement in local fundraising and awareness drives for the MS Society and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Foundation. We also support organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters as board members and other projects where our time and resources can benefit Naples and its surrounding areas.
We know that disasters can strike at any time, and our SERVPRO of Naples / Marco Island team is ready to help in any way that we can.
SERVPRO of Naples/Marco Island understands the stress and worry that comes with a fire or water damage and the disruption it ... More Info |
A lawsuit that has worked its way through New York federal courts since 2017, including up to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, has met its final stop at the United States Supreme Court.
This week, the Supreme Court denied a petition for a writ of certiorari in the Kirchner case. This case raised the question of whether broadly syndicated term loans are “securities” and therefore should be subject to state and federal securities regulations.
We previously reported here that we had a final answer to whether a term loan is a security when, last summer, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a 2020 decision from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York which held that broadly syndicated term loans are not securities. Most legal and regulatory experts expected that the Court’s decision would be the end of this litigation.
Now the Supreme Court has spoken, or perhaps we should say has declined to speak, and therefore we have our final final answer. Without providing any explanation, the Court declined to grant the petition that Kirschner submitted for the Supreme Court to hear the case.
For our non-lawyer readers out there, when parties are not satisfied by a ruling of a lower court they have to file a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court asking the Court to hear (and therefore determine) their case. The way this is generally done is to ask the court to grant a writ of certiorari, which is a request that the Supreme Court order the lower court in question to send the case record to the Supreme Court for review. Generally speaking, unlike other courts where you can file an original lawsuit or file an appeal of a decision of a lower court by following court procedure, the Supreme Court is not obligated to hear all cases and it can be choosy about the cases that it does hear. To put it in perspective, according to the Court, it is asked to review thousands of cases each year and it generally actually hears less than 100.
When the Supreme Court declines to grant a petition for certiorari, the existing decision in the case will stand as final, which is what has happened here. Hence, final answer: syndicated term loans are NOT securities.
Loan market constituents have been watching this case over the years with great interest. The Loan Syndications Tradition Association ("LSTA") has been quite vocal in this case and has urged that a determination that syndicated term loans are securities could pose an case as an “existential threat” to the $1.4 trillion syndicated loan market in the U.S. with the fear that a determination that securities laws should apply to the syndicated loan market would completely upend that market as we know it. We explained the implications in one of our previous articles on this case here.
The LSTA and others filed amicus briefs in support of their position when the case was before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The case generated a great deal of excitement when the Court asked that the SEC weigh in on the question before it. After a number of extensions of time, the SEC declined to comment.
It is interesting to note that this is not the first time the Supreme Court was ask to grant a petition of certiorari on this topic. In 1992, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found in Banco Espanol de Credito v. Security Pacific National Bank that loan participations are not securities. An appeal was filed following the Court’s decision and the Supreme Court denied certiori in that case. Perhaps more significantly, in that case, in the context of briefings submitted to the court, the SEC had indicated that loans could be securities although court ultimately ruled the other way. |
Is Crestone/Baca, Colorado, “The Vatican City of the New World Order?:”
An Exposé of the Occult “New World Religion”
Part I. Is Crestone/Baca, Colorado “the Vatican City of the New World Order?”
Dr. Eric T. Karlstrom, Emeritus Professor of Physical Geography, California State University
January, 2012 (revised, Dec. 2013)
Part I. Crestone/Baca, Maurice Strong, and the “New World Religion (?)
Spiritual seekers in North America eventually hear about Crestone. They make their pilgrimage to this sacred land reminiscent of the Himalayas and home to dozens of spiritual organizations and retreat centers.
Allison Rae, “Shambala of the Rockies: The Mythos and Power of Crestone”
Maurice Strong is a Canadian billionaire who has constructed a new age retreat in southern Colorado called the Baca. Many of the world’s elites visit this religious retreat, including many adherents to eastern religions. One well-known actress has built a ‘channeling’ center there and even the Vatican has a representative present… Maurice Strong also is the United Nations Undersecretary for the UNCED (UN Conference on Environment and Development- 1992 Rio Earth Summit). This man is a radical New Ager and environmentalist and travels extensively in Globalist circles. Some of the more radical environmentalists embrace a form of pantheism… called Paganism…. This agenda is nothing more than a revival of the Babylonian mystery religion. Where various forms of divination and occult practices and earth worship are mixed and only certain initiates are given a glimpse of the inner “secret doctrine.” This system is an abomination to God and is spoken of at length in the Book of Revelations (chapter 17).
Mark S. Watson, “Occult Theocracy!”
(The UN religion is) a weird and diabolical convergence of New Age mysticism, pantheism, aboriginal animism, atheism, Communism, socialism, Luciferian occultism, apostate Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.
William Jasper, 2002, “The New World Religion: Teaching God’s Children to Worship ‘Divine Nature’”
What does Maurice Strong have to do with American property rights? Everything. The assault on property rights, the entire radical environmental agenda, is being driven by the United Nations. And Maurice Strong is the number one force behind UN environmental policy. Maurice Strong is the leader of a radical contingent of environmentalists that believe that technology and modern industrialization must be stopped. Radical greens believe that all of man’s activities on earth are harmful and therefore not sustainable. They believe that man is a cancer on the earth. Their goal is to slowly cut back and finally reduce human habitat to specific areas while the rest of the world is turned into wilderness.
Maurice Strong and his buddies are the driving force behind a New Age pagan religion known as Gaia. And it is pure nature worship. The Strongs own a 63,000-acre ranch in Colorado known as Baca Grande… Baca Grande, Strong believes, is the Vatican City of the New World Order.
Maurice Strong is also a director of the Temple of Understanding in New York City, where pagan rituals and earth-worshipping ceremonies include escorting sheep and cattle to the alter for blessing. Elephants and camels walk the isles. A soprano sax is used to create the sound of a wolf moaning its extinction at the hands of man. Here, Vice President Al Gore delivered a sermon, as worshippers marched to the alter with bowls of compost and worms…
From “The Most Dangerous Man in the World,” speech by Tom DeWeese, President, American Policy Center, 1996
Still under construction worldwide but complete in New York City there exists an occult temple complex of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Temple of Understanding, the UN and, in particular, its’ pyramid-shaped meditation room, and Lucis Trust, originally named Lucifer Trust, repository for the “Ageless Wisdom Teaching,” or revelations from spirits.
Green is the symbolic color of the temple complex. Green is the color of the “new” occult pagan spirituality which describes itself in secular terms as the green eco-movement. Its’ worldwide utopian project is green spiritual communism. It hails Lucifer as the first free-thinker and liberator of mankind. Its’ deity is Isis, the Goddess of a Thousand Names. As Goddess Earth Mother, she is Gaia…
As the modern world increasingly succumbs to the seductive power of occult spirituality, a global totalitarian pagan state is arising. As it is the ultimate counter-tradition, it will demand nothing less than the counter-conversion of every soul, thereby claiming total possession of and jurisdiction over every man- mind, body, and soul- in a state directed by demons, or Transcended Masters as, powerful New Age insiders describe them.
Researchers say that somewhere between 100 and 200 million men, women, and children were murdered by Communists and Fascists during the 20th century. The Goddess Earth Mother will demand human sacrifice as well.
Linda Kimball, “Rise of the Modern Moloch state… global spiritual communism,” 2011
The United Nations has long been of the foremost world harbingers for the “New Spirituality” and the gathering “New World Order” based on ancient occult and freemasonic principles. Seven years after the birth of the UN, a book was published by the theosophist and founder of the Lucis Trust (formerly Lucifer Trust), Alice Bailey, claiming that:
Evidence of the growth of the human intellect along the needed receptive lines (for the preparation of the New Age) can be seen in the…. efforts of the United Nations to formulate a World Plan….. Within the United Nations is the germ and seed of a great international and meditating, reflective group – a group of thinking and informed men and women in whose hands lies the destiny of humanity. This is largely under the control of many fourth ray disciples, if you could but realize it, and their point of meditative focus is the intuitional or Buddhic plane- the plane upon which all hierarchical activity is today to be found.
From Discipleship in the New Age (Lucis Press, 1955)
No one will enter the New World Order unless he or she will make a pledge to worship Lucifer. No one will enter the New Age unless he will take a LUCIFERIAN Initiation.
David Spangler, United Nations Director of Planetary Initiative
Everything begins in faith and ends in politics. Charles Peguy
I live in Crestone/Baca, a small community at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in south-central Colorado (Figure 1). I first visited Crestone in the mid-1980’s. A group of Carmelite Catholic monks and nuns had relocated their hermitage here and invited friends to help them celebrate. Land had been donated to them by the Manitou Foundation, a non-profit organization headed by Maurice and Hanne Strong.
Figure 1. Sangre De Cristo Mountains, Crestone town site and Baca Grande subdivision.
An avid hiker/climber, I soon returned to this spectacular, pristine, mountain area to explore its peaks and trails. On discovering that lots in the Baca subdivision were relatively cheap, I began to consider buying land here. At this time, someone in the nearby town of Saguache told me that the CIA was very interested in Crestone. When I asked why, he replied; “There are people over there with a lot of money.” Curious but not dissuaded, I purchased three lots in the Baca Grande subdivision in 1994 and built my house here in 2000/2001.
My home is located in open conifer forest at the base of five 14,000+’ peaks and it has spectacular views out over the San Luis Valley. Our local population of about 1000 to 1500 includes people from all around the world. The 2003 Crestone Visitors Guide asserts: “The Crestone/Baca community of centers of the world’s religious traditions is currently the largest international interfaith ecumenical community in North America.”
A glossy journal entitled “Crestone: A Sacred Earth Journey” (2011) seems to bear that out, listing some 25 spiritual centers. These include Dharma Ocean (Buddhist), Chamma Ling (Tibetan Bon religion), Karma Thegsum Tashi Gomang (Tibetan Buddhist), Nur Ashki Jerrahi (Crestone Sufi Circle), Vajra Vidya Retreat Center (Tibetan Buddhist), I Am Harmony, Crestone Baptist Church, Yeshe Khorlo (Bhutanese Tibetan Buddhist), The Academy of On, Oniyan Wakan Tipi (Lakota Sacred Breath Lodge), Meditation Place of the Vast Expanse (Tibetan Buddhist), Shumei International Institute (Japanese), Dragon Mountain Zen Center, Nada Carmelite Hermitage (Catholic), The Way of Nature Fellowship, The Sri Auribindo Learning Center, Crestone Mountain Zen Center, Haidakhandi Universal Ashram (Hindu), Sacred Mountains Foundation Inc. (Navajo), Little Shepard of the Hills Episcopal Church, The Pundarika Foundation (Tibetan Buddhist) and The Desert Foundation (Catholic ecumenical).
We also have a Moslem Ziggurat, a Tibetan Peace Park, and a Crestone End of Life Cremation Project. The journal, Crestone, also features descriptions of our 18 healing arts centers, our local organic farms, and our alternative architectural styles. We even have a local ‘Shambala’ café, named after the mythical kingdom described in the Kalachakra tantra of Tibetan Buddhism. It seems that we who live here are truly blessed not only with our pristine, spectacular environment but also with the many dedicated spiritual seekers, practitioners, and teachers we have as neighbors.
But there are some snakes in paradise. Whereas people in surrounding communities tend to view Crestone and Crestonians as “weird,” some locals, such as myself, view life in our little berg as extremely controlled. As to why our neighbors might view Crestone/Baca residents as weird, well, many of us do live in a various realities quite different from the realities of the residents of the San Luis Valley, who tend to be farmers, ranchers, and relatively poor Hispanics. A high percentage of Crestonians, by contrast, go by New Age, Hindu, or Buddhist names rather than their original names. And there is a lot of talk around here of UFOs, with many locals claiming to have seen them. In fact, former Crestone resident, Christopher O’Brien, wrote a book, Mysterious Valley, that documents many UFO sightings in our area. And there’s the UFO Watchtower RV Park about 20 miles to the southwest near the town of Hooper. An image of an alien on a billboard waves and encourages people to stay there.
Like Sedona, Arizona, Crestone is on the world map of “high energy vortex” areas. A website of theAncient Wisdom Retreat Spiritual Resource Center advertizes trips to our area, stating: “TheAncient Wisdom Spiritual Resource Center will be on a Spiritual Adventure in Crestone, Colorado where we will experience one of the highest energy vortexes in the United States.” And one of the individuals interviewed in the movie: “The Flame: Searching for Gold in Crestone” proclaims that Crestone is the “crown chakra” of the planet.
Crestone is also a major center of New Age activity with many New Age fairs, events, etc. In the 1980’s and 90’s, there was much talk of ‘Arcturians’ landing here. “What’s an Arcturian?,” you might ask. Well, Arcturus is a star system in the Bootes constellation. According to http://www.floating-world.org/Arcturians.htm: “Arcturians are the most advanced 5th Dimensional beings in this galaxy. They give us an idea of what our future will be like. They are to us, spiritual, mental, and emotional healers for all of humanity.”
It seems the ‘Arcturians’ wanted to build a 300’ pink granite pyramid in the Baca subdivision. The leader of the group was a woman from Albuquerque who supposedly channeled messages from the “Arcturians” on her computer. The “Arcturians” instructed her to build the pyramid so that they, the beings from ‘Arcturus,’ could descend to earth and save our planet from the ecological destruction that we humans are inflicting upon it. Fortunately, our local property owner’s association (POA) refused to grant the required building permit because the 300’ pyramid would have exceeded the legal height limit for homes and structures, which is 30 feet. At about the same time, there was a group of “Pleidians” (from the constellation Pleides, of course) who also wanted to move here to help us humans in our next evolutionary phase.
In 2009, a Crestone friend warned me very seriously not to return to my teaching job in California because her “channeled information” told her that immanent “earth changes” would be so violent that California would break into huge pieces and fall into the sea. She said that Gaia (mother earth) was so angry at humans that “she” was soon going to “cleanse the earth” of the excess population. As a physical geography professor of nearly 30 years, I told her I was pretty sure that California would not and could not “fall into the sea,” because even very large earthquakes, which occur naturally and every hundred years or so, don’t significantly change the amount of land mass of California. She was so convinced that this “cleansing” would happen by December, 2011, however, that she took me up on my proposition of a small wager ($2) on the matter. Happily, it is now 2012, I’ve now won the bet, and California is still there.
There is lots of “magical thinking” amongst Crestone/Baca residents. Locals typically speak of “your truth” and “my truth.” During the years I’ve been here, many New Age ‘luminaries’ have spoken here. I attended a lecture/guided meditation event by Barbara Marx Hubbard, futurist, author, and President of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. She informed a credulous audience that a new and more spiritually-evolved kind of humans is now appearing on earth. (She implied, of course, that we were they). Hubbard maintained there is now a splintering of Homo sapiens into two separate species- of higher- and lower- spiritual capacities. (At the end of her talk, I asked if these two sub-groups met the standard biological definition of separate species, namely, that they cannot interbreed and produce fertile offspring. She didn’t seem to like that question and didn’t offer a good answer. Critical thinking was/is not encouraged by these New Agers.)
Another distinguished New Ager who visited our community was Michael Murphy, co-founder of the Esalen Institute in California and a leading figure of the Human Potential Movement. Murphy was the key-note speaker at the Carmelite’s celebration I attended in the mid-1980’s. Various reports indicate that visitors to Crestone have included such extremely high-powered personages as Laurence Rockefeller, David Rockefeller, Robert McNamara (then President of the World Bank), Edmond de Rothschild, British Prime Minister James Callahan, journalist Bill Moyers, and Henry Kissinger, sometimes described as CEO of the New World Order. A local rumor even has it that when Henry Kissinger visited, he proclaimed: “We will rule the world from here.”
Indeed, just this month (November, 2011), two fairly major New Age events occurred in our little berg. Dr. J. J. Hurtak, author of The Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch, spoke at Dharma Ocean, a local Buddhist retreat center. William Dean Ross (“Catch a Falling Star,” 2000) explained that Hurtak’s book “is the New Age Bible to eliminate all undesirables and bring in the Ascended Masters on a Mothership. The U.S.- the new Atlantis- is the major landing zone.”
And also this month, Thirteen Crystal Skulls were on display in Crestone. We were one of just seven cities in America where the thirteen skulls were displayed in their “pilgrimage” across the United States. Cal Garrison (http://www.spiritofmaat.com/) explained:
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the significance of the Thirteen Crystal Skulls, these ancient relics are said to contain information about the history of our planet and the future of mankind. Carved out of pure quartz crystal, and other crystals such as jade, the Skulls generate an energy field that activates human consciousness in a way that expands our perceptions of reality. Ultimately they are the manifestation of Spirit in a form that is now helping to shift the magnetic frequency of Mother Earth. When the Spirits of the Skulls are ceremonially awakened, ancient wisdom, wisdom that has been preserved in a crystalline matrix for eons, enters the unified field and fills the collective consciousness with all the knowledge of everything that has happened on the planet in the last 26,000 years, and perhaps beyond.
Wow! If we put all this together we get a vision of the ‘Mothership’ bringing in Enochian Ascended Masters and heralding a New Age on planet earth! Meanwhile, Spirit is shifting Mother Earth’s magnetic field to a unified field, thereby awakening spirits, ancient wisdom, collective consciousness, and knowledge of everything! It sounds almost too good to be true? Or is it too weird to be true? Or is it partly true and very, very bad? Or is it just outright crazy?
Above, I noted my impression local politics in Crestone is highly controlled. In Appendix 1, I include various articles and letters that I and others have written that address various highly controversial and contentious issues that have beset our “love and light” community over the past several years. Bottom line: our local politics is highly controlled by local (and foreign?) cabals, and our local politics are so unpleasant that most residents here opt out of the political process altogether and “retreat” to their respective spiritual centers or into their own homes.
Certainly, a survey of the literature reveals radically opposing views of what Crestone is all about. The idyllic, utopian picture of our community portrayed in our local publications, our newspaper, our Crestone magazine, the movie, The Flame, etc. is totally contradicted by the much darker vision painted by others. Brian Desborough, for example, paints a very grim picture of Crestone/Baca in his 1999 article, “Stop Misleading the Children, Mr. Jennings:”
Out of the chaos (of a contrived World War III), will arise a totalitarian New World Order and a new religion which embraces Lucifer. The new global religion is currently being composed under the direction of Maurice Strong, at a remote retreat in Crestone County, Colorado.
So which is the real Crestone/Baca? Is it the “official love and light story” or is Crestone the “Vatican City” of the “New Age/New World Order/eco-devil-worshipping cult?” Given the radical disparity of these two views, a critical examination of these issues seems to be in order. Why would I even attempt such an onerous task? Obviously, the stakes for humanity could be enormous. Another reason is that I have been around here long enough to notice that a core of insiders, often aided by strangers who seem to continually drop in and out of town, seem bent on controlling us. Thus, our local political battles can take on epic and very nasty proportions. (See my article, “Crestone/Baca Group Dynamics,” http://www.waterwatchalliance.us/ch19.html and Appendices 1, 2, and 3). Additionally, as an academic who has just retired from a 30-year career as a physical geography professor, I am accustomed to the rather tedious rigors of research projects. And finally, want to try to educate myself and others as to what is really happening in our beloved Crestone/Baca community.
II. Historical background on “the Baca”
In about 1978, Maurice and Hanne Strong (of Canadian and Danish extraction, respectively) acquired an approximately 132,000-acre ranch in the San Luis Valley that was originally part of the Juan Maria Luis Baca land grant. In the late 1970’s, this land belonged to Arizona Land and Cattle Company (AZL), an agribusiness conglomerate that also owned a series of companies active in feedlots, land, oil and gas, engineering, commodities trading, and a bank. The principle AZLshareholder at that time was Adnan Kashoggi, a Saudi business associate of the Bin Laden family who is (in)famous for his arms and drug dealing and money-laundering activities exposed during the Iran-Contra scandal.
Through a series of business deals, Strong emerged as sole owner of the Baca Grande ranch. In that capacity, he severed the mineral rights from the surface rights on the land, thus paving the way for subsequent gold and gas exploration activities here. With the arrival of Maurice and Hanne Strong in the late 1970’s came other representatives of the world’s ruling elite. The Aspen Institute owned a nearby large parcel of land at the time. And luminaries such as British Prime Minister James Callahan, World Bank President Robert McNamara, journalist Bill Moyers, and Canadian industrialist and United Nations entrepreneur/environmentalist, Maurice Strong, all came to visit the area.
In 1986, Strong created the American Water Development Inc. (AWDI) in an attempt to pump and transport the vast reservoir of groundwater underlying the San Luis Valley to the Denver area. Bingham (1996) and I (www.waterwatchalliancer.us) estimate the value of SLV groundwater to be in the trillions of dollars. Strong claims that when he became an AZL director, he did not know that the San Luis Valley had one of the largest fresh water aquifers in North America. However, when we examine some of his other business activities (see Section III below); for example, his being Chairman of Ontario Hydro, North America’s largest water utility, we can see that this claim can’t be true.
After a coalition of local citizens, ranchers, and environmentalists defeated Strong’s bid to export San Luis Valley groundwater, Strong sold the Baca Ranch. But he retained an approximately 1700-acre strip of land along sandwiched between the new Baca subdivision (about 38,000 acres) and the Sangre de Cristo mountains for his new creation, the Manitou Foundation, a non-profit directed by his wife, Hanne (Figures 2 and 3). Maurice donated $1.2 million of his profits from the sale of AWDI shares to help start Manitou. Manitou Foundation also received initial donations of $100,000 from Laurence Rockefeller and $20,000 from Robert O. Anderson, former head of ARCO and director of the Aspen Institute of Colorado, which was located in Crestone at that time. (Ex-British intelligence officer, Dr. John Coleman, asserts that the Aspen Institute of Colorado is the “American home of the Socialist-One-World-Government Committee of 300,” of which Maurice Strong, David Rockefeller, Edmond de Rothschild and Henry Kissinger are members (Coleman, 2006a, 2006b)).
Figure 2. Location of spiritual centers and various ecological projects on Manitou Foundation land (from “Manitou Institute: Spirit and Nature,” April, 2005, Crestone Eagle)
Figure 3. Location of Manitou Foundation land along eastern margin Baca Grande subdivision (from Crestone Eagle, 4/05)
So why would the Strongs and their associates want to establish a “spiritual United Nations” in the Baca? The “official” story, as told by Hanne Strong herself in the 2013 movie, The Flame: Searching for Gold in Crestone, is that while meditating for four days in the hyper-charged spiritual energies of Crestone, she was “told by Spirit; “You aren’t leaving until you get the map…. I was basically told that that the mystical traditions would gather here.” This message was soon confirmed when a local mystic mountain man informed her that “the Baca would become the center for a new planetary order which would evolve from the economic collapse and environmental catastrophes that wouldsweep the globe in the years to come.” This version of events is related in www.DemocraticUnderground.com blog:
The Strongs say they see the Baca, which they call ‘The Valley of the Refuge of World Truths,’ as the paradigm for the entire planet and say that the fate of the earth is at stake. Apparently, the Kissingers, the Rockefellers, the McNamaras, the Rothschilds, and other Establishment New World Order elites all agree as well, for they do their pilgrimage to the Baca- where politics and the occult- the New World Order and the New Age- all merge…..
Baca Grande also appears to be a magnet for military attention…. And reputedly is an active site for observing both UFO’s and spiritual manifestations.
Since these experiencing these initial “voices” and “visitations,” Hanne Strong and her Manitou Foundation have donated land to over two dozen international spiritual communities who have now built many exotic temples and retreat centers here (Figures 2 and 3). In addition, Manitou has also been involved in various educational and environmental projects. These include the creation of the Manitou Habitat Conservation Plan (MHCP), creation of the Earth Restoration Corps and sponsorship of the Earth Origins Seeds (seed bank) and Youth Peace Journey. Manitou has also drawn up plans for a future solar village in the Baca. In the April, 2005, Crestone Eagle article: “Manitou Institute: Spirit and Nature” we read:
In the mid 1990’s, Manitou and specialists of The Conservation Fund, with generous support of Laurance Rockefeller and the Jackson Hole Preserve, devoted several years to extensive studies of Manitou’s mountain properties, culminating in the creation of the Manitou Habitat Conservation Plan (MHCP). Comprehensive assessments were made of the terrain, slope, soil types, drainage and erosion patterns; botanical studies and wildlife patterns – corridors, birthing areas, human interface issues; forest health and wildfire concerns, and so forth. This culminated in a master conservation easement being laid on almost all of the Manitou Mountain Tract to the east of the Chalets.
Hence, in truth, Manitou’s activities can be summed up in a single word: “eco-spirituality.”
In the following maps, the Manitou Mountain Tract is shown to adjoin the Baca Mountain Tract of the U.S. Forest Service as well as the Baca National Wildlife Refuge (to west), Sangre de Cristo Wilderness Area, and the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve to the south (Figures 4 and 5). Hence, Crestone/Baca is surrounded by much larger land parcels owned and administered by the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Park Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Figure 4. Manitou Foundation land (in dark grey) between Baca Grande subdivision and Rio Grande National Forest (Baca Mountain Tract).
Figure 5. Baca subdivision (upper left), Baca Mountain Tract, Sangre de Cristo Wilderness Area, Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve
In order to answer our original question, we may legitimately ask if Manitou Foundation itself is part of a larger globalist agenda. The authors of the Project for the Exposure of Hidden Institutions (PEHI) indicate that, yes, Manitou Foundation is among the most important institutions in “The West’s Transnational Oligarchy” (Figure 6). An earlier version of this table was entitled: “The Group Surrounding the Rockefeller and Rothschild Families.”
Figure 6: Institutions of “The West’s Transnational Oligarchy.” Manitou Foundation is listed under 1001 Nature Trust/Club. (from Project for the Exposure of Hidden Institutions (PEHI)).
PEHI authors explain:
…An old boys network of low profile, privately-funded, and intelligence-ridden institutes exercise a huge amount of influence over local governments, the media, universities (science), and the policies of the multinational corporations (who fund these networks)…… It’s abundantly clear that many roads lead to London. The Pilgrims and the 1001 have been set up and are managed by a combination of Anglophiles and radical Zionists. The Pilgrims Society was set up by the British aristocracy, many of them Privy Council. The 1001 Club was mainly created by Prince Phillip and the South African billionaire Anton Rupert. Le Circle was set up by interests tied to the Hapsburgs and radical elements in the Vatican.
Zionism and the interests of the British Empire were informally merged no later than 1891, the year that, according to professor Carroll Quigley (1966), the Rhodes secret society was created. In the 1960’s and early 1970’s, the Rothschilds, British Royals, and Rockefellers set up their ‘sustainable development’ movement with the creation of the WWF, the Club of Rome, the World Wilderness Conferences, and the WWF-affiliated 1001 Club.
III. The Honorable Maurice F. Strong (P.C., O.C., LL.D.), the United Nations, and the New World Order
The proper study of political mankind is the study of power elites. A.K. Chesterton
The New York Times hailed Maurice Strong as the “Custodian of the Planet.” And The New Yorkerdeclared: “The survival of civilization in something like its present form might depend significantly on the efforts of a single man.” Just who is Maurice Strong? By various accounts, he is a billionaire industrialist capitalist, profiteer from resource development, environmentalist, New Ager, and probably the most influential United Nations organizer and bureaucrat of the past several decades. Ex-British intelligence officer, John Coleman, asserts Strong is also a former British intelligence officer and a current member of the Committee of 300, the self-described “Olympians,” who essentially direct the world’s secret or shadow government (Coleman, 2006a).
The enigmatic Maurice Strong was born in Manitoba, Canada and ran away from home and dropped out of high school at the age of 14. He worked as a trading-post employee for the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1944-45 and in 1947, through connections with the Rockefeller family, landed a job as an assistant pass officer at the newly-established United Nations. The rest of his career seems to defy all the laws of logic and gravity. It almost seems as if this one man, who was never elected to public office and who never completed high school, has been running the world by himself. Certainly, Strong qualifies as one of the “People with Endless Bios” of PEHI(https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?4728-The-people-with-the-endless-bios-An-introduction-to-the-world-we-live-in).
Strong is not your average high school drop-out. His professional accomplishments in Canadian business and international affairs have resulted in many honors, including membership in the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada, the Swedish Royal Order of the Polar Star, the Order of Canada, and 41 honorary doctoral degrees. Here are some of items on his vita:
A. Maurice Strong, entrepreneur/capitalist/industrialist has been President, Chairman and CEO of Petro-Canada (Canada’s premier oil company), VP of Dome Petroleum, Chairman ofOntario Hydro (North America’s largest water utility), President of Power Corporation of Canada, Director of Ajax Petroleum, Ltd. and Alberta Gas Company, Founder of International Energy Development Corporation, Founding Director of Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), Founder and President of Canada Development Investment Corporation (CIDA), President of Canadian International Development Agency, Chairman of Stovetest Holdings, Chairman and Director ofTechnology Development Corp., Director of Molten Metals Technology, Inc., Founder and President of International Energy Development Corporation (IEDC), Founder and President of MF Strong Management, Vice Chairman of Tosco (California-based oil company), Director of Toyota Motor Company, Chair of Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Chair ofCanadian Development Investment Corporation, President of the Council of the University for Peace in Costa Rica, Member of Privy Council of Canada, Chairman of Stovetest Holdings and Technology Development Corporation, andMember of the World Water Commission (among many other positions, I’m sure). (Abraham and Saunders, 1994 and Dewar, 1995, among others).
Strong’s corporate connections that relate directly to our Crestone/Baca area include his tenure as Chairman of the Executive Committee of Arizona-Colorado Land and Cattle Company (AZL), Founder and CEO of American Water Development, Inc. (AWDI), and Founder and Director ofFirst Colorado Corporation, Baca Corporation, and Manitou Foundation.
Strong once famously stated: “I am a capitalist in methodology and a communist in ideology.” (Translation: He and his fellow globalists will use capitalism and fascism to enrich themselves and use communism to enslave everyone else?). Here’s the communist part:
B. Maurice Strong, United Nations globalist, environmentalist, and New Ager has been called “the guardian of the Planet” and the “Wizard of the Baca.” He has served as Senior Advisor to both the United Nations and the World Bank, was Undersecretary General of the United Nations, Organizer of 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Earth Summit I) in Stockholm, Sweden, Secretary General of 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development or UNCED (“Rio Earth Summit II”), and first Executive Director of United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). He has been Chair and Director of United Nations Foundation and The Commission on Global Governance, Founder and President of World Federation of United Nations Associations (WFUNA), Organizer and Chair of UN Business Council for Sustainable Development, Executive Coordinator of the UN Office for Emergency Operations in Africa, Member, The World Commission on Environment and Development (The “Brundtland Commission”), and Co-Chair of the Council of the World Economic Forum. (Bailey, R., “International Man of Mystery: Who is Maurice Strong?)
Strong is Chair of the Earth Council, Chair of the World Resources Institute, Director of theInternational Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), Founder and Director of the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) and the World Resources Institute (WRI), Director of World Future Society, Chairman of The Earth Council, Co-Convener of Fourth World Wilderness Conference, and Director, Business Council for Sustainable Development.
In addition, Strong has been co-chairman of the World Economic Forum, member of the Club of Rome, Trustee of the Aspen Institute, Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and Rothschild Foundations.
So whereas it may appear that a great diversity of national and international groups are overseeing the environmental movement and the administration of national and international resources, the reality is that a great many of these groups are controlled by just a few individuals, and of these, Maurice Strong has had an enormous influence.
An example of UN policy recommendations that have now been implemented: The UN-funded Commission on Global Governance’s 1995 report entitled “Our Common Future” contained proposals such as establishing a global tax and United Nations’ control over the “global commons.” And at a UN Summit in 2000, the United Nations announced its own Trusteeship over the atmosphere, the oceans, and space!!!!! Did anyone notice this? Did anyone notice that the first truly global program of aerial spraying, Operation Cloverleaf, began in 1992? (See “Man-Made Climate Change in the Skies” https://naturalclimatechange.org/added%204-13/man-made%20climate%20in%20the%20skies5-white-test.htm, “Government Documents Link Global Warming to Advanced Military Climate Modification” Technology http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhRk2Wp92TY, and
“NASA Documents Reveal “Climate Change” Caused By Covert Weather Weapons”http://chemtrailsplanet.net/2013/11/05/nasa-documents-reveal-climate-change-caused-by-covert-weather-weapons/).
C. Maurice Strong, the extremely influential environmental scientist (?): Despite the fact that he has no formal education, Strong is a member of the Royal Society of Great Britain and the Royal Society of Canada. As Head of United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) andUnited Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), he wrote the “terms of reference” for climate research, defining climate change and global warming as strictly those changes caused by humans. By ignoring the much larger contributions of natural processes on climate change, and through controlling the “purse strings,” Strong and his UN colleagues have been able to profoundly skew several decades of “scientific research” in the direction of computer modeling, wherein pre-programmed assumptions yield pre-determined conclusions. All this computer-based “research” gives the false impression that human industrial activities are causing dangerous global warming (www.naturalclimatechange.us).
Simultaneously, Strong has been a major architect of international policies embedded in the Kyoto Protocol, which sets up a for-profit Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a worldwide “carbon trading” market in buying and selling the right to emit carbon dioxide. In an interview, Strong stated: “This world can live without gold; it cannot live if it fails to reduce our emissions of carbon.” And therefore, “what we are going to see is the expansion of the importance and the value of that commodity (carbon) beyond anything else” (estimated at $15 trillion/year). Note that Strong’s participation as Founding Director of the Chicago Climate Exchange and the Chinese Climate Exchange are extreme conflicts of interest.
D. Maurice Strong, the ultimate globalist insider has been and/or is Director and Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, Member of the Club of Rome, Trustee of the Aspen Institute of Colorado, Financial Director of the Lindisfarne Institute, Director, World Future Society, Founding Endorser of Planetary Citizens, Director of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum(at Davos, Switzerland), Advisor to the Secretary General of the World Bank, and Senior Advisor to the Rothschild Trust. In addition, he is a memberof the extremely elite, secretive Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
E. Maurice Strong, intelligence officer and member of the secret global ruling elite, as noted above, is a former MI6 British Intelligence officer and a member of the elite and secretCommittee of 300 (Coleman, 2006a). According to Dewar (1995), while involved in Africa, Strong utilized SNC, a Quebec-based engineering company, as a covert front for federal spying in Africa and Quebec. He thereby helped create a federally-funded but semi-private intelligence/influence network that influenced economic and political decisions in both Africa and Quebec. Might he also have applied his experience with directing “semi-private intelligence/influence networks” (aka change agents or simply, spies) in Crestone, Colorado?
F. Maurice Strong, world savior, author of Agenda 21 (Agenda for the 21st Century), the Earth Charter, and “The Ark of Hope”
1. Agenda 21. (Information here is taken from my article: “Green Global Dictatorship: Regional Governance, UN Agenda 21, Sustainable Development, and the Wildlands Project” (http://waterwatchalliance.us/ch11.html):
“Agenda 21” is shorthand for United Nations’ Agenda for the Twenty-First Century!
As its policies have been put into place, it has become clear that U.N. Agenda 21 is antithesis to the U.S. Constitution. U.N. Agenda 21 is worldwide collectivist government under the penumbra of the United Nations.
Freedom 21, Santa Cruz
Maurice Strong was both Secretary General of the 1992 UNCED Rio Earth Summit and principle author of the United Nations’ Agenda 21 (Agenda for the 21st century) that was unveiled at the 1992 Earth Summit. Agenda 21 is a 3000-page, 40-chapter, “soft-law” policy adopted by 179 nations, including the United States, as a work plan to implement ‘Sustainable Development.’ Maurice Strong set the tone for the 1992 UNCED conference (and the future?) when he stated:
Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class– involving high meat consumption and large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and workplace air-conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable. A shift is necessary which will require a vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations.
In other words, the globalists’ plan is to reduce the U.S. and other first world nations to the level of Third World nations.
At first blush, Agenda 21 sounds good to many well-meaning people. However, in “U.S. Military Targets Southeast Colorado (Part 3 of 3) (http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/spingola/080525), Spingola notes:
Agenda 21 is a very well-organized plan to reinvent and regionalize government beginning with the ‘rural cleansing’ of America and those referred to by the elite ruling class as resource-draining, expendable, “useless eaters.” Because Agenda 21 provides guidelines for local, regional, national, as well as global governance, it is radically transforming the entire world.
“Rural cleansing” refers to the United Nations’ goal of removing American citizens from rural areas, i.e., taking their private property and re-locating them in “Human Settlement Areas.” See the 1976 document “Report Of Habitat: The United Nations Conference On Human Settlements” (http://www.womensgroup.org/HUMANSET.html).
In “The Green Agenda: Agenda 21- The UN Blueprint for the 21st Century,” (http://green-agenda.com/agenda21.html), we read:
Like most “green movement initiatives,” Agenda 21 is a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” It is not an environmental management policy, but an attempt to impose a global centrally-planned quasi-government administered by the United Nations. Under Agenda 21, all central government and local authority signatories are required to conform strictly to a common prescribed standard and hence, this is just communism resurrected in a new guise.
The fact that most people still have not even heard of Agenda 21, even though it was ratified in by 179 governments in 1992 and is now being implemented worldwide, reveals the depth of interpenetration and cooperation between corporations, government, NGO’s, and the media.
In “Why Are Americans Ignorant of ‘Agenda 21’” (http://www.newswithviews.com/Morrison/joyce36.htm), Morrison notes that Agenda 21 is “the global plan to change the way we ‘live, eat, learn and communicate’ because we must save the earth.”
In “Local Agenda 21: The U.N. Plan for Your Community (http://www.crossroad.to/text/articles/la21_198.html), Berit Kjos notes:
Its (Agenda 21) regulation would severely limit water, electricity, and transportation- even deny human access to our most treasured wilderness areas, it would monitor all lands and people. No one would be free from the watchful eye of the new global tracking and information system.
Agenda 21 seeks to regionalize America and other nations for the benefit of a tiny international elite. Regionalism works to blur political boundaries, take decision-making authority away from local peoples, and allow elected representatives to dodge accountability. The blurring of political boundaries, along with privatization of public assets, allows state collectivists to steal the wealth of the people. The goal of state collectivists is to abolish private property, increase government control over people, and to forcefully replace individualism with collectivism. Agenda 21 is also designed to implement the United Nations Charter and establish global governance under the United Nations. The U.N. Charter posits that ordinary humans are “biological resources” to be arranged by the elite into a sustainable number of worker bees and bee keepers. Indeed, under the U.N. Charter, as contrasted with the U.S. Constitution, peoples’ rights are dependent upon his/her usefulness and compliance to the will of the elite.
In “Agenda 21- What is it? How Did it Get Here?” (http://www.freedom21santacruz.net/site/article.php?sid=394), Henry Lamb states:
(Agenda 21) is a set of policy recommendations designed to reorganize global society around the principles of environmental protection, social equity, and what is called “sustainable” economic development. At the heart of the concept of sustainable development, is the assumption that government must manage society to ensure that human activity conforms to these principles. The idea that government is inherently empowered to manage the affairs of society is diametrically opposed to the idea that the just power of government is derived from the consent of the governed. As these conflicting principles collide in the arena of public policy, the people who are governed are losing the ability to limit the power of government. Consequently, government power over people is expanding. Nowhere is this transformation more dramatic than in the policies governing private property rights and the use of land and its resources…. The paradigm shift from sacred private property rights to government-managed land use is a perfect example of how sustainable development is transforming America into a government-managed society.
This transformation is not the result of a deliberate decision made by elected representatives after a fair and public debate. It is the result of years of subtle influence and obscure processes relentlessly imposed through the United Nations’ agencies and organizations, and a multitude of non-governmental organizations accredited by, and sympathetic to the United Nations’ agenda.
(In other words, the secret implementation of United Nations Agenda 21 by the various overt and covert agents of international government may very well account for the fact that our local Crestone/Baca politics are so controlled! Might it also partly provide the rationale for the great spiritual/mind control experiment in Crestone?)
Lamb further notes that the most influential NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in the formulation of Agenda 21 were the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Worldwide Fund for Nature (formerly the World Wildlife Fund, and still known as WWF), and the World Resources Institute (WRI). These three organizations also participated in the preparations for the UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat I)in 1976, which produced the first formal UN-Rockefeller Brothers Fund documents, compiled and edited by William K. Reilly,” including The Use of Land: A Citizen’s Policy Guide to Urban Growth (1972), The Unfinished Agenda (1977), and Blueprint for the Environment(1988).
In his introduction to The Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide, Maurice Strong calls on local leaders around the world to “undertake a consultative process with their populations and achieve a consensus on ‘Local Agenda 21’ for their communities.” In practice, achieving this consensus generally means painting very scary scenarios of a dying planet in order to frighten children, anger youth and persuade adults to submit to unthinkable regulations. It means blaming climate change on human industrial activities while ignoring the much greater importance of natural climate cycles.
In “Local Agenda 21: The U.N. Plan for Your Community,” (http://www.crossroads.to/text/articles/la21_198.html), Berit Kjos notes that Agenda 21 calls for each community to formulate its own “Local Agenda 21.” This document states:
Land….cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals… Public control of land use is therefore indispensable.” Thus the document recommends that:
1) all countries establish a national policy on human settlements which should 2) facilitate population redistribution according to availability of resources. And 3) governments must maintain full jurisdiction and exercise complete sovereignty over such land with a view to freely planning development of human settlements.
Governments exercise complete sovereignty over land and plan the development of ‘human settlements?’ Sounds like pure, totalitarian communism to me. Welcome to the “Gulag Archipeligo’ Part II. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel, Gulag Archipeligo is his personal account of the forced labor and concentration camp system in the Soviet Union).
Strong’s involvement with the United Nations programs continues to this day. The “Godfather of Global Green Thinking” recently resurfaced on the international stage at the United Nations’ Rio+20 Conference in June, 2012. (http://junkscience.com/2012/06/22/exclusive-godfather-of-global-green-thinking-steps-out-of-shadows-at-rio20/). There, according to Fox News, “EXCLUSIVE: Rio + 20 conference: Negotiators producing a mammoth, messy and expensive grab bag of regulations and demands.” (http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/06/01/rio-20-conference-negotiators-producing-mammoth-messy-and-expensive-grab-bag/). It’s “déjà vu all over again,” it seems.
2. The Earth Charter. In 1994, two years after the UNCED Rio Earth Summit, Maurice Strong launched the Earth Charter Initiative as well his newly formed Earth Council. In 1997, the Earth Council and (Mikhail Gorbechev’s) Green Cross International formed an Earth Charter Commission. The final text of the Earth Charter was approved at a meeting of the Earth Charter Commission at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in March, 2000. The authors were Maurice Strong, Steven Rockefeller (Chairman of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund), and Mikhail Gorbachev (former premier of the Soviet Union, Chairman of the Russian Communist Party, and Head of the ‘environmental’ group, Green Cross International).
The Earth Charter itself is a 2,400-word document divided into “pillars” that represent sixteen main principles. Basically, it sets forth the means for establishing a global government based on communist ideology and New Age beliefs. It has definite religious overtones, but these involve the twisting and often negation of the Judeo-Christian principles that have provided the underpinnings of Western civilization.
Maurice Strong declared: “The real goal of the Earth Charter is that it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments.” Gorbachev elaborated, stating: “Do not do unto the environment of others what you do not want done to your own environment…. My hope is that this charter will be a kind of Ten Commandments, a “Sermon on the Mount,” that provides a guide for human behavior toward the environment in the next century.”
Clearly, in producing a quasi-scriptural document that would dictate all human behavior henceforth, Strong and Gorbachev are attempting to exercise enormous power and influence over all their fellow humans. Just what are their personal spiritual beliefs?
Strong has stated: We are all gods now; gods in charge of our own destiny. (Obviously, Strong believes that humans have now supplanted God and now rule the earth. But wasn’t this the very same “deal” that Satan offered Adam and Eve in the garden when he said: “Ye shall surely not die, for then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil?” Genesis: 2:4-5). Gorbachev has also articulated his beliefs: “Cosmos is my God. Nature is my God.”This is pantheism, plain and simple.
As might be expected, then, based on the personal beliefs of its authors, the Earth Charter itself is New Age and Humanistic in its ideology. In “The Earth Charter and the Ark of Hope: Eco-Socialism as a Tool for Enslavement,” Huxwell voices his main criticisms of the Earth Charter as follows:
In place of the simple elegance of the (Ten Commandments) that provide rules for self-government and social stability, the Earth Charter calls for the imposition of a global tyranny over every aspect of human activity which becomes evident once you strip away the rhetorical devices and eco-socialist jargon… The program calls for all individuals to be “guided and assessed” by an unspecified group of managers and to accept a subsistence level existence regardless of their individual aspirations. The hypocrisy of these billionaire globalists preaching about virtues of universal poverty is mind boggling. (Emphasis mine, ETK).
3. The “Ark of Hope.” In order to maintain the fiction that the Earth Charter is a sacred edict from ‘on-high,’ the Earth Charter has been inscribed on papyrus paper and is now enshrined in a wooden box called the “Ark of Hope.” This “Ark of Hope,” decorated with neo-pagan artwork, has been paraded around the world by “true believers.” According to Contender Ministries (“Ark of Hope: The Ark of the New Age Covenant”):
In many ways, the Ark of Hope was designed as a Satanic, half price knock-off of the Ark of the Covenant (which housed the Ten Commandments). It is a wooden chest. The four sides have various artwork and represent the four directions and also four elements (earth, water, fire, and air). The top of the ark features artwork that represents the fifth element, spirit. Around the edges of the top are a variety of religious and cultic symbols, including the occult pentagram!
The attempt to blaspheme the Ark of the Covenant is no chance occurrence. The contents of the Ark are as dark as its design, and include the Earth Charter written on papyrus, “Temenos Earth masks,” and over 300 “Temenos Books” designed by artists and school children from Vermont. Temenos is a concept adopted by Carl Jung to denote a magic circle, a special place where special rules and energies apply.
Hence, we begin to see that Maurice Strong is the harbinger of a New World Order Religion, and that religion is New Age, pagan, and occult in its nature.
G. Strong left the United Nations when he was caught in a series of scandals and conflicts of interest. While serving as a top adviser to then-Secretary General Kofi Annan, Strong took nearly $1 million that was bankrolled by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein as part of the UN’s Oil-for-Food program. The check was delivered by a South Korea businessman, Tongsun Park, who was convicted of conspiring to bribe UN officials (i.e., Strong and Annan) on behalf of Saddam Hussein. Another conflict of interest involved Strong’s creative use of a little-known, UN-chartered educational institution called the University for Peace in Costa Rica. Strong is currently residing in China, where he is reportedly working with financier George Soros to make and export fuel-efficient cars to North America- and make another billion dollars in the process.
H. How can one man possibly wear so many different hats and exert all this power and influence in the world?
If it seems I have made a bit of a study of Maurice Strong, well, I have. I don’t know him personally, but I feel I have gotten to know him (or them), little by little, over the years. Actually, it seems that Maurice Strong is almost like a front for a committee which consists of hundreds or even thousands of individuals. I first “encountered” this enigmatic “savior of the planet” during the 1990’s. I had taken a job as geography professor at California State University and was assigned to teach a class called “Human Ecology.” As it happened, a 10-part video series called “Race to Save the Planet” had just been released and purchased by the university. Meryl Streep introduced each segment and Roy Scheider narrated. Topics ranged from pollution, to overpopulation, to loss of biodiversity, to climate change, etc.,. Maurice Strong introduced and concluded the entire series, asserting that an “environmental revolution” was now needed to “save the planet.” Due to my educational programming, I was an enthusiastic “believer” in and advocate for the new religion of environmentalism. Over the course of the next decade or so, then, I saw Strong’s face and heard his voice many times.
After buying land in the Baca, however, I learned that Strong, the arch-environmentalist and “planetary savior” from Canada, had also tried to bilk billions of dollars from Americans through the sale and exportation of San Luis Valley groundwater. Eventually, it was Strong’s stunningly hypocritical behavior that helped me realize that the entire environmental movement had been co-opted by our power elite as an excuse to impose progressively greater socialist/communist restrictions on our citizenry (please see my websites: www.naturalclimatechange.us andwww.waterwatchalliance.us). At this point in my teaching career, I began to explore the “right-wing” critique of the environmental movement. Interestingly, for some reason, attendance in my “Human Ecology” class dropped dramatically the next year.
But coming back to Strong: Obviously, he is an extremely effective organizer and persuader. But it is even more obvious that the fix is in. Apparently through historical family ties, Strong has always been an agent, or point man, for two of the most powerful family dynasties in the world, namely, the Rockefeller and Rothschild Empires. Without these connections, it would have been impossible for a single individual (a high-school dropout, no less) to found and direct all these international agencies and corporations.
Nonetheless, when Maurice Strong speaks, he often reveals the goals of the global ruling elite that he has so effectively represented.
I. Interesting quotes from Maurice Strong:
During his opening speech at the 1992 UNCED (Rio Earth Summit) conference, Chairman Strong stated:
The concept of national sovereignty has been the immutable, indeed sacred principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security…
It is the responsibility of each human being today to choose between the forces of darkness and the force of light. We must therefore transform our attitudes, and adopt a renewed respect for the superior laws of Divine Nature…
Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class- involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and sub-urban housing- are not sustainable….. Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?
Other statements by “Chairman Strong:”
After all, sustainability means running the global environment – Earth Inc. – like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization, and maintenance accounts.
I am convinced the prophets of doom have to be taken seriously.
We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.
The United States is clearly the greatest risk to the world’s ecological health.
The 50th anniversary of the United Nations provides a unique opportunity to restructure and revitalize the UN to prepare its role as the primary multilateral organization in the New world Order.
In an interview with WEST magazine, “The Wizard of the Baca Grande,” in May, 1990, Strong the related following scenario:
Each year the World Economic Forum convenes in Davos, Switzerland. Over a thousand CEOs, prime ministers, finance ministers, and leading academics gather in February to attend meetings and set the economic agendas for the year ahead. What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude that the principle risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? Will the rich countries agree to reduce their impact on the environment? Will they agree to save the earth?
The group’s conclusion is “no.” The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?
This group of world leaders form a secret society to bring about a world collapse. It’s February. They’re all at Davos. These aren’t terrorists – they’re world leaders. They have positioned themselves in the world’s commodity and stock markets. They’ve engineered, using their access to stock exchanges, and computers, and gold supplies, a panic. Then they prevent the markets from closing. They jam the gears. They have mercenaries who hold the rest of the world leaders at Davos as hostage. The markets can’t close. The rich countries…?
The journalist adds: “and Strong makes a slight motion with his fingers as if he were flicking a cigarette butt out of the window. I sat there spellbound…. He is, in fact, co-chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum. He sits at the fulcrum of power. He is in a position to do it.”
J. George W. Hunt and the Fourth World Wilderness Congress of 1987. Christian businessman George Hunt attended a number of semi-secret United Nations planning sessions in Colorado in the late 1980’s. These meetings were preparatory for the Rio Earth Summit of 1992. Hunt’s eye-witness testimony offers one of the most powerful clarifications yet of: 1) Strong’s role in the globalist “Plan,” 2) the details of the “Plan” itself, and 3) Crestone/Baca’s intended role in the “Plan.” Hunt stated:
(In 1987) I attended The Fourth World Wilderness Congress. Maurice Strong, the convener, said it was called the Fourth World because it was the fourth one of these environment congresses that Edmund de Rothschild had created. I learned later that the World Order refers to the coming One World Government as the Fourth World, or world control by the World Order where there is no more First, Second, or Third Worlds, just a boundary-less planet which is called the “fourth world wilderness.” Yogis and shamans refer to it as the “fourth world wilderness,” the “lostness of the mind.” The” lostness of the mind” refers to the collective consciousness. Persons will be coerced through lies, drugs, fear, and pain to surrender themselves, their egos to the collective consciousness.
The Fourth World will be a return to a society much like the Caesar’s or Babylon or the Fourth Reich, within the fictionalized societies described in Huxley’s Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited and Orwell’s classic, 1984. We will flourish with only a whimper. The World Order wants to create a new society out of the ashes of chaos; a collectivist Fourth World complete with a collectivist religion, collectivist finance and unchecked world national socialism (fascism). The World Order will offer Gaia, mother earth, to the masses as the big brother image to worship in the Fourth World.
Maurice Strong has already has set up a 140,000-acre project in Crestone, Colorado to develop this earth religion system. Projects are funded by the Rockefeller Fund among other foundations. The (1992 Rio) Earth Summit will link environment with industry. The Lords of the UNCED Conference will be the masters of who gets what and when if we don’t do something about it quickly.
Who leads the environmental movement? The Convener of the (Rio Earth) Summit, Maurice Strong, identifies Baron Edmond de Rothschild as the creator of the environment movement. Strong states that Rothschild is the positive synthesis of environment on the one hand (that’s the thesis) and growth and development on the other (that’s the antithesis). Strong very clearly admits that the Rothschild combination, including the Rockefellers and most world capitalists, aim to control the environment and development movement as the synthesis (of the thesis and anti-thesis in the Hegelian dialectic). Power will converge into their hands through the (1992) Rio Conference. The synthesis, the head of the power, merges into the hands of the House of Rothschild.
Another speaker at the Fourth World Conference was David Rockefeller, world energy capitalist and banker. He was named “Mr. Growth and Development” at the meeting. His counterpart, William Ruckelshaus, organizer of the EPA and creator of its laws under Presidents Ford and Reagan, was dubbed “Mr. Environment.”
“Mr. Environment,” Ruckelshaus, is the CEO and Chairman of the Board for BFI, Browning-Ferris Industries, one of the largest private environment companies in the world. The hypocrisy is that Ruckelshaus as EPA chief, made the very laws by which his waste company, BFI, is becoming rich. Hypocrisy number two is that Ruckelshaus and Maurice Strong were key investors in American Water Development, a company which tried to circumvent Colorado water laws and gain control of one of the largest underground reservoirs of water in the world…..
I did a survey of the people down in the San Luis Valley. And I asked what will happen when Maurice Strong and William Ruckelshaus and others will pull 200,000 acre feet of water/year out of the San Luis Valley? It was unanimous that their land will turn into a wasteland, will turn into a desert. So here we have people at an environment congress that are waltzing 200 miles south that want to suck the aquifers dry and turn it into a desert. The hypocrisy is so deep.
What kind of madness are these World Order Caesars afflicted with? They hope to run the lives of people for generations to come. They are the same crowd who created a Hitler, arranged the assassination of Lincoln and Kennedy, and have indicated elsewhere that they want to drastically reduce the population of the world to make environment and development more “sustainable.”
In subsequent interviews, Hunt clarified several of these points:
1) Strong’s comment that Baron Edmond de Rothschild is the synthesis of the world environmental movements and world economic system means Rothschild controls both systems.
2) The idea of a contrived, controlled conflict between a thesis and its antithesis yielding a predetermined synthesis is called the Hegelian dialectic and it is the means by which ruling elites (and “powers and principalities”?) have controlled the masses for many generations.
3) The “Plan” is to crash the world economic system in 2012 so that the single remaining (all-powerful) bank will be the Rothschild-controlled World Conservation Bank.
4) In the earth-religion cult established under the planned totalitarian, feudalistic, satanic World Order, everyone would have to worship “Big Brother,” now in the guise of Gaia, or “Big Sister.”
5) The goal of the World Order is to “capture the mind” because “this is a mind game.” (Hence, the spiritual Disney Land of religions in Crestone/Baca?).
6) Under the Whistle Blower Act, Hunt is personally suing Maurice Strong for illegally absconding with $8 million from the sale of AWDI.
K. Maurice Strong’s (Occult) Religions Behind the United Nations’ Intended “Global Transformation.” Since the global power elite seems to be intent upon bringing in a “one world religion” with their “new world order,’ it might be a good idea to investigate and begin to understand the religious orientation of these ruling elite personages. In addition to his commitment to the New Age religion, Strong is a said to be a devout Baha’i and a Mason. The Baha’i faith embraces a humanistic philosophy and tries to unify all faiths, prophets and the entire human race. According to “Contender Ministries:”
The goal of the Baha’i faith and its leadership is for the world to become a single superstate with Baha’i as its religion. It’s no wonder Baha’i is promoted vigorously by the U.N. and plays a major part in all United Nations spiritual events.
In “The Baha’i Faith and Wicca- a comparison of Relevance in two emerging religions,” Lil Abdo outlines the history of the Baha’i faith:
Baha’i was founded in Persia (Iran, today) in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The first of its key figures was Siyyid Ali-Muhammad (1819 – 1850) titled ‘The Bab’ (The Gate). The teachings of the Bab, were seeped in traditional Islamic magic, His use of talismans and sigils, often in the shape of pentagrams, were the same as those Arab philosophers and occultists expounded. The Bab proclaimed himself to be the Promised One of Islam, the Qa’im, and said that his Mission was to alert people to the imminent advent of another Prophet, “Him Whom God shall make manifest”. This was Mirza Husayn-Ali (1817 – 1892) titled Baha’u’llah (The Glory of God) the Prophet-Founder of the Baha’i Faith who revealed some fifteen thousand Writings (referred to as Tablets) which include the revelation of the foundation principles of a “new world order of society founded on the unity of mankind, equality and justice.”
In addition to claiming most-favored prophet status, Baha’u’llah also claimed to be the second coming of Christ and the spirit of truth recorded in John 14:16. He viewed himself as the fulfillment of the coming of Maitreya, the Buddha from the Buddhist scripture, the Krishna for the Hindus, and a fulfillment of “the Day of God” from the Muslim Qur’an. In fact, the Baha’is believe all of the world’s religions have pointed to the coming of Baha’u’llah, and that during his era, a promised reign of peace will be established.
Conservative Christians, of course, claim that Baha’i is just one of many the world’s false religions. From ‘Contender Ministries:’
The Baha’i World Faith claims to be a religion of unique relevance to the modern world. Its emphasis upon rationalism, human rights, international peace, education, equality of the sexes, and the eradication of all forms of prejudice gives the Baha’i Faith a very broad base of appeal. The Baha’i cry for one world religion appeals to the ecumenical spirit of the age, especially in light of the continuing insistence that Baha’i are in perfect harmony with the Christian Faith.
Critics of Baha’i-ism, however, point out its connections, not only with Wicca, or modern witchcraft, but also with British imperialism, In Wikipedia: ‘Political Accusations Against the Baha’i Faith,’ Naser Emtesali points out connections between Bahaism and Freemasonry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_accusations_against_the_Baha’i_Faith).
The Freemasons were the ones who introduced the Bahai religion to America, and they did it through the Chicago Masonic Temple around the turn of the (20th) century. The Bahai religion is committed to a one-world government, a new world order, and a one-world religion. There was this Masonic Oriental Order of the Magi and they were the hardcore group within the Chicago Masonic Temple who started the Bahai religion in this country.
In “Wiccan Religion Started by a Freemason!” (http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/False%20Religions/Wicca%20&%20Witchcraft/wicca-freemasonry.htm) we learn that:
Gerald Brosseau Gardner (June 13, 1884 – February 12, 1964) was a Freemason, an English hereditary Witch and largely responsible for reviving Witchcraft in the modern Western world. Gardner claimed to trace his roots to a Witch named Grissell Gardner who had been burned at the stake in 1610 at Newburgh…
Gardnerian Wicca borrows very heavily from Freemasonry, Tantric Hinduism and a touch of ceremonial magick. Gardnerian covens are always headed by a High Priestess and have three degrees of initiation closely paralleling the Masonic degrees. Worship is centered on The Goddess and The Horned God. Eight seasonal Sabbats are observed, and the Wiccan Rede is the guiding principle.
Former 32 Mason William J. Schnoebelen, explains the religious underpinnings of Freemasonry in “Freemasonry: The Witchcraft Connection:”
The nature and character of the (Masonic) Lodge’s deepest theological underpinnings are rooted in Witchcraft and Paganism. Now that may be an astonishing assertion to some, especially to most Masons. However, it is very easily proven. Few people, within the Craft of Masonry or otherwise, perceive that just because a Bible lies open on the altar and Bible verses and characters play an important part in the ritual of the Lodge, that this does not prevent the Lodge from being of the nature of the occult or Witchcraft.
Witchcraft, in its religious sense, involves the veneration of the forces of reproduction—both in plant, animal and human life. Thus, human and animal sexuality are revered, the cycle of the seasons celebrated; and rituals do frequently involve the use of ritual tools which symbolize the human reproductive organs (wands, daggers, goblets, cauldrons, etc.) Many Witchcraft groups even have ritual sex, believing that this is an important way to encounter the gods.
The term “mystery religion” means that it is a religion in which elements are kept hidden from the “profane” (non-members). You can only learn these elements by going through a formal initiation in which you are ceremonially set apart from the masses and sworn formally to secrecy. Only then are you entrusted with the group’s secrets, and then in degrees. In other words, there are things a “third-grade” or “third-degree” Witch is allowed to know that a first-degree Witch is not.
A secondary element in Witchcraft is the belief in magic.… Finally, we need to define Paganism. This is basically a belief in the forces of nature as being sacred. Pagans are usually pantheists, in that they believe that a kind of god-force is in everything—trees, animals, rocks, etc. Essentially, a Pagan believes most everything the Witch believes, but is kind of a layperson, whereas a Witch is more of a Priestess or Shaman. The typical Pagan may not have access to some of the deeper “mysteries” of Witchcraft which are not available to the un-initiated.
With these definitions in mind, we can begin to examine the similarities between the Masonic theology and ritual and the workings of a Witchcraft group. One point, however, must be clarified. Modern Wicca is just that—modern. Although it claims mythic descent to groups back in the Stone Age, it is actually a comparatively modern religion. As it is currently constituted, Wicca is barely a century old.
This is not to say that it doesn’t draw on elements from the ancient mystery cults. To be certain, it does—to a high degree. However, it is a difficult task to ascertain whether contemporary Wicca so strongly resembles Freemasonry because two of its principle architects (Aleister Crowley and Gerald B. Gardner) were Masons; or whether that similarity is a derivation of more ancient practices.
If Masonic rituals were engrafted into Witchcraft in the late 19th and early 20th century, and if that melding was so seamless and effortless—even to the point that in some cases, the Wiccan rites were less bizarre and blasphemous than their Masonic counterpart, then what message does that send about Masonry? With that point in mind, let us look first at the ritual similarities between contemporary Wicca and Freemasonry:
A) Both are built on a foundational system of three degrees;
B) Both are secret societies; in that both membership rolls are secret, and secrets are kept from the general populace (to a greater or lesser degree) by both religions.
C) Both have highly ceremonial initiations to pass from one degree to another, including sworn oaths.
D) Both have ceremonial purgings and purifications of their ritual space before commencing any ritual work.
E) The precise similarities between the two groups are: Both groups…1. Cause candidates to strip off all secular clothing, 2. Cause the candidate to be divested of all metal, 3. Hoodwink (blindfold) the candidate and ceremonially tie ropes around him,. 4. Cause the candidate to stand in the Northeast corner of the “temple” in the first degree, 5. Challenge the candidate by piercing their naked chest with a sharp instrument (Witches use a sword, Masons, the point of a compass), 6. Challenge the candidate with secret passwords, 7. Lead the candidate blindfolded in a circumambulation (walking around) of the temple., 8. Require the candidate to swear solemn oaths of secrecy before being given custody of the secrets of the group. 9. Both have a ceremonial un-hoodwinking of the candidate, following the oath, before lighted candles which is intended to bring “illumination.” 10. Both convey to the new initiate the “working tools” pertinent to that degree, and each of their uses are taught to them. 11. In both, the tools have correspondences both in the ceremonial realm, and in similarities to human reproduction. 12. Both, in the higher degrees, take the initiate through a ritual death-and-rebirth experience, in which the initiate acts the part of a hero (heroine) of the Craft. 13. Both cause the candidate to endure (while being blindfolded) being picked up, spun around, carried around, being jostled or struck from person to person. This is supposed to produce an “altered state of consciousness.” 14. Both Wicca and Freemasonry are, by co-incidence or design, both referred to as “The Craft.”
Having given almost two dozen precise similarities between the ritual work of Witchcraft and the Lodge, it should not surprise us to see that there is also some doctrinal or philosophical resemblance between the two:
A. Both Witches and Masons revere the powers of human reproduction (albeit most Masons do so unknowingly),
B. The authorities of Freemasonry, most notably Albert Pike, 33° and Manly P. Hall, 33° (both occultists par excellence) write that the essential, underlying philosophy of Freemasonry is Kabbalism and Gnosticism. Kabbalism is a system of Jewish mysticism and magic and is the foundational element in modern Witchcraft. Virtually all of the great Witches and sorcerers of this century were Kabbalists. Gnosticism is an ancient, anti-Christian heresy best summarized by the statement: “One is saved by acquiring secret, unknown knowledge (Greek: gnosis).” Thus, all mystery religions, including Witchcraft and Masonry are, per force, Gnostic in character.
C. Both Witches and Freemasons seek salvation through “illumination” or receiving “The Light.” This is, in a way, a corollary to (B), but it is important, because of the centrality of this symbolism in both sects.
D. Both groups teach a kind of salvation by works, not grace. The occult doctrine of reincarnation is explicitly taught in Witchcraft and implicitly taught in the Lodge.
E. Finally, both groups deny the unique character and mission of the Lord Jesus Christ. Both deny the resurrection of Christ. Most people would have no trouble believing that Witches deny these beliefs, but in this, the Wicca are identical to the theology of the Lodge.
It can be readily shown that Freemasonry is rooted in the medieval occult societies of Europe, such as the Templars and the Rosicrucians. Indeed, many Masonic writers boast about these connections. Additional associations pop up with the dangerously subversive Illuminati Ordnen of Adam Weishaupt in the 18th century.
It is vital to understand that this past interchange between Masonry and these various occult groups did not stop in the 18th century. If anything, it has grown more prominent in the past century. There is something about the Lodge that has always attracted sorcerers. The historical list of occultists and Witches in the last century who were Freemasons reads like a Who’s Who of 20th century occultism.
In Freemasonry From A to Z (2009), Dr. John Coleman states: “But it is to the Princes of Masonry, those who have reached the 33rd degree, that the real face of Masonry becomes known.” Coleman relates that in 1889, “The Supreme Council Body of 23 Councils of Worldwide Masonry” gave the following instructions to Albert Pike, the Supreme Pontiff. These instructions, preserved in the British Museum, spell out that higher degree Masons (only) understand that the Masonic God is Lucifer:
To you Sovereign Inspectors General, we say this, that you may repeat to the brethren of 32nd, 31st and 30th Degrees…. The Masonic Religion should by all of us initiates of the high Degrees, be maintained in the purity of the Luciferian Doctrine…. The pure and true philosophic religion is the belief in Lucifer… the God of light and God of Good.
L. President John F. Kennedy’s Warming about Secret Societies
In a speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association on April 27, 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered this profound and prophetic message. It expresses, perhaps, the last genuine attempt on the part of an American president to encourage a genuinely free and open society. This message directly confronts the insidious and destructive influence of secret and semi-secret organizations such as the Freemasons and the Council on Foreign Relations (the American branch of Britain’s Royal Institute for International Affairs):
The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.
For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion; on subversion instead of elections; on intimidation instead of free choice; on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed not published. Its mistakes are buried not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced not praised. No expenditure is questioned. No rumor is printed. No secret is revealed.
No President should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding. And from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary. I am not asking your newspapers to support an administration. But I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. (applause) For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed. I could not only not stifle criticism among your readers, I welcome it. This administration intends to be candid about its errors. For as a wise man once said, an error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.
We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors and we expect you to point them out when we miss them. Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed. And no Republic can survive. That is why the Athenian law-maker Solon, decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment. –
These are powerful and prescient words. Kennedy was also fond of quoting Dante’s admonition that: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” In hindsight, it now seems that JFK might have been making desperate appeals for the American populace to wake up and protect themselves from the tyranny he foresaw. For, of course, if Solon’s law were to be enforced today, most people I know would be found guilty of the crime of “shrinking from controversy.” And if Dante’s more serious admonition is to be taken seriously, most Americans have earned reservations for themselves in the hottest places in hell.
Telling hard truths, of course, is always dangerous, for the powerful often prefer to shoot the messenger rather than listen to the message. Ten days before JFK was publically executed by the international criminal cabal (aka, the World Order or “secret government”), JFK publically revealed that:
The high office of President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American’s freedom, and before I leave office I must inform the citizen of his plight.
M. Summary of the Origin and Goals of the New World Order/One World Conspiracy
Some of ex-Mason Schnoebelen’s final points bear repeating because they are foundational to understanding the proposed New World Order’s intended New Age religion. These are:
1) The essential, underlying philosophy of Freemasonry is Kabbalism and Gnosticism.
2) Kabbalism is a system of Jewish mysticism and magic and is the foundational element in modern Witchcraft.
3) Gnosticism is an ancient, anti-Christian heresy best summarized by the statement: “One is saved by acquiring secret, unknown knowledge (Greek: gnosis).”
4) Thus, all mystery religions, including Witchcraft and Masonry are, per force, Gnostic in character.
Now we begin to gleen that even though Maurice Strong may be an extremely effective agent of the New World Order conspiracy, he is just one of many, many players and organizations that have been working to implement this Plan over many years. Coleman (2009) summarizes the character and goals of the Conspiracy as follows:
The motivating force, the reason for the One World Conspiracy such as we see in its visible elements, the Club of Rome, the Mont Pelerin Society, the Cini Foundation, the Bilderbergers, and the Trilateral Commission, the Royal Society for International Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aquarians, is the destruction of the Christian religion first, followed by other religions (particularly the Muslim religion) and an end to industrial growth, destruction of technology and a return to feudalism and the New Dark Ages, coupled with a huge reduction in population that their plans require, because the millions of “useless eaters” will no longer be needed in a post-industrial society.
Many historical records and documents reveal that the “Plan” is hundreds of years old, at least. This statement by British General Cornwallis indicates the “Plan” had been formulated prior to the conclusion of the American Revolution:
Jonathan Williams recorded in his Legions of Satan (1781) that General Cornwallis revealed to General Washington during the signing of the Article of Capitulation signed by Cornwallis at Yorktown that:
“A holy war will now begin on America, and when it is ended America will be supposedly the citadel of freedom, but her millions will unknowingly be loyal subjects to the Crown…. Your churches will be used to teach the Jew’s religion and in less than two hundred years the whole nation will be working for Divine World Government. That government that they believe to be divine will be the British Empire. All religions will be permeated with Judaism without even being noticed by the masses, and they will all be under the invisible all-seeing eye of the Grand Architect of Freemasonry.”
General Cornwallis to General Washington as recorded by Jonathan Williams, ‘Legions of Satan’, 1781
(from savethemales.ca – Judaized Christianity: Front for New World Order …www.henrymakow.com/nwo_introduced_under_masonic_g.html)
Henry Makow, Ph.D. summarizes the strategy and goals of the world’s power elite in “How the Rockefellers Re-Engineered Women:”
Feminism is an excellent example of how the Rockefeller mega cartel uses the awesome power of the mass media (i.e. propaganda) to control society….. A drastic paradigm shift is required to make sense of the world. The Rockefellers are part of the private world central banking cartel that also controls media, defense, pharmaceutical and other cartels. To protect their monopoly of credit and wealth, they are instituting a world police state (“world government”) using the bogus 9-11 attack and endless war as a pretext. Rockefeller told (film maker Aaron) Russo about this plan a year before 9-11.
The poet Charles Peguy said, “Everything begins in faith and ends in politics.” The banking cartel needs a philosophy to justify enchaining mankind. That philosophy is Satanism. The cartel controls the world through a network of occult societies linked to Freemasonry, Communism, the Vatican and organized Jewry (Bnai Brith, ADL, AJC, Zionism). The highest occult rank is known as the Illuminati.
Modern Western culture is Masonic. Based on Luciferianism, Freemasonry teaches that man and not God determines reality. (Naturally, they need to overrule natural and spiritual laws in order to assert their own control.) They have noticed that people are diffident malleable creatures who prefer to believe what they are told than trust their own reason or perception. Thus, for example, the media successfully promotes homosexual values that conflict with our natural instincts.
In the next sections (Parts II through X) of this series, we continue to investigate the main players in the “Plan,” the links between the various organizations involved, and the characteristics of the so-called “New World Religion.” We will see that it is a diabolical plan and that fulfillment would mean an end to democracy, human rights, the U.S. Constitution, and adherence to the Ten Commandments as the organizing principles for civil society. Implementation of the “Plan” would result in the engineered depopulation of over half of the human community and forced imposition of a feudalistic world governed by an “occult theocracy,” the only form of government that is more despotic than fascism or communism.
Abdo, L., 2009, “The Baha’i Faith and Wicca- a comparison of Relevance in two emerging religions,” (www.equinoxjournals.com/POM/article/viewArticle/6639 )
Abraham, L., with Saunders, F., 1994, The Greening: The Environmentalist’s Drive for Global Power, Double A Publications, Inc., Phoenix, 308 pp.
Bailey, A., 1955, Discipleship in the New Age, Lucis Press.
Bailey, R., 1997, International Man of Mystery: Who is Maurice Strong? The National Review.
“NASA Documents Reveal “Climate Change” Caused By Covert Weather Weapons”http://chemtrailsplanet.net/2013/11/05/nasa-documents-reveal-climate-change-caused-by-covert-weather-weapons/
Contender Ministries, “Ark of Hope: The Ark of the New Age Covenant.”http://www.contenderministries.org/articles/arkofhope.php
_____, “Baha’i http://www.contenderministries.org/bahai.php
Coleman, J., 2006a, A Conspirator’s Hierarchy: The Committee of 300, 4th Edition, Global Review Publications, Inc., Carson City, Nevada, 487 pp.
_____, 2006b, Tavistock Institute of Human Relations: Shaping the Moral, Spiritual, Cultural, Politcal and Econcomic Decline of the United States of America, World In Review Publishing, Carson City, Nevada, 246 pp.
_____, 2009, Freemasonry From A to Z,
Desborough, B., 1999, Stop Misleading the Children, Mr. Jennings,
Dewar, E., 1995, Cloak of Green: The Links Between Key Environmental Groups, Government, and Big Business, James Lorimer and Company Publishers, Toronto, 497.
DeWeese, T., 1996, 2012, The Most Dangerous Man in the World,
Emtesali, N. 2010, Freemasons and Bahaism, (http://bahaism.blogspot.com/2010/01/freemansons-bahaism.html):
Fox News, 2012, Exclusive: Godfather of Global Green Thinking Steps Out of Shadows at Rio + 20 Conference,” http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/06/20/godfather-global-green-thinking-steps-out-shadows-at-rio-20/
_____, 2012, “EXCLUSIVE: Rio + 20 conference: Negotiators producing a mammoth, messy and expensive grab bag of regulations and demands.” http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/06/01/rio-20-conference-negotiators-producing-mammoth-messy-and-expensive-grab-bag/
Hurtak, J. J., 1987, The Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch, 3rd Edition, The Academy For Future Science Publisher, 612 pp.
Huxwell, The Earth Charter and the Ark of Hope: Eco-Socialism as a Tool for Enslavement” (http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=ArkOfHope)
“Informer,” 1996, THE UNITED STATES IS STILL A BRITISH COLONY
EXTORTING TAXES FOR THE CROWN! A DOCUMENTARY REVIEW OF CHARTERS AND TREATIES
Jasper, W., 2002, “The New World Religion: Teaching God’s Children to Worship ‘Divine Nature’” (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/809275/posts)
Karlstrom, E. T., 2008, “Crestone/Baca Group Dynamics,”http://www.waterwatchalliance.us/ch19.html).
______, 2008m Green Global Dictatorship: Regional Governance, UN Agenda 21, Sustainable Development, and the Wildlands Project” ) http://waterwatchalliance.us/ch11.html:
_____, 2008, webmaster of www.waterwatchalliance.us
_____, 2010, webmaster of www.naturalclimatechange.us
_____, 2011, “Man-Made Climate Change in the Skies”https://naturalclimatechange.org/added%204-13/man-made%20climate%20in%20the%20skies5-white-test.htm
Kimball, L., 2011, Rise of the Modern Moloch state… global spiritual communism, (http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=196786)
Kios, B., In “Local Agenda 21: The U.N. Plan for Your Community (http://www.crossroad.to/text/articles/la21_198.html),
Lamb, H., 2006, “Agenda 21- What is it? How Did it Get Here?” (http://www.freedomadvocates.org/articles/sustainable_development/agenda_21_
Morrison, J., 2006, Why Are Americans Ignorant of ‘Agenda 21?’” (http://www.newswithviews.com/Morrison/joyce36.htm).
O’Brien, C., 2007, Secrets of the Mysterious Valley, Adventures Unlimited Press, 441 pp.
Owen, S. W., 2013, The Flame: Searching For Gold In Crestone, http://seanwilderowen.com/work-2/the-flame/
Project for the Exposure of Hidden Institutions (PEHI), (https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?4728-The-people-with- the-endless-bios-An-introduction-to-the-world-we-live-in).
Rae, A., 2011, Shambala of the Rockies: The Mythos and Power of Crestone, Four Corners Magazine, Sedona, AZ, http://www.crestonecolorado.com/shambala.html
Rockefellers Brothers Fund, 1977, The Unfinished agenda: the citizen’s policy guide to environmental issues : a task force report sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Ross, W. D., 2000, Catch a Falling Star,www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/staticwritings/fallingstar.htm
United Nations, 1976, The Vancouver Declaration on Human Settlements and the Vancouver Action Plan (Habitat I) http://www.unhabitat.org/downloads/docs/3566_45413_HS-733.pdf
Reilly, W.K., Ed., 1973, The Use of Land: A Citizen’s Policy Guide to Urban Growth, Stanford University Press,
Schnoebelen, W.J., Freemasonry: The Witchcraft Connection, (www.jesus-is-lord.com/masonry.htm)
Solzhenitsyn, A., 1973, The Gulag Archipeligo, Harper and Row, New York, 660 pp.
Strong, ICLEI, IRC , UNEP, 1996, The Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide: An Introduction to Sustainable Development Planning, printed in Canada, 214 pp.
Spingola, D., 2008, “U.S. Military Targets Southeast Colorado (Part 3 of 3) (http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/spingola/080525)
Unspecificied authors, “Wiccan Religion Started by a Freemason!” (http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/False%20Religions/Wicca%20&%20Witchcraft/wicca-freemasonry.htm) we
Utube, “Government Documents Link Global Warming to Advanced Military Climate Modification” Technology http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhRk2Wp92TY
Mark S. Watson, “Occult Theocracy!” www.jesus-is-savior.com/…/occult_theocracy.htm
Williams, J., 1781, Legions of Satan.
The Green Agenda: Agenda 21- The UN Blueprint for the 21st Century,” (http://windfarms.wordpress.com/2008/01/17/agenda-21—the-un-blueprint-for-the-21st-century/1st-century/), http://green-agenda.com/agenda21.html
Wood, D., 1990, The Wizard of the Baca Grande, WEST Magazine. |
Promoting gender equality is key to building prosperous households, communities, businesses and cooperatives.
Evidence suggests that gender inequities—the differences in access and opportunities among women, men, girls, boys and gender diverse individuals—significantly impact development outcomes. NCBA CLUSA recognizes the critical importance of addressing gender dynamics in its work to empower individuals and families to achieve resilience and economic security and exercise a better, longer and healthier quality of life.
NCBA CLUSA’s development approach emphasizes that its “clients are the decision makers when it comes to solving their communities’ most pressing development needs. This community-led approach highlights the importance of collective action, shared values and a focus on process. NCBA CLUSA applies this approach to its work in gender integration in building resilience, promoting economic growth, and supporting cooperative development. As members of households, communities and programs, women’s and gender diverse individuals’ agency and decision-making ability are a priority in all aspects of NCBA CLUSA’s work.
Beyond supporting gender integration to challenge inequitable gender and social norms and practices among women, men and gender diverse individuals in its programming, NCBA CLUSA also recognizes the importance of addressing gender as part of its wider efforts in diversity, equity and inclusion.
Building Resilient Communities
Our resilience work addresses systems and institutions and seeks to build the capacity of households and communities to respond and adapt to shocks such as natural disasters, income loss, illness and other expected stresses. It ensures that women and gender diverse individuals are not only part of the conversation, but that they are empowered to make decisions to participate meaningfully in preparation, response and adaptation to unexpected challenges within their households or communities. Projects in this portfolio focus on gender integration in the areas of governance, food security and nutrition, rural livelihoods, climate change adaptation, and natural resources management. Gender transformative approaches under this practice area may include strengthening women’s property rights, male engagement, addressing household decision-making through social behavior change communication, and strengthening women’s social capital through their groups and networks.
Creating Economic Opportunities
This practice area addresses gaps and barriers for women, men and gender diverse individuals throughout the entire market system, including gendered division of labor, income generation, access to financial services, access to technology or inputs, and market linkages. To support economic security and help create sustainable business models, it promotes women’s entrepreneurship and women-led economic initiatives by building capacity, strengthening business development services, and linking communities to resources. Relevant research in this practice area may include gendered value chain analysis or gendered market analysis to better understand existing gender roles and inequities and risks of gender-based violence for programs to address. Gender transformative approaches may include promoting women’s economic security by addressing gender and social norms through social behavior change communication alongside building the capacity of women farmers to start savings groups or access financial services, improving agricultural production, and reducing time poverty through better use of technology or improved farm management, value-addition processing, strengthening business relationships, leveraging private sector resources, and advocating for more equitable policies.
Strengthening Cooperatives and Producer Groups
As the country’s oldest and largest cooperative development organization and trade association representing cooperatives across all sectors, NCBA CLUSA is a leader in supporting cooperatives and producer organizations around the world. This work includes advancing women’s and gender diverse individuals’ participation in membership and governance bodies within cooperatives and producer organizations. Women’s participation and leadership in cooperatives allows them to enter the formal economy, gain economic independence, increase their self-confidence, and develop their capacities. NCBA CLUSA developed a Women’s Inclusion, Empowerment and Leadership in Cooperatives (WIELCOOP) blended learning training of trainers (TOT) guide. This TOT guide is used to train its own staff, facilitators and cooperative leaders so that they can in turn train other leaders, members and stakeholders on cooperatives and gender equity and empowerment. Overall, NCBA CLUSA’s work in this area focuses on reducing barriers to women’s participation in cooperative membership and leadership, as well as the capacity development of cooperative members, their families and other key stakeholders. It includes work in numerous areas: legal and regulatory framework reform; updating cooperatives’ bylaws; improving cooperatives’ governance and management practices; financial literacy and inclusion; and supporting development of new business lines and services that equitably serve members’ families. |
About this product+
NDZ Springfield Echelon Magazine Plate with Plus 6 Capacity Extension, Aspis Cut
Fits Gun Model: Springfield Armory Echelon with 17 round Magazine.
Does Not Fit: Echelon with 10 round Magazine.
NDZ Performance is proud to introduce a lineup of products for the Springfield Armory Echelon, including a brand new Magazine Plate with up to a Plus 6 Capacity Extension. Add 6 additional rounds to a 17 round Echelon magazine (23 total rounds!) with our capacity extension magazine plate; this requires the removal of the magazine spring plate. Just like you would expect from NDZ Performance our magazine plates are made in the USA from durable aluminum and anodized in a range of vivid colors. These magazine plates also feature our new Aspis design cut to add style to your firearm. Browse our selection of Echelon products and see how much adding a customized part from NDZ Performance to your firearm will improve your shooting experience today!
- Adds 6 rounds to a 17 round Echelon magazine and increase your magazine capacity to 23 rounds.
- Featuring our Apsis design pattern cut into the plate.
- Made from durable aluminum with an anodized finish in a variety of different colors.
- All NDZ products come with a lifetime warranty against manufactured defects.
- Proudly Made in the USA.
Note: These plates alter the capacity of the magazine, increasing the amount of bullets it holds by six (+6). This product requires the magazine spring plate be removed in order to expand the capacity of the magazine by 6 rounds. If the magazine spring plate is not removed only 5 additonal rounds can be added to the magazine.
Warning: Adding more than 6 additional rounds into your magazine may damage the spring and cause failures to feed.
INSTALLATION WARNING: Magazine Floor Base Plates & Extension Devices are secured by Spring Tension & can cause serious injury if improperly handled. NDZ Performance recommends the use of Safety Glasses when removing or installing this product & if instructions are needed please see one of our installation videos.
Note: NDZ always recommends any part be installed by a qualified and trained gunsmith. NDZ promotes the use of safety practices and gear when working on any firearm. |
Adolescents and young adults are highly social creatures who pay close attention to their peers and use them as reference points for their own style and behavior.
As a result, social media can play an outsized role in the relationship between teenagers and drug and alcohol abuse, which may develop into a substance use disorder when left unchecked.
While excessive social media use has been strongly linked with increases in serious mental health problems, the relationship between social media consumption and substance abuse is less clear. Here’s what we know.
Social Media Facts & Figures
Young people in America today have never lived in a world without the internet and the widespread adoption of social media platforms ranging from Facebook to Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and many others.
According to figures provided by Pew Research, in 2022:
- 97% of teens reported using the internet daily
- 72% of U.S. teens reported access to a smartphone, a computer and a gaming console at home
- 52% of 15- to 17-year-olds reported that they use the internet “almost constantly”
- 36% of 13- to 14-year-olds reported the same perception
- 55% of teens say that spend the right amount of time on social media, compared to 36% who say they spend too much time on social media
- the most popular social media sites for American teens were YouTube (95% use), TikTok (67%), Instagram (62%), Snapchat (59%), Facebook (32%), Twitter (23%), Twitch (20%), WhatsApp (17%), and Reddit (14%)
Social Media & Teen Drug Use
Celebrity, corporate, and peer influence, all transmitted through social media, may plant suggestions or make certain teens anxious about missing out on new experiences like partying and getting high (FOMO).
After all, American teens are consumers of social media, are early adopters when it comes to new technology and behavior, and are highly susceptible to peer pressure.
This could, potentially, lead to increased alcohol and drug use among impressionable teens who consume social media.
What’s The Evidence?
There is some limited evidence to support this concept.
A 2011 study by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University demonstrated that, among the 2,000 studied teens, those who used social media heavily used more tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana than those who didn’t, especially if they had seen pictures of teens using or passed out from alcohol or drugs.
In fact, these teens were:
- 5x more likely to buy cigarettes
- 3x more likely to drink
- 2x more likely to use cannabis
However, in the years since this study the national picture of teen substance use has actually changed for the better.
Millennial & Gen-Z Substance Abuse Trends
Public health statistics from the past two decades (coinciding with the rise of social media) reveal that underage alcohol use among those 17-12 years of age has declined by around 60%.
Teen smoking, also declining for decades, also experienced its fastest ever rate of contraction during this time, electronic cigarettes/vaping notwithstanding.
Likewise, cannabis use among teens has remained relatively steady, while overall illicit drug use appears to have declined also, particularly following the covid-19 pandemic.
Nevertheless, overdose deaths among those 15-24 years of age have increased sharply since the turn of the millennium, reflecting the increased potency of drugs like methamphetamine and fentanyl currently circulating among Americans of all ages.
The Impact Of Social Media On Teen Health
Using social networking sites does not appear to automatically or universally encourage teen alcohol or drug use.
In fact, the use of social media may even cause many young people to reject substance use due to the transmission of positive messaging or association with drug-free peers and role models.
Nevertheless, the influence of social media is not necessarily positive.
Worse Mental Health
Strong evidence even suggests that excessive social media users tend to also develop lower self-esteem, life satisfaction, and mental stability, with increased suicidal thoughts or activity.
Social media use can, in many cases, lead to social comparisons between teens and glamorous influences or their peers constantly showing their best sides.
This constant doubt can chip away at a teen’s happiness and self-image, getting in the way of positive social interactions and generating profound loneliness and dissatisfaction during a vulnerable and formative period.
It remains to be seen if these negative patterns may, in the future, be associated with changes in the use of alcohol and drugs by these generations in the same way that teen suicides have increased substantially since the year 2000.
Getting Help For Your At-Risk Teen
Alcohol and drug addiction can impact anyone, no matter their age or the hashtags they post. And if your teen or some other loved one in your life is struggling with substance abuse, professional treatment can help.
At Northeast Addictions Treatment Center, we provide leading teen and adult outpatient treatment services for all forms of substance abuse including alcohol, prescription drugs, and illicit substances.
We also offer dual diagnosis treatment options for co-occurring mental health disorders like anxiety, depression, manic-depressive disorder, ADHD, and others.
To learn more about your teen’s options for recovery, please reach out to our team today.
- What Does The Fire Emoji Mean?
- The Decriminalization Of Drugs | Here Are The Pros & Cons
- The Effects Of Meth On Children In Massachusetts
- American Academy of Pediatrics – Digital Media and Risks for Adolescent Substance Abuse and Problematic Gambling
- Journal of Adolescent Health – Social Media and Substance Use: What Should We Be Recommending to Teens and Their Parents?
- National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics (NCDAS) – Teenage Drug Use Statistics : Data & Trends on Abuse
- Pew Research Center – Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022 |
- Addiction Statistics
- Treatment Questions
- Choosing a Rehab
- Program Types
- Getting Started
Massachusetts towns and cities are focusing on the problems caused by drugs and how to solve that problem. The result is a rich network of evidence-based treatment in the area, including outpatient programs.
Not having the time isn’t a reason to avoid getting treatment for addiction—because time-consuming live-in programs (while effective) aren’t your only option. Outpatient treatment programs help you cross the barrier to treatment by offering flexible treatment on your terms.
While attending outpatient in MA, you should expect your care to take place during scheduled sessions while you keep living at home. The frequency and length of treatment sessions depends on your needs and history.
The most common outpatient programs include:
- Partial hospitalization programs
- 12 Steps programs
- Standard outpatient programs with up to 4 phases of care
You might be a candidate for an outpatient treatment program in MA if you:
- Live with a substance use disorder
- Struggle to stop using drugs or alcohol
- Have trouble finding the time to attend inpatient rehab
- Have responsibilities to attend to at home, like work or childcare
Wondering if outpatient rehab could be right for you? Chances are that you have questions about how to find outpatient rehab, what to expect, and more.
Learn the lowdown on drugs, alcohol and outpatient rehab in MA:
Massachusetts Alcohol and Drug Addiction Statistics
Like most parts of New England and the Northeast, opioids are the leading threat in Massachusetts. The National Institute on Drug Abuse most recently reported MA drug statistics in 2018.
Massachusetts-Specific Drug Stats
In MA, health officials reported 2,214 drug overdoses in 2019. The year before, 88% of drug overdose deaths in Massachusetts involved opioids.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 alone, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health distributed 13,000 Narcan kits to reverse opioid overdose deaths in populations that are high-risk.
Massachusetts Treatment Facts
The Massachusetts Bureau of Substance Addiction Services last reported data on treatment admissions in 2018 for the previous year. Here’s what they found about people entering treatment in MA:
- 80,896 people entered addiction treatment
- There were 109,002 treatment admissions, including repeat admissions
- 47% of people in treatment reported injecting drugs within the last year
- Alcohol (41%) and heroin (37%) were the primary drugs in most treatment admissions
Massachusetts Alcohol and Drug Outpatient Treatment Questions
It’s natural to have questions about outpatient treatment before you decide it’s right for you. Asking questions (and getting answers) is a normal part of deciding to go to rehab.
The more you know, the better prepared you can be for treatment. Check out the answers to these frequently-asked questions in the area:
Where should I go to receive the best outpatient drug treatment in Massachusetts?
The best outpatient drug treatment in Massachusetts depends on you and your individual needs. That being said, you should go to an outpatient treatment center that:
- Customizes your care to meet your needs
- Provides evidence-based treatment
- Offers integrated care for co-occurring mental health disorders
- Guides you on aftercare
Those 4 important factors ensure that the treatment you’re getting is safe and effective. Northeast Addictions Treatment Center offers programs that meet all these requirements and more.
How long is outpatient addiction treatment in Massachusetts?
The length of outpatient treatment depends on your recovery progress and the level of care that you need. Your care team will work with you to choose the right treatment length for you, but in general, aim to stay in treatment for at least 3 months.
The shortest ideal length of treatment is 90 days, but you should attend treatment for as long as you can in most cases. In fact, many people keep attending outpatient rehab for months or years to maintain their recovery.
What should I look for in an outpatient rehab facility?
Look for a treatment facility that offers outpatient care in phases so you can adjust your care to meet your changing needs as you go.
The exact course of multi-phase treatment varies depending on the treatment center and your needs, but it usually includes an intensive phase, a transition or reintegration phase, and a maintenance phase. You might move back and forth between the phases more than once.
Is addiction treatment necessary for recovery?
Yes, addiction treatment is necessary for recovery! Outpatient treatment is an accessible form of care that can help you through the most vulnerable parts of recovery.
During treatment, you learn critical coping skills that can help you maintain long-term recovery. Without addiction treatment, your risk of relapse jumps by up to 50%!
How to Choose an Outpatient Rehab Center
If you’re sure that outpatient rehab is the next step for you, then it’s time to decide where you’ll begin your recovery. Choosing the right treatment center is highly individual and your decision may include factors like these:
Accredited facilities are held to a standard of care by an outside agency, which means you can be sure that the treatment center in question is keeping up on addiction treatment best practices.
Look for local addiction treatment that holds these accreditations:
- Joint Commission
- Massachusetts Bureau of Substance Addiction Services
The most reputable outpatient treatment centers use evidence-based treatment methods. That is, treatment methods that have scientific research backing their use. To know if a treatment center offers evidence-based treatment, look for programs that include:
- 12 Steps rehabilitation therapy
- Cognitive-behavioral therapy
- Dialectical behavior therapy
- Family behavior therapy
- Medication-assisted treatment
This isn’t an exhaustive list of evidence-based treatment for addiction, but it includes the most commonly used ones.
Customized Outpatient Programs
The best treatment centers in MA offer customized rehab programs. Instead of applying the same treatment to everyone with your diagnosis, your care team will craft a unique treatment plan that considers your history and your needs.
During your outpatient rehab intake, you’ll review your medical and mental health history with a clinician to help determine the best treatment plan for you.
Dual Diagnosis Treatment
It’s critical to treat your mental health as a whole with dual diagnosis treatment, including depression, anxiety, or other mental health problems.
Many people who live with substance use disorder also have another mental health disorder, even if they don’t know it. Some examples of mental health disorders that commonly co-occur with addiction include:
- Anxiety disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and social anxiety disorder (SAD)
- Depressive disorders, including major depressive disorder (MDD), premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), and bipolar disorders (bipolar disorder types 1 or 2)
- Psychotic disorders, including schizoaffective disorder and schizophrenia
Choose a treatment center that screens for dual diagnoses like these and provides treatment. Addressing your mental health along with your substance use problems is the best route to recovery.
Credentialed Treatment Professionals
Choose a treatment center that works with credentialed treatment professionals to provide the best possible addiction care. Look for an outpatient center that’s open about sharing the experience and licensing of their clinical care team. The credentialed professionals who provide your care may include:
- Behavioral health technicians
- Licensed Practical Nurses
- Social workers
Continuum of Care
Your substance use problem doesn’t exist in a bubble. Choose a treatment center that uses the continuum of care to inform the way they treat you.
The continuum of care is the full spectrum of areas where treatment can benefit you, including care in biological, psychological and social areas. It also includes what happens before and after addiction treatment, such as detox referrals or aftercare plans.
If you live with family, they can be a valuable resource in treatment… and it’s important to remember that they need support too. You and your family members may both feel like you have unmet needs, but you have no idea how to articulate or meet the needs.
That’s common in families with addiction. Outpatient family programs can meet those needs by:
- Empowering you to repair family relationships
- Giving your family tools to cope with your disorder
- Teaching important relationship skills
- Helping you understand how substance use affects your family
- Providing a neutral third party and a safe talking space
Anyone living with addiction who also lives with family should consider attending a family program as part of their outpatient regimen. Substance use disorder can be hard on families, and family programs help bring them back together with therapy and education.
Selection of Treatments and Therapies
For the best outcome, pick a treatment center that offers a wide variety of treatments and therapies. The average treatment plan includes several treatments that work together to provide synergy and cover every aspect of your disorder.
For instance, cognitive-behavioral therapy is effective on its own, but many people find it works even better with 12 Steps and medication-assisted treatment.
Your treatment center’s treatment roster should include dual diagnosis treatment for any mental health disorders that co-occur with addiction. That may include anxiety and mood disorders, as well as psychotic disorders and personality disorders.
Choosing an outpatient center with a big treatment roster means it’s easier to mix and match therapy types, so your clinical team is more likely to hit upon the perfect combination.
Types of Outpatient Programs in Massachusetts
Curious about your outpatient options? Believe it or not, all outpatient programs are not equal. The right program depends on your needs, your drug use history, your relapse history, and more.
You may have an idea already which program you want to enter, but don’t worry if you still don’t know. It’s your intake team’s job to help you decide.
You may enter multiple different programs at different times. For instance, some people start with intensive outpatient or partial hospitalization and “downgrade” to outpatient rehab when their condition stabilizes.
The main types of outpatient programs in MA include:
12 Steps Program
The 12 Steps program shares a foundation with the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous program that was introduced in the 1930s.
At first, 12 Steps programs were only for members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, the same treatment framework is used for all kinds of substance use disorder. Today, there are over 200 unique 12 Steps programs all over the world, all following the same framework and working toward a common goal of recovery.
The modern version of 12 Steps involves working toward reaching these goals:
- Admitting that you can’t control your substance use disorder
- Believing in a strength-giving higher power (if you’re not spiritual, this power doesn’t have to be a god or a deity of any kind)
- Examining and challenging your past behavior, typically with the help of a sponsor
- Living your life by a new moral code
- Helping others who live with the same struggles as you, including substance use disorder or a trauma history
These are the goalposts set by the American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology, but different 12 Steps groups may modify them based on group needs. The 12 “steps” are built around reaching these goals, but the actual steps are different from group to group. There are many ways to do 12 Steps and they’re all valid!
You can attend 12 Steps in any of these ways:
- As part of an outpatient rehab program
- As part of an intensive outpatient program
- As part of a partial hospitalization program
- Outside of treatment as aftercare
Outpatient Rehab Program
Outpatient rehab programs give you the flexibility you need to manage your care while living your life—but they don’t sacrifice the high-level addiction care you need.
A 4-phase outpatient rehab program starts you at Phase 1 with the most intensive program. As you progress through treatment, you’ll move through 4 phases of treatment. These phases gradually prepare you for adapting to a life in recovery.
Here’s what this type of outpatient rehab program may look like:
- Phase 1: This is the most intensive phase of treatment. During Phase 1, you attend the Partial Hospitalization Program 5 days a week, up to 6 hours a day.
- Phase 2: This is the first of two transitional phases. You’ll decrease your treatment sessions to 3 or 4 times weekly. At the same time, you’ll start managing responsibilities like job-seeking.
- Phase 3: During the next transitional phase, you’ll still attend treatment a couple times weekly while attending work or school (or tending other responsibilities).
- Phase 4: At this point, you’re fully transitioned to life in recovery. Your treatment consists of weekly group and individual therapy.
Partial Hospitalization Program
The Partial Hospitalization Program is the most intensive outpatient treatment option. You’ll attend treatment full-time during the week, returning home after sessions end for the day.
During treatment, you’ll receive intensive addiction care that may include:
- Educational sessions
- Therapy, including individual and group therapy
Most people who enter outpatient treatment should start with partial hospitalization. Spending more time in treatment maximizes the benefit that you get from it, and the long days in PHP help you make the most of your time there. Starting with intensive treatment builds a strong foundation for the rest of your recovery.
When you graduate from treatment, you should have an aftercare plan in place. That can be a program that you participate in or a personal lifestyle change that you commit to.
Either way, your aftercare serves these purposes:
- It helps you maintain your mental and physical health
- It helps you learn and practice coping skills for recovery
Your aftercare may include any of the following:
- Addiction coaching
- Continuing outpatient treatment
- Lifestyle changes
- Medication-assisted treatment
- Individual or group therapy
- Support groups
Aftercare is highly individual, so pick and choose the tools that work for you. If you’re unsure, then your clinical team will help you formulate a plan.
How to Use Your Insurance to Pay for Outpatient Treatment
If you have health insurance, then the chances are good that you can use your insurance to pay for outpatient treatment. That includes health insurance through:
- The Healthcare Marketplace
- Your employer
- Medicare or Medicaid
Substance use disorder is considered a preexisting disorder, and those are covered under healthcare plans that aren’t temporary (e.g. buying single-term insurance wouldn’t help you, but getting insurance at work would).
Some insurance companies that may cover addiction treatment include:
- CVS Health
- Blue Cross Blue Shield
To get the specifics about addiction treatment coverage under your plan, call the phone number for Member Services on the back of your Member ID card. The actual coverage varies depending on your group and BIN, so be prepared to have those ready if your card includes them.
Most Popular Questions in Massachusetts
If you still have questions about outpatient rehab, we have a few more answers for you! These are the most-asked questions about outpatient treatment in MA:
Who is a good candidate for outpatient treatment in Massachusetts?
Many people who meet the criteria for a substance use disorder are good candidates for outpatient treatment. That criteria includes:
- Taking a substance in larger amounts than intended
- Wanting to cut down or stop, but being unable to
- Spending increasing amounts of time getting or using substances
- Having cravings for the substance that can be unmanageable
- Not meeting your responsibilities at work, school or home because of substances
- Using substances even when it damages your relationships
- Giving up things you used to enjoy to use substances
- Using substances even when it’s dangerous to your health
- Needing larger amounts of the substance to get the same effect
- Getting withdrawal symptoms when you stop using substances
It takes 2 symptoms from the above list to meet the criteria for mild SUD. Four or 5 symptoms indicate moderate SUD, and 6 or more symptoms mean you have severe SUD.
If you have severe SUD, then outpatient treatment may not be the right choice for you (or maybe it is.) Some people with SUD need more structure than an outpatient can provide. You should talk to your doctor to know if outpatient is the right fit for you.
What should you do to prepare for outpatient treatment in MA?
You should prepare for outpatient treatment by detoxing. When outpatient treatment does not include detox, it’s still important to stop using drugs or alcohol before your treatment begins.
Using drugs while you’re going to treatment can derail and delay your recovery, and detox helps reduce that possibility. A medical detox program can help you detox safely. Talk to your care team at Northeast Addictions Treatment Center for a detox referral.
Why should you choose outpatient rehab over inpatient?
For some people, outpatient rehab offers the necessary flexibility to recover from substance use disorder while managing day-to-day life.
If you can’t take leave from work or leave your children behind to attend inpatient, outpatient rehab means that treatment is still an option. Entering outpatient rehab can be the difference between accepting a bad situation and changing your life.
Why Choose Northeast Addictions Treatment Center?
You should consider Northeast Addictions Treatment Center because we offer evidence-based treatment that follows the continuum of care.
Our accredited drug and alcohol rehab programs can transform your life, including day treatment and intensive outpatient treatment. From partial hospitalization to aftercare, we’ll help you navigate the transition back to everyday life as you move through 4 phases of tailored treatment.
It’s important to recover in an environment that makes you feel comfortable and safe. At Northeast Addictions Treatment Center, our integrated clinical team offers compassionate outpatient care in a family-like environment at our homelike Quincy, MA location.
Northeast Addition Editorial Team
©2024 Northeast Addition Center | All Rights Reserved
This page does not provide medical advice. |
On Sunday, May 26, 2019 an angel left this earth for heaven. Our wonderful son, Brady Michael Jensen, 16, passed away peacefully at his home in Provo Utah, from difficulties of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. \n\nBrady was born April 16, 2003, the third child of Nathan and Natalie Jensen. He came with big blue eyes, and a full head of hair looking like his Grandpa John Jensen. His two older siblings were so excited to hold him and play with him.\n\nFrom the very beginning, Brady was sweet, loving, and smart. He also had a very strong will and stubborn streak that could take you by surprise. He knew what he wanted and went for it. He would stand up for himself, and not let anyone push him to do something he didn't want to do. As a young child, Brady loved to be outside kicking and playing ball. He loved Legos, video games, sports, Star Wars, Nerf guns, and hanging out with friends. He also loved drawing and art which continued until it became too hard to hold the pencil.\n\nHe attended Timpanogos Elementary for kindergarten-when it was being rebuilt-so half the year he rode the bus to Lakeview Elementary. He then went to Westridge Elementary where his older brother, Zach, and sister, Sydney, attended. Brady thrived at Westridge because of the nurturing environment, great teachers and staff, and good friends. He had an easy going personality and made friends easily even though he could be shy and didn't like to draw attention to himself. He had a big group of handsome, kind, and athletic friends that included him, hung out with him, took care of him, and called him "Bray-Dawg". Everyone knew who he was, and usually saw him zipping past at top speed in his wheelchair. He did not like to go slow with anything. If it snowed, you could bet he was out doing cookies on the playground. While at Westridge, he worked hard to get good grades, and achieved the Quest for Excellence in 6th grade. \n\nBrady then went on to attend Dixon Middle School, and then Provo High School. He worked hard to get good grades and was a good student. This last year of high school, his sophomore year, he struggled to attend because of his health. The staff, teachers, and friends at Provo were so kind and understanding and worked with his schedule and ability. His counselor, Emily Jiminez, was especially thoughtful and took care of details for Brady.\n\nWhile at PHS, Brady attended Seminary where he had excellent teachers. He was a very active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He had a strong testimony of the Savior Jesus Christ. He had a light within that always shone no matter where he was, even when he didn't say a word. People wanted to be around him. He served in his priesthood quorums, with wonderful leaders and friends who always watched out for him. He was able to go on a Pioneer Trek with his stake in the summer of 2016. He had an amazing experience that strengthened his testimony, and he strengthened others around him. All the youth pulled and watched out for him the entire time. He didn't realize what an inspiration he was.\n\nBrady loved to laugh and tease, and was generally happy most of the time. His sense of humor was contagious, and he was especially good with puns and facial expressions. He could come up with a joke anytime and could get anyone to laugh. He had a fun way of being "sassy".\n\nHe absolutely loved getting hugs, getting his back or head scratched, and loved to soak up the sun. He was a joy to be around, and left us way too soon. He was loved so dearly, and will be missed by all.\n\nHe is survived by his loving parents, Nathan and Natalie Speelmon Jensen, his siblings Sydney, Tyler, and Ashlee. His grandparents Ben and Annette Speelmon (Terreton, Idaho), his best friend and cousin Jaxson Long (Pocatello, Idaho) and numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins on both sides. Preceded in death by his brother Zachary, cousins Jack, Konner, Jake, and Brian, and grandparents John and Beth Jensen (Springville, Utah).\n\nThere will be a viewing on May 31st from 6-8 p.m. at Nelson Mortuary (4780 N. University Ave. Provo). An additional viewing will be held Saturday, June 1st 9:30-10:45 a.m. at the Pioneer LDS church (376 N. 700 W. Provo). The funeral service will follow at 11 a.m. Graveside services will then be at the Provo Cemetery (610 S. State St. Provo).\n\nOur family would like to thank the office and staff of Utah Valley Pediatrics (Dr. Richard Later) for their excellent care over the years. Also Dr. Lynn Kerr, and Dr. Kristin Carroll at Shiners Hospital, and all the other medical professionals who have taken care of us. We would also like to thank Make-A-Wish Utah Chapter for sending Brady to Hawaii. |
Larry King Brown died peacefully in his sleep on Friday, February 28th, at\n12:07 pm, in Provo,Utah, due to complications from Alzheimer's Disease. He\nwas 81 years old.\n\nLarry was born on April 8th, 1938 in Salt Lake City, Utah to Emma Lavon\nand Burl Armon Brown. He was the fourth of six children. He was raised in\nUtah and California and graduated high school from BY High in Provo, Utah.\nHe met Alice Drue Berrett, the love of his life, at Ricks college and they were\nmarried in the Idaho Falls Temple on July 3rd, 1959.\n\nLarry received a Masters Degree in Public Health Administration from the\nUniversity of Alaska. He spent his entire career working for the Center for\nDisease Control (CDC). His career took him and his family to Anchorage,\nAlaska; Ft. Smith, Arkansas; Atlanta, Georgia; and Olympia, Washington.\nIn 1988 he was assigned to Mbabane, Swaziland where he worked with the\nSwazi government to develop and implement a program for childhood\ndisease prevention. At the end of that assignment, with his wife Drue, he was\ncalled to open the Kenya, Nairobi Mission, for the Church of Jesus Christ of\nLatter-Day Saints. He retired from CDC in 1991 at the age of 52 in order to\nfulfill that assignment. Africa became and remained the endearment of his\nlife. Even as his memory was failing in the midst of his Alzheimer's disease,\nhe always remembered Africa. He spent hours reading his mission\nexperiences, looking at pictures, and watching his beloved “Uganda Video.”\n\nIn 1997, he served as the director for the Independence, Missouri Visitors\nCenter. In 2004 he was called into the Seattle Temple Presidency. The temple\nbecame the center of his life and he served joyfully with Drue for over 20\nyears. His final calling in his mortal life was as the Olympia Stake Patriarch\nwhere he served for many years. His life was a supreme example of giving\neverything to the Lord.\n\nAt the age of 74, Larry fulfilled his lifelong dream of opening an old\nfashioned ice cream store in downtown Olympia called “Grandpa's.” It\nbrought him immeasurable joy to see families come in together and eat ice\ncream. He especially loved seeing his grandchildren behind the counter\nscooping ice cream to save money for college and missions. Just like\neverything he did in life, even his ice cream store had a spiritual purpose.\n\nHe was a devoted husband, father, and grandfather who loved gathering \nfamily together. He built homes with gathering in mind and loved spending\nfamily reunions at “Ospreyland,” a vacation home he built on Anderson\nIsland. He regularly took his grandchildren on boating adventures in the\nPuget Sound.\n\nFor health reasons, he and Drue moved to Provo, Utah in the summer of 2019\nwhere he loved the mountains and being closer to his “best cousin Bill.”\nHe is survived by his loving wife, Drue, and his seven children: Larry King\nBrown Jr. (Digger), Kathleen Woolf, Brenda Labit, Julie Backus, Angela\nPaynter, Alicia Neeley, and Randall Brown.\n\nFuneral services will be held on Saturday, March 7th at 1:00 p.m. with a viewing\nprior to the service at 12:00 p.m. The service will be held at The Church of \nJesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints Stake Center on 600 Overhulse Road, \nOlympia, Washington. |
Is there a way I can get
termopen() to not wrap lines produced by the underlying program? Today, the output from the underlying program always wraps at the window width. In Vim, there’s an option
'termwinsize' which allows the underlying PTY to have a larger width than the buffer window hosting it.
My use-case is a small plugin which I had written (which worked well in Vim). I would open a terminal which would invoke
make and once that that finished, I would invoke
to parse the terminal contents into an error list. This works well enough most times, but sometimes, the wrapping breaks up a file name printed by
make into multiple lines. This breaks the parsing specified by
I know I can use
jobstart instead of
termopen where I can specify the width. However, that would mean writing additional code to keep updating a buffer. Moreover, our
make provides some very informative color coded messages which would be lost with
I have tried a few async make plugins, but I really want to be able to monitor the build progress in a terminal buffer.
Thanks for any help! |
Whether you’re a passionate motorbike, an adventure-seeking roadie, or an experienced rider, seize the chance for pure biking enjoyment with our motorcycle tour in Rajasthan. Join us on this extraordinary bike tour in Rajasthan through the unforgettable rural landscapes of Rajasthan, rightfully recognized as the Land of the Kings.
This distinctive motorcycle tour in Rajasthan offers the opportunity to discover picturesque palaces and havelis, ancient monuments brimming with soul, sprawling deserts, a wealth of history, quaint villages, cultural heritage, and the experience of the renowned warm hospitality that Rajasthan is famous for. Unquestionably, you will explore the wonders of Rajasthan with our special bike tour in Rajasthan. Cruising through the Rajasthan, you can be sure that you will come across unique culture and centuries-old traditions. Furthermore, this Motorcycle tour in Rajasthan offers a perfect blend of adventure and heritage, from camel safaris in the desert to majestic palaces.
You will begin your motorcycle tour in Rajasthan in Mandawa known for its 18th-century haveli architecture. From here, you will enjoy the camel Safari in the deserts of Bikaner, witness the “Blue City” from Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, and explore the enchanting City of Lakes, Udaipur. Then finally, you will visit the sacred land of Pushkar with its Brahma Temple and conclude your bike tour in Rajasthan in the “Pink City” of Jaipur. Further, if you want to join the ride in the Himalayas of India, you can consider this ride.
Route for Motorcycle tour in Rajasthan
Delhi – Mandawa – Bikaner – Jaisalmer – Jodhpur – Udaipur – Pushkar – Jaipur – Agra – Delhi
- Ride in the majestic land of the Maharajas.
- Immerse yourself in the lavish architecture of Rajasthan, where vibrant colors, enticing fragrances, and warm hospitality await, all on the legendary Royal Enfield” Bullet”.
- Explore Mandawa’s traditional Havelis adorned with intricate decorations.
- Explore the mystical town of Pushkar, centered around a holy lake with the Brahma temple, the creator of Earth.
- Visit India’s revered sites, including city palaces, temples, and ancient forts.
- Experience the chaotic charm of Jaipur, the serene beauty of Udaipur, and the golden city of Jaisalmer.
- Capture the mesmerizing Taj Mahal at sunset.
- Experience a beautiful ride through the picturesque landscapes of Rajasthan.
- Visit palaces, havelis, and forts offering breathtaking views.
- Immerse yourself in the rich architectural and cultural experience of Rajasthan.
Best time for a motorcycle tour in Rajasthan
The best time for a motorcycle tour in Rajasthan largely depends on weather conditions and the overall experience you desire. The ideal periods to go on a motorbike tour in Rajasthan are broken down as follows:
Winter Season (October to March):
Optimal Time: The most popular and recommended time for a Rajasthan motorcycle tour.
Weather: Pleasant temperatures ranging from 10°C to 25°C, making it comfortable for riding.
Attractions: Enjoy exploring Rajasthan’s iconic landmarks like Jaipur, Udaipur, Jaisalmer, and the Thar Desert without extreme heat in this season.
Cultural Events: Witness colorful festivals like Diwali, Pushkar Fair, and Desert Festival during this season, adding cultural richness to your bike tour in Rajasthan.
Spring Season (February to March):
Ideal for riders who prefer slightly warmer temperatures and want to avoid peak tourist crowds.
Weather: Mild to warm temperatures, ranging from 15°C to 30°C, with clear skies ideal for long rides.
Landscape: Experience the rural beauty of Rajasthan at its peak when you see the colorful bloom of the desert flora.
Monsoon Season (July to September):
Ideal for thrill-seeking bikers looking for a unique experience between verdant surroundings and occasional showers.
Weather: Even if the temperature can be a little lower, between 25°C and 35°C, be ready for periodic rainfall and high humidity.
Caution: Be careful on slick roads and carefully consider your route to stay clear of flooded regions. When it rains a lot, some isolated paths could become impassable.
Summer Season (April to June):
Not recommended due to scorching temperatures exceeding 40°C in many parts of Rajasthan.
Weather: Extreme heat can make riding uncomfortable and pose health risks, especially during peak summer months.
Alternative Routes: If you are going during this period, try to ride in the early morning or late afternoon. Look for routes that have lots of shade and regular water stops.
Ultimately, the best time for a motorcycle tour in Rajasthan is during the winter season (October to March) when the weather is most favorable. Without having to deal with the pain of extremely high temperatures, you can completely involve yourself in the natural beauty and culture of this area. |
Assignment 1: LASA 2: Change Management (MAKE SURE TO COMPLETE ATTACHED TEMPLATE!!!)
For many companies, change is a constant thing. A company that can smoothly navigate organization change is one that is more nimble and better able to meet market demands for products. In this assignment, you will develop a change management plan that is similar to what a business today might use to implement change.
Assume you are the supervisor of a product development team that designs cell phone applications for your company’s newest cell phone. Unfortunately, this model has not been performing well in the market and your company has decided to discontinue production.
Your team is being asked to discontinue their current operations and move to the design and development of applications for a new smart phone. This will require new skills and experience that some of your team members do not possess. In addition, management has asked for a shortened timeline meaning your team will have to put in considerable overtime hours.
You are to develop a change management plan for leading your team through these changes, including reorganization. You will review your plan with your boss.
Research change management plans using your textbook, the Argosy University online library resources, and the Internet. Select at least two authoritative resources, one of which may be your text, to use in this assignment. Be sure to use real-world situations when presenting examples in your response.
Download and review the Change Management Plan template from the Doc Sharing area. Analyze the case information and fill in the template.
Write a detailed change management plan covering the following:
- Identify two reorganizational changes and their impact on the team.
- Offer suggestions and strategies for managing the change including:
- Two ways to communicate the reorganization plans with the team
- Two ways to gain buy-in from the team
- Two ways to deal with resistance from the team
- Two ways you will lead and motivate your team through the change
- Identify two specific ways you will inform your supervisor of plans and progress.
- Identify five action items required in order to implement the change.
- Identify seven potential risks along with a plan of the action to take if a risk occurs. Explain your solutions.
Give reasons and examples from your selected resources in support of your assertions.
Write a 5–6-page paper in Word format. Be sure to include your filled-in Change Management Plan template. Apply APA standards to citation of sources. Use the following file naming convention: LastnameFirstInitial_M5_A1.doc.
By Monday, November 2, 2015, deliver your assignment to the M5: Assignment 1 Dropbox.
|Assignment 1 Grading Criteria
|Identified two reorganizational changes and their impacts on the team. Justify your responses.
|Suggested two ways of how you can communicate the reorganization plans with the team. Include your justification.
|Suggested two ways to gain buy-in from your team. Include your justification.
|Suggested two ways to deal with resistance from the team. Include your justification.
|Suggested two ways you will lead and motivate your team through the change. Include your justification.
|Identified two ways you will communicate the plans and progress to your supervisor. Justify your decision.
|Identified five action items required in order to implement the change. Justify your response.
|Identified seven potential risks along with a plan if a risk occurs. Justify your solutions. |
As global macroeconomic conditions worsen and funding slowdown continues, Indian startups are cutting their spends on an integral part of tech businesses – cloud storage – by renegotiating contracts with service providers like AWS and Google Cloud, multiple startup founders told ET.
Many of these companies have slashed cloud expenses by 20%-30% while some growth stage startups such as ecommerce platforms Meesho and Dealshare have brought down their cloud expenses by 50%, under pressure to control their cash burn, they said.
This has led to the top three cloud service providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure – waging pricing wars to lure startups onto their platforms in the current downturn.
Over the past months, several startups have been approached by AWS rivals to switch over for lesser pricing, multiple founders who have been in talks with them confirmed.
In some instances, founders are using pricing quotes received from Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure to renegotiate discounted contracts with AWS, their primary cloud service provider, said one of the founders.
The Data Security Council of India has forecast that the cybersecurity ecosystem will expand up to a point where nearly one million professionals will be required by 2025. Additionally, the demand for cloud security skills is estimated to grow by 115% between 2020 and 2025, representing almost 20,000 job openings, Narayan added.
An extensive exercise in reskilling and/or upskilling the existing workforce, believe staffing experts, is one of the ways that telcos can future proof their work.
Indian mobile phone operators are expected to at least double their investments on network security with the 5G roll out expected to spark a surge in network vulnerabilities, which assume critical importance especially for enterprises.
However, it is already proving to be a challenge for telcos to have robust security teams.
Bharti Airtel, for example, has been preparing for 5G roll out by upskilling its professionals and offering them certification courses such as CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) and CCNP (Cisco Certified Network Professional). The courses are offered based on skill and eligibility level free of cost. |
Summary: A new study links caffeine consumption during pregnancy to changes in important brain pathways that help regulate behavior in children.
Source: University of Rochester
New research finds caffeine consumed during pregnancy can change important brain pathways that could lead to behavioral problems later in life. Researchers in the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) analyzed thousands of brain scans of nine and ten-year-olds, and revealed changes in the brain structure in children who were exposed to caffeine in utero.
“These are sort of small effects and it’s not causing horrendous psychiatric conditions, but it is causing minimal but noticeable behavioral issues that should make us consider long term effects of caffeine intake during pregnancy,” said John Foxe, Ph.D., director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, and principal investigator of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development or ABCD Study at the University of Rochester.
“I suppose the outcome of this study will be a recommendation that any caffeine during pregnancy is probably not such a good idea.”
Elevated behavioral issues, attention difficulties, and hyperactivity are all symptoms that researchers observed in these children. “What makes this unique is that we have a biological pathway that looks different when you consume caffeine through pregnancy,” said Zachary Christensen, a M.D/Ph.D. candidate in the Medical Science Training Program and first author on the paper published in the journal Neuropharmacology. “Previous studies have shown that children perform differently on IQ tests, or they have different psychopathology, but that could also be related to demographics, so it’s hard to parse that out until you have something like a biomarker. This gives us a place to start future research to try to learn exactly when the change is occurring in the brain.”
Investigators analyzed brain scans of more than 9,000 nine and ten-year-old participants in the ABCD study. They found clear changes in how the white matter tracks – which form connections between brain regions – were organized in children whose mothers reported they consumed caffeine during pregnancy.
URMC is one of 21-sites across the country collecting data for the ABCD study, the largest long-term study of brain development and child health. The study is funded by the National Institutes of Health. Ed Freedman, Ph.D., is the principal investigator of the ABCD study in Rochester and a co-author of the study.
“It is important to point out this is a retrospective study,” said Foxe. “We are relying on mothers to remember how much caffeine they took in while they were pregnant.”
Previous studies have found caffeine can have a negative effect on pregnancy. It is also known that a fetus does not have the enzyme necessary to breakdown caffeine when it crosses the placenta. This new study reveals that caffeine could also leave a lasting impact on neurodevelopment.
The researchers point out that it is unclear if the impact of the caffeine on the fetal brain varies from one trimester to the next, or when during gestation these structural changes occur.
“Current clinical guidelines already suggest limiting caffeine intake during pregnancy – no more than two normal cups of coffee a day,” Christensen said. “In the long term, we hope to develop better guidance for mothers, but in the meantime, they should ask their doctor as concerns arise.”
About this neurodevelopment research news
Source: University of Rochester
Contact: Kelsie Smith Hayduk – University of Rochester
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Closed access.
“Caffeine exposure in utero is associated with structural brain alterations and deleterious neurocognitive outcomes in 9–10 year old children” by John Foxe et al. Neuropharmacology
Caffeine exposure in utero is associated with structural brain alterations and deleterious neurocognitive outcomes in 9–10 year old children
Caffeine, a very widely used and potent neuromodulator, easily crosses the placental barrier, but relatively little is known about the long-term impact of gestational caffeine exposure (GCE) on neurodevelopment. Here, we leverage magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, collected from a very large sample of 9157 children, aged 9–10 years, as part of the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Developmentsm (ABCD ®) study, to investigate brain structural outcomes at 27 major fiber tracts as a function of GCE. Significant relationships between GCE and fractional anisotropy (FA) measures in the inferior fronto-occipito fasciculus and corticospinal tract of the left hemisphere (IFOF-LH; CST-LH) were detected via mixed effects binomial regression. We further investigated the interaction between these fiber tracts, GCE, cognitive measures (working memory, task efficiency), and psychopathology measures (externalization, internalization, somatization, and neurodevelopment). GCE was associated with poorer outcomes on all measures of psychopathology but had negligible effect on cognitive measures. Higher FA values in both fiber tracts were associated with decreased neurodevelopmental problems and improved performance on both cognitive tasks. We also identified a decreased association between FA in the CST-LH and task efficiency in the GCE group. These findings suggest that GCE can lead to future neurodevelopmental complications and that this occurs, in part, through alteration of the microstructure of critical fiber tracts such as the IFOF-LH and CST-LH. These data suggest that current guidelines regarding limiting caffeine intake during pregnancy may require some recalibration. |
Try checking the archives or using the search box below.
For only $20 (per annum, $10 concession) you can become a member of The New Bush Telegraph Incorporated. Membership to an incorporated association shows your support and gives you voting rights at annual general meetings, access to volunteer opportunities and special member events.
Keep up to date with all the news from The New Bush Telegraph and be notified of new articles when they are published. It’s the best way to stay in touch and never miss out on those important local issues. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Donate to the New Bush Telegraph
The New Bush Telegraph is a not-for-profit community initiative. Support us to grow and reach our goals by considering making a donation.
Click the Donate button below and enter the amount you would like to donate.
Submit an article
We welcome all contributions about local issues and events, poems, photos and any other item of interest to our local community. |
The Veil was Torn in Two
द्वारा New Christian Bible Study Staff
When Jesus died on the cross, there was an earthquake. Rocks were split. The centurion and his soldiers who had carried out the crucifixion orders were afraid.
In the heart of the temple, in the "holy of holies", in the very heart of Jerusalem, the sacred veil tore, from top to bottom.
The veil, "rent in twain"...
The veils in the tabernacle and later in the temple were important. They're described in great detail in Exodus and in 1 Kings. In Arcana Coelestia 2576, it says that, "Rational truths are a kind of veil or clothing to spiritual truths.... The veil represented the nearest and inmost appearances of rational good and truth....
And now, as Jesus dies on the cross, the veil tears. What does this mean?
Here's how Swedenborg describes the symbolism of this:
"...that once all appearances had been dispelled, the Lord entered into the Divine Itself, and at the same time He opened a means of access to the Divine Itself through His Human that had been made Divine." (Arcana Coelestia 2576)
Think about four watershed spiritual events:
1) The creation of the physical universe. (Current best guess: 13.8 billion years ago). Genesis 1:1-10
2) The beginning of life. (On earth, between 3.5 and 4.5 billion years ago.) Genesis 1:11-25
3) The beginning of spiritually conscious human beings. (Reasonable guess: 100,000 years ago). Genesis 1:26-31
4) The incarnation and resurrection of the Lord God Jesus Christ (2000 years ago).
God's love and wisdom have been flowing into the universe for a long time. Where you might expect entropy, instead we see a universe that seems to favor life and intelligence. Think what a fulfilling moment it must have been when God could tell that human minds were now responding to Him, after all that outpouring.
But the free response-ability has tragedy baked in, because we can also choose not to respond, and to go the opposite way.
As we humans grew more "sophisticated", God used new channels to reach us, notably prophets and spiritual leaders, and later the written word. And in those channels, from the earliest times, there are already prophecies that the Lord would one day come into the world in human form.
Why did He need to do that? He must have foreseen that people would need to have that human level of connection, in order for enough good and truth to exist for us to make the decisions that open us to salvation.
Let's go back to Swedenborg's description:
"... once all appearances had been dispelled the Lord entered into the Divine Itself..."
Throughout the Lord's life on earth, there was the appearance that he was a man, like us. He had a human body. He could be tired and hungry. He could be tempted (though unlike us, he always won). In his spiritual life, there were times when he felt keenly the appearance of his human separate from his Divine essence. At other times, that appearance thinned, and he felt his divinity more powerfully. As he grew up, and was baptized, and began his ministry, he must have been growing more and more fully aware of what was going on inside him -- the glorification of the human part of him. With the death of his body on the cross, the bodily human-ness was no longer in the way. That appearance was dispelled. A new connection was fully forged between the Divine and the human.
And then, there's the second part of Swedenborg's statement:
"at the same time He opened a means of access to the Divine Itself through His Human that had been made Divine."
The veil was torn. The old religion, which had placed ritual above real good, and where God was invisible, separated from human knowledge by a veil -- was torn. New light could reach people, through the new teachings of the Lord. We could respond to a God who, in His Divine Human, we now could understand and approach and love more deeply.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. |
NDA has partnered with VIOOH for a series of articles exploring OOH advertising and the role programmatic technologies will play in its development.
As part of this project, we spoke to industry leaders to hear their predictions for DOOH and programmatic OOH in 2021.
Next up is Benoit Dejean, Programmatic Media & Partnership Director at Croud.
What are the biggest opportunities, and challenges, for DOOH in 2021?
The biggest opportunity for digital out-of-home has been its continuous growth that we’ve seen in the market. DOOH is gradually taking on more and more of the market share vs the traditional OOH buy.
In 2020 the US DOOH ad spend accounted for 30% of the total US OOH ad spend, it is forecasted to be around 42% by 2023. Another opportunity that could also be seen as challenges for some advertisers is the way DOOH has evolved to be more data-driven.
This means the planning of DOOH must change to account for the increase of digital screens with the ability to connect with various APIs to make OOH more connected and personalised.
What are the biggest opportunities, and challenges, for programmatic in OOH in 2021?
We believe programmatic OOH is not getting enough traction, there have been so many developments being made, one of which is how OOH supply sources such VIOOH integrate natively with various omnichannel and OOH-specific DSPs which makes programmatic OOH widely available to not only the large advertisers but also smaller advertisers who want a piece of the OOH market share.
What programmatic OOH brings to the mix is a different approach, no longer looking at OOH as a standalone media buy driving awareness metrics but now a fully integrated part of the overall digital media mix using third-party tools to measure the effectiveness and the incrementality of the activity.
For me the biggest opportunity around why advertisers should invest in programmatic OOH is the ability to quickly adapt and make changes on the go, without having to sign another IO. We can dial in or out spend in specific locations or screens based on real-time data and not be committed to high minimum spend requirements.
How has COVID impacted your planning for the use of programmatic advertising in OOH in the next 6 months?
2020 has seen an overall decrease in Out of Home, in the UK a 52% decrease was reported in Q2 which was to be expected based on the reduction in movement throughout the UK. We had a few campaigns planned during that time that were understandably cancelled, however, but we took the opportunity to educate our clients on the benefits of programmatic OOH and how using data and OOH placements can really make a difference even during a national lockdown and we should look at OOH in a different way than we previously did.
Do you intend to decrease or increase investment in programmatic OOH in 2021?
We plan to increase our investment in 2021, at Croud we’ve invested in our programmatic OOH offering for our clients.
We have partnered with leading tech and measurement companies to ensure our clients see the value of programmatic OOH as part of their overall digital marketing mix.
What was your favourite programmatic OOH campaign this year?
One of my favourite digital out-of-home campaigns this year was the Pepsi MAX bus shelter activation.
It was just a brilliant use of creativity and making users at its core was a great execution.
If I think of one of the great programmatic OOH campaign activation, Uber used the TFL API connection to target digital screens near tube stations that were operating with severe delays, another great use of data that might not have been possible if not run programmatically. |
Providing Rockingham Vermont Condominium Roof Repair and Replacement Services to Condo Associations of all Sizes
Condo Roof Repair in Rockingham for Condos including shingle, metal, flat, membrane, TPO, Bitumen, and more!
Condominium Roof Repair for Rockingham Condo Complexes and Their Condominium Associations; what you as board members and residents need to know before repairing your damaged condominium roof or replacing it.
When it comes condo roof repair, there are many things to consider, and most have them rely on choosing the best commercial roofing contractor with condominium roof repair and replacement expertise in your area. Additionally, not all condo roofs are constructed in the same ways and from the same materials, finding the right condominium roofing company that also has experience in roof inspections and construction is also a must. With many different roofing materials available, and with a failing roof yourself, how do you know if the original material and construction were the right choices, and how do you know what your choice should be moving forward. Your commercial roofing company shouldn’t be just that, a roofing company, they need to be subject matter experts, and that’s exactly what you get at Penna Roofing when you engage our professional roofing experts for your Rockingham project!
What Makes a Condominium Roofing Company The Best Roofing Company for Your Condominium Roof Repair or Replacement?
For starters, you just can’t replace experience. You need to choose a roofing company with experience, but even more so than that, a roofing company that has at it’s core, craftsman, estimators and project managers that have experience. Ask for references, ask for credentials, ask for anything you need to make you feel comfortable that you have chosen the right roofing company for the job. Do they have experience in the roofing material needing repair? If you have a flat roof, are they qualified to perform the work on such a roofing structure? If you need a roof replacement, are they qualified to present you with the options available for your roof, or are they only experts in one type of roofing material, and as such only present the solution they provide and not the one you need? You need an agnostic commercial roofing contractor that will give you an unbiased opinion and set of options so you can choose the one that best suites you and your association needs.
Always Look for a Value Based Condominium Roofing Contractor You Can Trust
Penna Roofing is the leader in value-based roofing repair and replacement, including those projects for condominiums. But what does that mean? The most important thing to consider after you find a qualified roofing company for your condominium roof repair or replacement project, is to determine who offers the best value. Value does not equate to price, but value is the more important factor when choosing your commercial roofing contractor. There are quite a few components when assessing value among contractors, and sometimes they can be elusive, but most of them are critical to choosing a roofer for your job.
- Subject Matter Expertise
- Timing to Start and Finish Project
- Quality of Roofing Materials and Experience With
- Presentation of Project Materials and Bids
- Proper Liability Insurances, Licenses, and Documentation
- Itemized Bid Proposals (very important to ensure you get what you pay for)
- Cleanliness of Job Site on a Daily Basis (get references)
- Perform Background Checks on all Internal Employees
- Have no Outstanding Complaints with Your Local Building Department (info below for reference)
- Have the Necessary Construction Experience Needed to Address Roof Structure Needs & Recommendations
- Will Commit to Timetables and Meet Them (many companies drag out projects putting the buildings envelope at risk of negative effects)
- Does The Contract Have Conditions They Have to Meet as Well as You the Client?
In a nutshell the overall value you receive from a vendor is comprised of all of the things you need to ensure a proper roofing job not just for today, but for the future. In this case an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and if it seems too cheap to be true, it probably is. When you hire the right condominium roofing company that itself hires well qualified and credentialed roofing contractors and project managers, and they in turn recommend the proper repairs and associated materials needed, and they get installed properly, leading to all of the manufacturers warranties being enforceable, you are ensured you have a great repaired or finished roof you can count on for years to come. This is one job you don’t want t skimp on and hire the low cost provider. When shortcuts are taken, it has been proven you can reduce the lifespan of any roof by as much as 80% plus. In some cases using the wrong materials, or even worse, using the wrong installation processes, you can completely void the manufacturer’s warranty on materials, and be looking at a complete replacement in less than one year. You heard that right…If you install a cedar shake roof wrong, it can lead to complete deterioration in 6 months or less. The cost of replacing or repairing poor roofing work can be astronomical, and those repairs can come in short order. By hiring a value leader like Penna Roofing, you can mitigate premature deterioration, ensure enforceable warranties, giving you the security and comfort, you need to know your roof will last it’s expected lifespan, or someone else will be on the hook for its repair. Paying a fair price, for great value is definitely the way to go when choosing your condominium roofing contractor.
You can always call your local building department to see if any complaints have been filed in your town regarding any roofing contractor for violations, or general complaints.
Rockingham Building Department
Bellows Falls, VT 05101
Work with a Condominium Roofing Company That Understands the Needs of Your Condominium Association Board as Well as it’s Community Members
Understanding how Condominium Associations work is also critical to the process, ensure you have like-minded people engaged from the outset to assess roof damage, create a repair plan, and understand how that plan is impacted by reserve budgets not only today, but in the years to come. I many cases we can minimize long term roofing maintenance, repairs, and replacements by scheduling out planned and budgeted work so that your association can be prepared for most roofing repair and replacement expenses.
We also have resources to help with capital needs assessments for your association so the board can plan safely and comfortably. We can help with situation assessments, or comprehensive capital assessments provided for by some of the nation’s premier capital assessment experts. Why not engage Penna Roofing today and be prepared for the future!
We are fully licensed and bonded. We also have one of the best track records of any roofing company in Vermont.
Penna Roofing is not just a commercial roofing contractor specializing in condominium roof repair and replacement, we are general contractors with deep commercial experience. We can provide any and all of your general repair, updates, upgrades and assessment services when it comes to your condominium complexes structures and systems. Additionally, because we also perform residential contracting services for clients, we understand the fine balance behind commercial decision making taken by a business management group like your Condo Association Board, as well as understanding the intricacies of working with homeowners direct. That gives us the very specific experience you need to balance board and member ownership when it comes to expenses, work schedules, and the personal side of contracting disruption and workplace policies and procedures.
Commercial Roof Inspections from Penna Roofing, the Value and Quality Leader in Commercial Roofing and Roof Contracting Services in Vermont
Roof damage isn’t always visible and can be often overlooked, leaving your roof system to deteriorate over time. Penna Roofing commercial roof inspectors are trained and knowledgeable to examine critical areas of your roof to identify any potential damage or weak spots, as well as to address the extent and severity of any, and all damage to your roof, and make the necessary repair or replacement recommendations.
Your Commercial Roof Inspection Comes with a Report Consisting of the Following
- Photographs of critical areas of need
- Detailed written assessment of the roofs current condition and current and future needs
- Repair or replacement paths
- Repair estimates for insurance claims
- Sit down meeting to discuss the report and determine next steps
Common Commercial Roof Failures and Signs of Potential Issues with Commercial Membrane Roofs
Roof Membrane Punctures
Punctures or holes in the roof membrane material can occur for a variety of reasons, material penetration from tree limbs, penetration from worker error, poorly mounted or installed rooftop HVAC equipment, etc. These punctures can be repaired by fusing or welding new membrane material
Open seams can occur when the roof membrane deteriorates due to issues or age. These can also be fixed with welding or fusing and replacement of membrane material
Pooling or Ponding Water
When roof drains fail, rain water tends to pool or “pond” in areas of the roof and standing water on your roof can be a major issue and lead to accelerating roof deterioration. Having your drains inspected for blockage and having any blockage cleared is the first step
Blocked or Clogged Roof Drains
Blocked or clogged roof drains, including roof downspouts and gutters can cause issues with pooling or ponding water on the roofs surface that will lead to roof leakage, and accelerated roof material deterioration
Bridging walls on the roof are usually a sign that the roof is nearing its age out, and considerations for a roof replacement should be considered or discussed. It can also be from poor initial installation. This can be repaired if this is the case.
Fastener Failure and Backout
When the membrane fails and water penetrates the surface material the roof contracts and expands more than the tolerances allowed forcing the fasteners to “backout” and creating a situation where the roofing envelope is compromised. These fasteners must be replaced after a full inspection of the roofing sub base and membrane are inspected and repaired as necessary.
This is the most common commercial roof failure with membrane roofs and occurs when caulk ages. This can lead to serious roof issues if left unchecked. Annual roof inspections can help you determine when roof caulking needs to be repaired and replaced. This is also one of the easiest roof repairs to make as it entails removing the old caulk, cleaning the locations, and resealing with new caulking.
Blisters occur when air gets trapped under the membrane. This requires the removing of the affected area, alleviation of the blister, and the replacement of new membrane material that is fused or welded in place with manufacturers approved processes.
When it comes to other types of commercial roofing material repairs and replacement needs, we offer a full suite of services. Common failures on these roofs are:
- Failing shingles
- Fastener failure and backout
- Flashing failure
- Ice and water shield failure
- Poor roof venting
- Punctured surfaces
- Issues with roofing sub decking
Schedule an Appointment to Assess Your Condominium’s Roof and Understand What Your Roof Repair Entails in Terms of Repair Scope and Costs
Is your Condo Association faced with roof damage from a recent windstorm, hail, or just plain old years of exposure to the elements, or even worse, pure neglect? You should contact us to schedule an appointment with one of our condominium roof repair experts right away. Our team of trusted condominium roofing contractors will be happy to work with you! 603-288-1711 |
THE Namibia Wildlife Resorts (NWR) has announced an Independence special of a 60% discount on all its accommodation locations for the month of March.
The special is aimed at encouraging Namibians to explore the beauty of their own country by providing significant discounts on accommodation at all NWR locations, NWR spokesperson Nelson Ashipala said in a press release last week.
He said the programme addresses Namibians’ concerns about the high cost of recreational travel within the country.
“Starting 01 March, all lodges under NWR’s management will be discounted by 60%, making it easier for locals to experience the diverse landscapes and unique wildlife that Namibia has to offer,” Ashipala said.
He further said while the special is open to all travellers, NWR hopes to see a strong uptake from locals.
As part of the special offer, popular lodges such as Khorixas Camp in Damara Land will be available for as little as N$220 per night, inclusive of breakfast.
However, Ashipala clarified that seasonal camps such as the Miles along the coastline are not part of the discounted offer. |
Pre foreclosures are known as properties that have reached the final stages before they get repossessed or taken back by the lender or bank. The owner is still in complete control of the property or home, although the bank or lender will repossess the home if the owner doesn’t attempt to rectify the situation. Normally, if the owner makes things right with payment, the pre foreclosure will settle and things will go back to normal.
When buying real estate, there are several benefits to pre foreclosures. Although there are several ways that you can buy a home, pre foreclosure is one of the best. Even though it is one of the best ways to buy property, many people miss out simply because they aren’t familiar with pre foreclosures and all of the benefits that come with them.
The best thing about pre foreclosures is the prices that are associated with them. In most cases, the owner has no choice but the sell the house, and therefore will listen to just about any offer that he receives. Due to this very reason, you can find pre foreclosures for sale at nearly 50% off market value. This is an ideal time to purchase, especially if you are looking to save a lot of money.
Along with the great prices you can get with pre foreclosures, you’ll also have the luxury of dealing directly with the owner – no third parties involved. This is a great advantage, with buyers being in total control of pre foreclosure sales. In the event that the home owner decides to turn down your offer and cannot find another buyer, he will lose everything. Even if you offer the owner a small price, he will be able to make a little bit of money selling the home.
You can find pre foreclosures that up for sale pretty much the same way that you can find homes in which the bank already has control of. You can look in the local newspaper, on the Internet, or by calling the lender directly. There are several options that you have in terms of finding pre foreclosures, giving you plenty of options. Once you have found a pre foreclosure for sale, it’s up to you to seal the deal and get the home of your dreams at a very affordable price.
When you compare foreclosed properties with pre foreclosed properties, you’ll find that there is less competition involved with pre foreclosures. Pre foreclosed homes are a great purchase, as they will normally come at a very affordable price. Those of you who have been looking for a new home shouldn’t hesitate to check out pre foreclosed properties. They are a great investment – and can indeed be very profitable in the long run. |
All school districts are required to collect USDA meal benefit applications.
This information helps our schools far beyond providing free meals for students. The information collected is used to determine everything from the school district's Title 1 funding to the discounts we can receive on utilities. There are also many optional grant programs that use this information as part of the qualification process.
Please take a few minutes to help our community by filling out and submitting a meal benefit application. Please click the link on the left to access the application.
Families that qualify for SNAP benefits are also automatically enrolled to receive free meals at school. Please click on the link on the left to learn more about SNAP and how to apply! |
forage, teff grass, water use efficiency, nutritive value
The objectives of this study were to determine the forage yield, nutritive value, and water use efficiency of teff grass (Eragrostis tef) under field conditions as compared to sorghum sudangrass and forage pearl millet. Water use efficiency was determined by regressing above-ground biomass on crop water use between sampling periods. Yield was determined by quadrat area clippings of above-ground biomass. Nutritive value was determined using wet chemical analysis. Cultivars showed significant differences in biomass production at all sampling dates in both years. Teff grass demonstrated potential to provide producers with a fast-growing and competitive forage crop by reaching optimum yields at an earlier date than other commonly grown forages.
Davidson, J. M.; Min, D.; Aiken, R. M.; and Kluitenberg, G. J.
"Evaluating Teff Grass as a Summer Forage,"
Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station Research Reports: |
Your contributions are the driving force behind our campaign success.
Your contribution to the New Prosperity Foundation provides our team with the wherewithal to prosecute aggressive independent campaigns to help elect candidates who agree with our platform. We promote:
- Economic prosperity and job growth.
- Reducing federal spending.
- Implementing further tax and entitlement reforms.
- Implementing education reforms and investment in our children’s future.
NOTE: Contributions or gifts to NPF are not deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes. Contributions from foreign nationals and federal government contractors are prohibited. NPF is registered with the FEC as an independent expenditure committee. Accordingly, we may accept unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, and other organizations. Your contribution is not subject to FEC contribution limits. NPF’s spending is independent, and it does not make contributions to, or coordinate its spending with any candidates or political parties. |
Christmas Meal at Our Place
When it comes to Christmas dinner, Our Place needs a lot of prep time. That’s because its kitchen staff and volunteers expect to feed over 750 hungry people.
As manager of food services at Our Place, Brian Cox is a pro at creating tasty meals for the masses on a limited budget. And thanks to the extra support of donors during the festive season, he’s able to get his hands on 450 kg of turkey, 225 kg of potatoes, 110 kg of stuffing, 100 kg of vegetables, 115 litres of gravy, 25 kg of cranberry sauce, 125 pies and over 1,500 cups of coffee.
“I love it,” Cox says with a near ear-to-ear grin. “The Our Place family really appreciates that we deliver such a special feast for them at this important time of year.”
Our Place has seen a dramatic rise in meals served this winter with over 116,000 meals served since Oct. 1.
“Christmas is all about family,” says Don Evans, executive director of Our Place. “And for those people living in poverty, we’re often the closest family they have. We want everyone to know they are loved and cared for.” |
The Shed Is a Shiny Billionaire’s Box of Dreams. Can It Be an Important Cultural Center Too?
What the flashy new institution's merger of high-tech and social justice rhetoric means about culture now.
What the flashy new institution's merger of high-tech and social justice rhetoric means about culture now.
The Shed, the brand-new, half-billion-dollar cultural institution opening on the West Side of Manhattan, is very, very lucky to have Alex Poots as its director. Poots is the person who managed to get the institution to change its name from its mortifying original moniker—“The Culture Shed”—to the shorter, hipper “The Shed,” which sounds like a rustic-themed Bushwick bar with $16 cocktails and the arcade game Big Buck Hunter.
Poots is also, by all accounts, the person who managed to give the nascent institution some real mission. From the outside, it always looked like the idea for the Shed was conjured out of the blind imperative to have something special to anchor the West Side’s new luxury mega-development, Hudson Yards, and little else but a cloud of words like “New!” “Different!” and “Popular!”
Poots was clever enough to turn that weakness into a strength: He made the lack of mission into a mission in and of itself. The Shed, he promises, is a new-model cultural institution, one for the era when the borders between fine art and pop culture, wavering since the ‘60s at least, have well and truly broken down—when the average audience member is assumed to be uninterested in little things like medium or tradition, and just wants access to whatever is New, Different, and Popular.
So now that it is at last opening to the public, what does this dream look like in practice? Let’s break it down into four parts.
Poots may have managed to save the new institution from the name “The Culture Shed.” But he has not stopped its main performance space—the massive concert bay formed by deploying the telescoping outer shell over a section of the surrounding plaza—from being named “The McCourt” after property developer and mega-donor Frank H. McCourt, Jr. This makes the Shed’s biggest venue sound a bit as if it is to a courtyard as a McMansion is to a mansion, or as a McRib is to meat.
The association is mildly unfortunate, because once you get inside and get past its infrastructural bells and whistles, the Diller Scofidio + Renfro building does feel a little bit corporate and basic, not exactly grand or edgy.
It has the typical poured concrete floors and perfectly ordinary, mall-like escalators shuttling you up and down its eight floors. There are areas, up on the level known as the “Tisch Skylights,” that make you feel like you are in a hotel lobby, and not even a nice hotel lobby.
The innovations all focus on the building’s ability to reconfigure itself inside and out—how it can expand or contract to form a concert venue, and how the interior galleries and theaters can be reconfigured or opened up so that, say, the lecture theater overlooking the McCourt can be linked up with stepped seating on the ground floor to create a concert-hall-scaled performance venue.
Elizabeth Diller declared it “an architecture of infrastructure: all muscle and no fat.” Inside, it feels very much as if it is emphasizing the utilitarian aspects of its Swiss Army Knife architecture, and cutting against the association with decadent novelty.
How it all really works in practice, and what if any kinds of new productions it makes possible, we will soon see.
The Shed opens with a flashy program of new commissions, an à la carte sampling of stars from all media, willfully blurring genres: Steve McQueen staging a concert series about the history of African American music with Quincy Jones; famed poet Anne Carson debuting a new production starring hot British actor Ben Whishaw and opera legend Renée Fleming; a “kung fu musical” with tunes by Sia; and painter Gerhard Richter teaming with minimalist music legend Steve Reich for an immersive choral installation, among other marquee fare.
The parade of donors and bigwigs who took to the stage in the McCourt yesterday to celebrate the Shed was not shy about touting this genre-blurring and embrace of the popular as putting New York’s other institutions in the dust: “Some of them tend to be about the past,” billionaire heir and patron Jonathan Tisch declared from the stage, “The Shed, once again, is about the future.”
What was more striking, however, is how all the presenters seemed to have absorbed the rhetoric of social justice into their pitch for the Shed. The words “diverse,” “inclusive,” and “social impact” were repeated again and again. Co-architect David Rockwell even at one point declared that an institution with a “large and diverse audience has no better food partner than Danny Meyer.”
Frank McCourt, speaking from the McCourt stage and so, like Aquaman in the sea, a man feeling his own power, took things to a fever pitch. He declared the Shed to be the new frontier of exploring the “civic imagination,” a place for “ideas put into action to serve people, to better humanity,” to explore “human creativity for the greater good,” to inspire “social innovation.”
He sounded as if he wanted to be launching a movement, not a mixed-use arts venue: “In a world replete with cynicism, the Shed is an example of quite the opposite.” (To which my inner cynic responds, “so… it’s an example of naïveté?”)
There’s an interesting point here about what the Shed represents in terms of the contemporary evolution of what used to be called “bourgeois culture.” It once was that the elite defined itself as keepers of tradition, and went to the opera or theater as spaces that defined a culture of educated distinction.
The Shed Elite, seemingly, wants to be associated with values of innovation and experimentation instead of taste and connoisseurship; the future instead of the past. And it seems eager to compete for distinction not by paying allegiance to the Western Canon but by embracing the rhetoric of woke cosmopolitanism.
Believe it or not, though, you can be too cynical about all this. It’s one thing when the billionaires adopt this language in such a self-congratulatory way, and quite another for the actual staff of the place. It’s hard to judge from the outside, but Poots and Co. seem actually to be trying to walk the walk.
A funny thing about Poots is that, as he speaks, he seems almost to be both boasting about the Shed and apologizing for it at once, as if keenly aware at each moment of the potential objections and criticism: The Shed is for the celebrity-obsessed; the Shed is just a big trophy in search of a purpose; the Shed can’t help but be a symbol, just by dint of the forces that brought it into being, of the antiseptic new New York.
When he says (to Town & Country no less), “I wanted the Shed to be part of the solution to the problem of gentrification,” that is a bit much to pretend to promise. But when he declared, at one point during the many panels on press day, “We’re privileged here, and we need to redistribute that privilege,” I don’t think it’s only rhetoric.
Tamara McCaw, the Shed’s chief civic program officer, talks persuasively about how what drew her to the project was Poots’s willingness to work some kind of real, non-celebrity-focused community engagement into the heart of the new institution’s mission.
There will be commissions and workspace for local artists, including a show of more than 50 selected from an open call. The Shed has reserved 10 percent of tickets for low-income New Yorkers (though just whether Hudson Yards’s luxury mall complex truly wants to embrace lots of low-income New Yorkers passing through is not clear).
Along with the more star-studded stuff, in May, the schedule features the likes of “POWERPLAY,” a “women-centered celebration of radical art and healing” targeted at 16- to 18-years-olds and featuring participants in the new institution’s “DIS OBEY” program of social-justice workshops with New York City students. The Shed’s schools outreach, McCall says, serves some 600 low-income kids in 20 schools and the New York City Housing Authority, with teaching artists helping them, through creativity, to voice the “issues they have within school, or at home.”
What I do find distasteful is the patrons patting themselves too much on the back about it all.
Because if you are a very rich person and are going to fund empowerment of diverse communities through an arts organization, I am not sure why you’d do it through a glittering brand-new one on the West Side, rather than through one of the thousands of local, culturally specific nonprofits dispersed across the city, which are starved for funding from both city and private donors in New York’s desperately asymmetrical, over-centralized landscape of mega-institutions and mega-donors. The Shed, both despite and because of its rhetoric of doing good, adds another ultra-extra-mega-institution to compete with for money and favor.
You could give to those littler, long-standing organizations—but then you wouldn’t get to meet Steve McQueen or Bjork or have your name on the cool Transformer building. Glamor is the price of trickle-down social justice.
As has been stated many times, when the Bloomberg administration hatched the idea for “The Culture Shed,” the brief was to do something to “keep New York on the cutting edge.” And it does that—within the limits of the way the task was framed.
The thing is, across the golden ages of culture in New York, those moments you associate with the deep wells of cultural cachet that have kept renewing the city’s vitality—whether Greenwich Village in its bohemian heyday or the hard-pressed Bronx in the heady early era of hip-hop—tend not to be associated with pricey arts institutions, but just the opposite. They tend to come at those points where creativity is not under the direct pressure of the real estate and luxury economies (for good or bad reasons), unleashing a wave of energy and cultural mixing, making experimentation possible and necessary for large numbers of people.
But Bloomberg was famously and explicitly committed to selling New York as a luxury product. And so you got a technical fix to the problem of “keeping New York on the cutting edge” instead of a social and economic fix. Rather than some big program of affordability, you get the Shed.
It could be worse! There is a palpable self-consciousness about the need to earn a real place in the city’s cultural life that pulses beneath the telescoping skin of this new institution—and it certainly didn’t have to be that way. It could have been much more oblivious.
It faces all the problems of mega-culture. Poots has opened it with programming that looks, on the whole, smart and thoughtful. When the next shiny thing inevitably arrives on New York’s mega-philanthropy scene for donors to get distracted by, you can imagine the Shed ending up getting dumber and more craven about its celebrity side as it tries to court fickle appetites. And of course its giant-sized experiments may not add up but merely exhaust the patience of admirers, and fall apart.
But that tiny kernel of angst is at least something. Some angst, some honesty about the situation, probably is the requirement to prevent this type of institution from merely hosting enticing, expensive spectacles and to instead make culture that might actually address the present, and matter beyond it. |
Friday, March 22, 2024 Cathay Cargo Terminal and Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Limited (Hactl) announced today that they had both successfully achieved IATA Environmental Assessment (IEnvA) certification, becoming the first cargo handling-companies to achieve IEnvA in Asia.
IEnvA is a comprehensive certification programme developed by the International Air Transport Association (IATA). It independently assesses the commitment of aviation stakeholders including airlines, airports, cargo-handling facilities, freight forwarders and ramp handlers, to continuously improve their environmental and sustainability performance. By adhering to globally recognised standards and industry best practice, IEnvA ensures that organisations minimise negative impacts on the environment while maintaining operational excellence.
Cathay Cargo Terminal Chief Operating Officer Mark Watts said: “This significant milestone demonstrates our unwavering commitment to environmental sustainability. The programme brings real rigour to environment management systems and reflects the significant investments our companies are making to support Hong Kong International Airport achieve its vision for sustainable airport operations.”
Hactl Chief Executive Wilson Kwong said: “This notable accomplishment is a testament to the extensive efforts we have made in implementing sustainable practices in our operations. By attaining this certification, our two companies have set a high standard for the entire industry to strive towards. This achievement solidifies our position as leaders in promoting environmental responsibility, and underscores the importance of sustainable practices in the aviation sector.”
IATA Sustainability Standards and Audits Senior Manager Quintin Holder said: “In IEnvA, we empower organisations like Cathay Cargo Terminal and Hactl to align environmental goals with operational excellence. We believe that sustainability shouldn't come at the expense of efficiency. Our solutions help businesses optimise their operations while minimising their environmental impact. It's not just about compliance; it's about making a real difference for our planet and future generations.”
For more information about IEnvA, please visit:
For more information about Cathay Cargo Terminal, please visit:
For more information about Hactl, please visit: |
‘Women at the Top’ to examine first female presidents of Ivy League
The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study will host a May 2 discussion with the first female presidents of Ivy League universities on the topic of American higher education and women’s changing roles. The lecture, titled “Women at the Top: The Changing Face of the Ivies,” will be moderated by Drew G. Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute and president-elect of Harvard, and will be held at 4 p.m. in Agassiz Theatre. It is free and open to the public.
For a complete schedule of upcoming events at the institute, visit http://www.radcliffe.edu/events/calendar.php.
Third Eye Blind to headline Yardfest on April 28
Chart-topping pop quartet Third Eye Blind has been tapped to headline this year’s edition of Yardfest — Harvard’s spring celebration taking place April 28. The group’s performance from the steps of Memorial Church will cap the afternoon event, which is scheduled to run from 5 to 8 p.m.
Presented by the College Events Board and the Harvard Concert Commission, Yardfest allows undergraduates to “take back the Yard” with barbecue-style food, music, rides, and games. The event is open to all Harvard undergraduates with a valid College ID.
A.R.T.’s ‘Harvard Night’ features food, talk
“Harvard Night at the A.R.T.” takes place this evening (April 26) and features a specially priced performance of “Invincible Summer,” the New England premiere of master storyteller Mike Daisey, who tells the tale of the grueling and comical New York summer before everything changed. Daisey offers a vivid image of his Brooklyn neighborhood both before and after one terrible day, framing a story of personal upheaval with a narrative of national tragedy. The show takes place at 7:30 p.m. Tickets may be purchased through Outings & Innings at http://harvie.harvard.edu/perks. There will be a 25 percent discount on dinner before the show at Grafton Street Pub & Grill (diners must show tickets), and an opportunity to join Daisey for a drink and conversation at the pub after the show.
Upcoming Arts First set to light up Harvard Square
Harvard Square will transform into a veritable stage for music, dance, theater, and the visual arts from May 3 to May 6 in celebration of the 15th annual Arts First festival. The entire University community is welcome to sample from dozens of performances and installations featuring the creative work of Harvard students and faculty (most events are free of charge). The University’s Board of Overseers and the Office for the Arts sponsor the festival.
For more information, visit http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~arts/.
Arts First volunteers wanted
Arts First organizers are still seeking volunteers for Harvard’s upcoming music, theater, dance, and visual arts celebration (May 3-6). Site managers are wanted for Art Walk (May 3 from 5 to 9 p.m.) — the walking tour of student-produced visual art held in galleries and alternative art spaces across campus. Additionally, volunteer stage managers, backstage crewmembers, and audience greeters are also needed for the Performance Fair (May 5 from noon to 5:30 p.m.). The fair features dozens of music, dance, and theater performances at 11 different venues.
All volunteers will receive an Arts First T-shirt, an invitation to the presentation of the Harvard Arts Medal to composer John Adams ’69, A.M. ’72, and an invitation to a wrap-up party hosted by Office for the Arts Director Jack Megan. E-mail [email protected] to volunteer, or call (617) 495-8699.
Take a quick tour of ancient Egypt, Israel during Arts First
In conjunction with the upcoming Arts First weekend, the Semitic Museum will sponsor half-hour tours of its “Ancient Egypt: Magic and the Afterlife” and “Houses of Ancient Israel: Domestic, Royal, Divine” exhibits on May 6. The tours begin at 11:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.
Stressing stress: BHAC event to examine stress, coping skills
The Department of Behavioral Health and Academic Counseling (BHAC) and the University Student Health Coordinating Board invite University affiliates to attend “Caring for the Harvard Community 2007: Coping with Stress” on May 2 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. in Ropes Gray Room, Pound Hall. Facilitated by Families for Depression Awareness, the event will feature expert presentations on effectively managing stress, from everyday strains caused by work, school, and relationships, to life-changing events, such as a family member’s death or the loss of a job.
Presenters will include Massachusetts State Sen. Robert A. Antonioni; Associate Professor of Psychiatry Paul Barreira, director of BHAC; and Edward M. Hallowell, author of “Crazy Busy: Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap!” The panel will explore the signs and symptoms of stress, ways to reduce or alleviate it, and tips for coping with stress on a daily basis. They will also discuss when it is more than stress — identifying and coping with anxiety and depression. This event is free and open to the entire Harvard community, though seating is limited. To reserve a seat, register at http://www.familyaware.org.
Kansas Gov. Sebelius visits Harvard as IOP fellow
Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius has been serving as a visiting fellow this week (April 23-27) at Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP). “We are very excited to host Gov. Sebelius here at Harvard,” said Jeanne Shaheen, director of the IOP. “Her public policy experience spanning many levels of government is sure to generate great interest among students and throughout the Harvard community.”
Sebelius was sworn in as the 44th governor of Kansas in January 2003 and was named by Time magazine as one of the nation’s top five governors less than three years later. She was re-elected to a second term as governor last year. In 2006, Sebelius was elected chair of the Democratic Governors Association and named chair of the Education Commission of the States. She also serves on the National Governors Association’s Executive Committee.
Among her engagements while at Harvard, Sebelius delivered a public address at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum yesterday (April 25).
‘Hold Your Breath’ screening, Q&A at New Research Building
Massachusetts General Hospital’s Disparities Solutions Center, in partnership with the Harvard Medical School (HMS) Cross-Cultural Care Committee, HMS Academy Center for Teaching and Learning, Active Voice, WGBH, and other partner organizations, will present a screening of the documentary “Hold Your Breath” by award-winning filmmaker, physician, and Stanford University research scholar Maren Grainger-Monsen on May 2 at 5:30 p.m. in the amphitheater of the New Research Building, HMS. The film exposes the clash between ancient Islamic traditions and contemporary medical technology through intimate moments of anguish, frustration, and hope.
A panel discussion and Q&A with Grainger-Monsen, other physicians, and community representatives will immediately follow the screening from 6:45 to 7:30 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.
PDK event to explore return of music, play to Afghanistan
“Afghanistan: Reclaiming Rights Through Music and Play” is the title of a May 2 talk with Harvard Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) board member Louise Pascal and Harvard Divinity School student Zach Warren.
During the 6 p.m. program at Ticknor Lounge, Pascal will share her story about her journey to return music to Afghanistan through the publication of a songbook from her Peace Corps experience 35 years ago. At Ticknor, she’ll play her CD of children singing in four languages and show an excerpt from a new educational DVD. Pascal recently returned from Washington, D.C., where she was honored at the Afghanistan Embassy for bringing the music back to the children of Afghanistan and to the adults who haven’t heard the songs since childhood. Warren, meanwhile, will present his work on the children’s circus in Kabul.
Harvard PDK board member Sahar Ahmed organized this program, which was codeveloped with the Harvard Cultural Agents Initiative. A reception will follow.
Maine vacation rental open to faculty, University officers
Applications are now being accepted for weekend or weeklong stays at Howells Memorial House, the University’s vacation rental property in Kittery, Maine. Under the terms of the bequest to the University, only faculty members and University officers are eligible to rent the property.
To learn more about the house or to submit an online application, visit http://www.facultyrealestate.harvard.edu and click on Maine Vacation Rental. For additional information, call Irina at (617) 495-8840. |
Allan R. Robinson, Gordon McKay Professor of Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Emeritus, died suddenly on September 25, 2009, at his summer home overlooking Buzzards Bay. Professor Robinson established and, for nearly four decades almost single-handedly ran, a graduate program in physical oceanography in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Many of his nearly 30 Ph.D. students and 25 postdoctoral fellows hold leadership positions at major universities and research centers.
Allan was known throughout the world of oceanography for his insightful contributions to understanding the Gulf Stream, the evolution of ocean eddies (the oceanic equivalent of weather), and the dynamics of circulation in the Mediterranean Sea. In the early 1980s he demonstrated that ocean current forecasting was possible and developed the Harvard Ocean Prediction System, a uniquely portable forecasting and analysis tool that is still widely used. He then successfully connected this methodology to practical applications in fisheries, search and rescue, and national defense.
Allan was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, and grew up a few blocks from the coast in Marblehead. As a student he excelled in science and began his lifetime interest in art, literature, and music. Like many in his community, he was drawn to the sea.
He enrolled in 1950 at Harvard College, where he enjoyed courses in physics and math and played baritone horn with the Harvard Band. During commencement week in 1953 Allan and his friends Edward Upton and Charles Lipson decided to write a set of nonsense Latin verses for “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard.” Today when the Harvard Band sings one can occasionally still hear “Illigitimi non carborundum, Domine salvum fac regem.” During Allan’s memorial service in Memorial Church the band sang his lyrics — he would have loved it.
As Allan contemplated possible career directions in physics, he was guided by a desire to make a fundamental contribution to theory. He began his dissertation research on nuclear shell theory, but midway through this work he was invited by Columbus O’Donnell Iselin, who was the Director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution at the time, to join a regular discussion among a small group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty and Woods Hole scientists who were attempting to reconcile ocean observations with fundamental physical processes. Around this time, under the tutelage of George Carrier, Allan’s Ph.D. research was shifting to theoretical ocean processes. This work was highly novel: only 14 prior publications are cited in his dissertation, and his studies led to more than half a dozen papers in prestigious scientific journals. After completing his Ph.D. Allan spent a year as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory with luminaries in fluid dynamics such as G. I. Taylor and George Batchelor. Allan returned to Harvard as an assistant professor in 1960 and was subsequently promoted to associate and then the Gordon McKay Professor of Geophysical Fluid Dynamics in 1968.
In the early 1960s Allan’s elegant analysis of vorticity conservation over a sloping sea floor led to the discovery of continental shelf waves, a term he coined. Next Allan spearheaded a number of ship-based explorations designed to study the performance of his ocean current models when compared to observed currents and water properties. With Henry Stommel he co-directed the Mid-Ocean Dynamics Experiment and co-chaired the US POLYMODE Organizing Committee, the latter of which involved extensive collaboration with Soviet physical oceanographers. These studies provided the first comprehensive overview of turbulent ocean “weather” that is analogous to the high and low pressure systems that influence atmospheric weather.
In the 1980s Allan launched a successful basin-scale modeling project of the eastern Mediterranean Sea that for the first time correctly depicted ocean current structures, which led to new research on the connections between ocean eddies and gyre circulation in the Mediterranean Sea.
While theoretical studies employing elegant mathematics were always dear to Allan’s heart, he also thought that scientists have an obligation to address societal problems. Allan’s understanding of the physics of eddies and his novel application of quantitative forecasting methods were highly valued by the U.S. Navy in its operational work relating to submarine detection. He took pleasure in the deference paid him by military leaders, such as when they delivered via a navy submarine an instrument he needed on a research vessel. Admiral Peter Cressy (Ret.) said, “From extensive personal observation . . . I can state . . . that [Professor Robinson’s] contributions were essential to our national defense and a key component of the successful conclusion of the cold war.” In 1991 the Office of Naval Research awarded Allan its Distinguished Educator’s Award in Ocean Science, in recognition of his many contributions to national security.
Allan served for many years as the editor of the journal Dynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans, and as editor-in-chief of the prestigious occasional series THE SEA, overseeing the production of six volumes. He retired from teaching in 2002 and from his research professorship in 2007. Over his professional career Allan wrote or edited over 150 research articles and books. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Geophysical Union and received honorary degrees from the University of Liege and the University of Massachusetts. In recognition of his contributions to important societal problems, he received the Award for the Merits of Two Worlds from the European Institute of Cultural Integration.
It would be fair to say that over the last half century no single physical oceanographer was more important than Allan in advancing the intellectual underpinning of interdisciplinary ocean science. In his later years he completed some of a projected series of influential papers on the theory of physical-biological interactions. Allan’s sudden death was a shock to all who knew him. He was as mentally active as ever, authoring papers, exploring new research ideas, and laying plans for new edited volumes. His friends and close collaborators quite simply expected him to continue this way forever. He is survived by his spouse, Marguerite; their three daughters, Sarah Penelope Robinson, Perrine Robinson-Geller, and Laura Ondine Robinson; six grandchildren; and his sister, Gladys Meltzer.
Frederick H. Abernathy
Kenneth Brink, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Nadia Pinardi, University of Bologna
James J. McCarthy, Chair |
A Massachusetts woman hung up her whistle and high school soccer referee jersey after almost a decade on the job, fed up with ongoing abuse from parents and coaches, the Boston Globe reported recently. It’s a familiar story. According to a 2017 survey by the National Association of Sports Officials, adult behavior is the reason more than 75 percent of all high school referees quit. The report also found that 80 percent of new officials stop after only two years. Many say the problem is contributing to a shortage of high school referees nationwide, and extends to the youth sports level. Richard Weissbourd is a psychologist and senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he co-directs the Making Caring Common Project, which focuses on moral and social development priorities in child raising. The Gazette spoke with him about the problem and what can be done to fix it.
GAZETTE: Despite efforts to control angry or verbally abusive parents on the sidelines of youth sporting games and events across the country, why does it continue to be such a problem?
WEISSBOURD: This is a puzzle with many pieces and there a lot of different things that are going on. I think it’s because sometimes parents are wanting to compensate for their shortcomings or live out their own fantasies about sports. I think it’s the degree to which we are becoming less communal and more tribal and more individual. Some people are feeling more Darwinian, like this is a survival-of-the-fittest kind of contest, and there isn’t a sense of commitment to the larger whole. I think it’s the degree to which, in the media, we have reinforced the tendency to demean and degrade people whom we disagree with — that’s too often the nature of our public discourse now. It’s been legitimized and normalized in ways that are concerning. I think we used to live in a culture where there was much more of an expectation that you showed respect even when it was hard, when our notion of morality meant doing things that are hard like thanking the referee even when you didn’t feel like thanking them. I’m concerned that many parents just don’t have the inclination. They don’t think about doing things that are hard as a way of modeling for their kids. There’s also this allergy to losing and to failure that we have in the culture. And I think it’s a president who divides the world into winners or losers. More and more it appears that idea is in the culture. What’s really concerning to me is the degree to which these things become normalized. We need communities of parents that really provide those parents with feedback and support and regulate them to some degree.
GAZETTE: What’s really at risk for kids when they see these kinds of actions by the people who are supposed to be setting an example by modeling good behavior?
WEISSBOURD: It sends all the wrong messages. What you really want to be modeling for your kid in a situation like this is that the referee is doing a job that is largely thankless. It’s not a well-compensated job. We should be grateful to them. You should be modeling for your kids that sometimes people make mistakes and when they do, you may want to point it out to them, but you do it in ways that are generous and constructive. You should let them know this ref isn’t trying to make a mistake. And you need to model for your kids that you’re not going to suddenly lose control. It’s a scary thing for a kid when their parent is so out of control.
GAZETTE: In addition to parents getting involved and calling out bad behavior on the sidelines, what can be done? Should kids try to address the situation in some way?
WEISSBOURD: It’s really hard for kids to take on an adult in a situation like this, but they can talk to their own parents about it. I do think that every league should have a compact with parents of one kind or another that spells out what the league’s role is in promoting ethical character and what appropriate parent behavior is, because some parents really don’t know. There are differences in cultures and the way people interact with sporting events. And that compact should be revisited periodically so it lives and breathes; it’s not just another form. So, I think it’s important to spell out what constructive and appropriate behavior is. It’s also about encouraging parents to do things like thank the coaches, or thank the referees. It’s providing red flags for parents. If your partner is embarrassed to sit with you during the game, that should be a red flag for you. If you’re spending all of your free time talking about who won the last game, that should be a red flag. If you’re finding yourself really stressed about whether your kid’s team is going to win, that should be a red flag. If your kid is not eating or sleeping well because they are stressed about performing well on a team they are on, that’s a red flag. And I know some of the good sports organizations do provide information for coaches around working with parents, and that can be really helpful.
GAZETTE: I wonder if you think the notion of winning is just so ingrained in our culture, in our history, in the story of our nation’s founding, that’s it going to be impossible to change?
WEISSBOURD: I think we’re out of balance. If you look throughout American history, this is what books like “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life” are about. There has always been this tension between individualism and a strong collectivist ethic in America, a strong sense of nationalism and community, a strong sense of responsibility for our neighbors. In many eras of this country it was mothers’ primary responsibility to prepare children to be good citizens — it should have been fathers’ too. Schools and most colleges in this country were founded primarily to cultivate ethical character. That is no longer true of parents, schools, or universities. And in our research data when we ask kids “What’s most important to you?” they are far more likely to say achievement than caring. And they are far more likely to think their parents value achievement over caring. I don’t think that was true in other times in our history, based on what I hear from child historians. There was this ethic of sacrifice in homes and schools that you don’t see nearly as much anymore. Robert Putnam’s work is about this decline in communal connection and so, in a sense, is Sara Konrath’s work on declines in empathy. I don’t want to overstate it because I still think there are strong collective impulses in America. People still believe in community, but I do think we’re out of balance.
GAZETTE: Does religion have a role to play?
WEISSBOURD: I don’t want to make a claim, pro or con, for any particular religion, but I think in good religious practices there are communities of adults who stand for ethical values, who engage kids in ethical questions. There is an ethic of sacrifice; there are rituals of gratitude. There are coming-of-age ceremonies like confirmations and bar and bat mitzvahs, where people are asked to think about their obligations to their communities. There is a fusion of a moral life and a spiritual life, the sense that you have obligations to your ancestors and to your descendants. There’s a lot about our responsibility to humanity more generally and the importance of giving and sacrifice. I’m not saying we should all become more religious, but I do think we should really think about how we reproduce these aspects of religion in secular life, including in sports. We need to think about how we create a strong ethic of care and responsibility for the community and how we cultivate the hardest forms of empathy and care: care when you’re angry at people, care when you are in competition with people. In my book “The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children’s Moral and Emotional Development,” I talk about how sports is this time when you collide with intense feelings, with yourself, and with other people. Sports also gives you an opportunity to rehearse how you work through those feelings constructively.
This interview was edited for clarity and condensed for length. |
Experts from the field of Impact Assessment and Health attended an interdisciplinary international workshop.
The Health in Environmental Assessment: Developing an International Perspective workshop, hosted at the Foresight Centre, was organised by Dr Urmila Jha-Thakur and Professor Thomas B Fischer from the School of Environmental Sciences.
The workshop was attended by 22 participants, including international representatives from India, the Netherlands, Germany and the World Health Organization. The experts were invited to explore the extent to which health is and can be accommodated within Environmental Assessment.
The workshop was funded by the Business Gateway Network Element Award, the Global Health Theme Award, the School of Environmental Sciences, the Research Strategy Group Pump-Priming Research Fund and the People Space and Place cluster of the School of Environmental Sciences.
Lecturer Dr Jha-Thakur said: “The workshop was a great success resulting in numerous research proposal ideas.” |
PSV Eindhoven coach Peter Bosz was left ruing missed chances after his side squandered several opportunities in a 1-1 draw with Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League last-16 first-leg tie on Tuesday. “In the second half, we had loads of chances. It was a shame that we didn’t score a second,” Bosz told reporters after the game at the Philips Stadion. Donyell Malen snatched a vital goal to earn the Bundesliga giants the away draw at his old club but wasteful PSV were left to wonder what could have been. The big question pre-match was which Borussia Dortmund would show up: the team that topped the Champions League ‘Group of Death’ or the outfit struggling for consistency in the Bundesliga?
And it was a cagey opening in an intimidating atmosphere in Eindhoven, the home fans letting off a volley of fireworks at kick-off.
“We started very nervously, I think both sides were nervous in the first minutes,” said Dortmund coach Edin Terzic.
When the smoke cleared, the hosts had the better of the opening exchanges, Mexico international winger Hirving Lozano causing the Dortmund defence headaches down the left.
PSV midfielder Malik Tillman fluffed two gilt-edged chances in front of goal, once firing wide after a clever through-ball from veteran Dutch striker Luuk de Jong.
And the visitors punished PSV’s profligacy, taking the lead against the run of play in the 24th minute when Malen squeezed a deflected shot into the top corner.
Malen had been prolific for the Dutch giants, scoring 55 goals in all competitions in just 43 games, and chose not to celebrate in front of PSV’s hardcore fans.
The misfiring Tillman somehow then contrived to miss another goal that looked easier to score, this time with a header right in front of goal.
Then it was Belgian international winger Johan Bakayoko’s turn to scuff a shot wide, with the home fans starting to wonder if it was going to be one of those nights as they went into the break 1-0 down.
PSV haven’t lost at home all season and started the second half on the front foot.
They were soon level.
Tillman redeemed his earlier errors by winning a penalty in the 56th minute, which De Jong slotted calmly past Alexander Meyer.
Dortmund defenders were incensed at the penalty award, insisting veteran central defender Mats Hummels had nicked the ball before bringing down Tillman.
Terzic described it as a “hard decision” and even Bosz acknowledged: “You could see from the reaction of the Dortmund players they didn’t agree with it.”
“Zero percent a penalty. Zero,” Hummels himself told Prime Video after the game.
“Tillman was laughing all over the place. Bakayoko was laughing himself to death. They were all grinning for minutes later.”
The controversial equaliser opened the game up, with chances at both ends, a flick by Dortmund’s Marius Wolf forcing a sharp save from Walter Benitez in the PSV goal.
With 15 minutes to go, Bakayoko danced through the Dortmund defence but failed to get any purchase on his shot — summing up the night for PSV.
PSV midfielder Joey Veerman said: “I think that we had the second half completely under control and in the first half we had big chances.”
“When you look at the whole game, we had better chances than Dortmund”, he said, adding “I think that 1-1 is not all that bad a position” to take back to Dortmund.
Hummels admitted his team let the “charged atmosphere get to us too much” but was confident of advancing into the quarter-finals when the two sides meet again in three weeks.
“I saw a very beatable Eindhoven today. In our home game, the second leg, we simply need to play better with the ball. Then, I am very confident that we will progress,” said Hummels.
“We know we still have the second leg to play. Then, there will be 80,000 people on a Champions League night. We are unbeatable there,” added Dortmund defender Nico Schlotterbeck.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Topics mentioned in this article |
East Ghouta: Action needed now to save hundreds of thousands ‘living in hell on earth,’ stresses UN
Deeply alarmed by the escalating violence in Syria’s east Ghouta, the United Nations has reiterated a call for an end to hostilities so that the sick and wounded can be immediately evacuated and humanitarian aid deliveries can reach those in need.
Speaking at a Security Council meeting on Wednesday, Secretary-General António Guterres called for an immediate suspension of all war activities in Syria’s conflict-battered east Ghouta, where, he said, “a human tragedy is unfolding in front of our eyes [with] 400,000 people living in hell on earth.”
“I don’t think we can let things go on in this horrendous way,” he urged, explaining that an estimated 700 people in the town, near the Syrian capital, Damascus, need urgent treatment that cannot be provided there.
Since the Syrian Government and their allies escalated their offensive against opposition-held east Ghouta on 4 February, there have been more than 1,200 civilian casualties, including at least 346 killed and 878 injured, mostly in airstrikes hitting residential areas, according to reports documented by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
The Office, however, underscored that the figures are “far from comprehensive” and represent only those cases it has managed to document in the midst of the “chaos and destruction” in east Ghouta.
Furthermore, only one humanitarian convoy has been able to make its way to the war-ravaged city since November last year, bringing to one of its enclaves desperately needed but overwhelmingly insufficient food and medical supplies – enough only to meet the needs of 2.6 per cent of the population in need.
Stop the ‘monstrous campaign of annihilation’ of east Ghouta – UN rights chief
Also on Wednesday, the UN human rights chief also appealed to the international community to act urgently to save lives.
“How much cruelty will it take before the international community can speak with one voice to say enough dead children, enough wrecked families, enough violence, and take resolute, concerted action to bring this monstrous campaign of annihilation to an end?” the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, said in a statement.
“International humanitarian law was developed precisely to stop this type of situation, where civilians are slaughtered in droves in order to fulfil political or military objectives,” he underscored, reiterating his plea to the international community to ensure accountability for the ongoing violations, many of which may amount to war crimes. |
AUSTIN, Texas — Global warming is approaching a tipping point that during this century could reawaken an ancient climate pattern similar to El Niño in the Indian Ocean, new research led by scientists from The University of Texas at Austin has found.
If it comes to pass, floods, storms and drought are likely to worsen and become more regular, disproportionately affecting populations most vulnerable to climate change.
Computer simulations of climate change during the second half of the century show that global warming could disturb the Indian Ocean’s surface temperatures, causing them to rise and fall year to year much more steeply than they do today. The seesaw pattern is strikingly similar to El Niño, a climate phenomenon that occurs in the Pacific Ocean and affects weather globally.
“Our research shows that raising or lowering the average global temperature just a few degrees triggers the Indian Ocean to operate exactly the same as the other tropical oceans, with less uniform surface temperatures across the equator, more variable climate, and with its own El Niño,” said lead author Pedro DiNezio, a climate scientist at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, a research unit of the UT Jackson School of Geosciences.
According to the research, if current warming trends continue, an Indian Ocean El Niño could emerge as early as 2050.
The results, which were published May 6 in the journal Science Advances, build on a 2019 paper by many of the same authors who found evidence of a past Indian Ocean El Niño hidden in the shells of microscopic sea life, called forams, that lived 21,000 years ago — the peak of the last ice age when the Earth was much cooler.
To show whether an Indian Ocean El Niño can occur in a warming world, the scientists analyzed climate simulations, grouping them according to how well they matched present-day observations. When global warming trends were included, the most accurate simulations were those showing an Indian Ocean El Niño emerging by 2100.
“Greenhouse warming is creating a planet that will be completely different from what we know today, or what we have known in the 20th century,” DiNezio said.
The latest findings add to a growing body of evidence that the Indian Ocean has potential to drive much stronger climate swings than it does today.
Co-author Kaustubh Thirumalai, who led the study that discovered evidence of the ice age Indian Ocean El Niño, said that the way glacial conditions affected wind and ocean currents in the Indian Ocean in the past is similar to the way global warming affects them in the simulations.
“This means the present-day Indian Ocean might in fact be unusual,” said Thirumalai, who is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona.
The Indian Ocean today experiences very slight year-to-year climate swings because the prevailing winds blow gently from west to east, keeping ocean conditions stable. According to the simulations, global warming could reverse the direction of these winds, destabilizing the ocean and tipping the climate into swings of warming and cooling akin to the El Niño and La Niña climate phenomena in the Pacific Ocean. The result is new climate extremes across the region, including disruption of the monsoons over East Africa and Asia.
Thirumalai said that a break in the monsoons would be a significant concern for populations dependent on the regular annual rains to grow their food.
For Michael McPhaden, a physical oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who pioneered research into tropical climate variability, the paper highlights the potential for how human-driven climate change can unevenly affect vulnerable populations.
“If greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trends, by the end of the century, extreme climate events will hit countries surrounding the Indian Ocean, such as Indonesia, Australia and East Africa with increasing intensity,” said McPhaden, who was not involved in the study. “Many developing countries in this region are at heightened risk to these kinds of extreme events even in the modern climate.”
The research was funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant under the NSF Paleoclimate Program. |
We welcome suggestions for research to highlight in Aliquots. The items should be primary research articles (no reviews, editorials or commentaries) published within the last two months in a peer-reviewed journal. Please send the article citation (PDF if available) and any other feedback about the column to: [email protected].
Pick a peck of proper proteins
Identifying new disease biomarkers hinges on determining which proteins are present in a sample. Proteomics methods like liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry break proteins down into thousands of fragments (peptides) that must be compared to known proteins. Since a single peptide can be common to many proteins, such methods often overestimate the number of proteins in a sample.
To facilitate protein identification, Bing Zhang, Ph.D., David Tabb, Ph.D., and colleagues have created an open-source protein assembly tool called IDPicker (http://fenchurch.mc.vanderbilt.edu/lab/software.html). They characterized the tool's accuracy of protein identification using mass spectrometry data sets of human and yeast protein samples. The team reports in the Journal of Proteome Research that the technique simplifies candidate protein lists, improves accuracy of protein identification, and groups proteins of related function together to help investigators decipher the biological lessons presented by each sample.
— Melissa Marino
Cre-ating tools for gene manipulation
It has become possible in recent years to make precise genetic modifications in the mouse — in specific tissues or at specific times during development. One approach for making these “conditional” changes is the Cre/LoxP system, which takes advantage of the Cre recombinase protein to modify gene targets. This system uses a single promoter to “drive” expression of Cre, but the available promoters often drive Cre production in too many different cell types.
To address this limitation, Guoqiang Gu, Ph.D., and colleagues explored expressing Cre as two inactive fragments under the control of separate promoters. They report in Nucleic Acids Research the successful reconstitution of Cre activity from two pieces of the protein, each modified to contain a protein interaction domain that “zips” the fragments together. The pieced-together Cre was active in both cultured cells and transgenic animals, suggesting that the approach can be used to study gene function in cells expressing two different protein markers.
— Leigh MacMillan
Poking holes in toxin structure
More than half of all humans harbor the bacterium Helicobacter pylori — a risk factor for gastric cancer and ulcers — in their stomachs, where it produces a toxin capable of punching holes in stomach cell membranes.
In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Borden Lacy, Ph.D., Tim Cover, M.D., and colleagues describe the structure of a key piece of the pore-forming toxin VacA. They determined that this “p55 domain,” which mediates binding of VacA to host cells, resembles a sock, with a globular “toe” region and a triangular helix making up the “heel” and “calf.” This structure fits nicely into the previously described flower-shaped structure of the VacA complex thought to assemble on the host cell membrane. The researchers identified two strictly conserved regions likely important for assembly of the pore complex and binding to host cells. Targeting these regions could be key to developing a vaccine that offers protection against multiple strains of H. pylori.
— Melissa Marino
Vaccine candidate for RSV
Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) — the No. 1 cause of respiratory disease and hospitalization in children under age 5 — is especially dangerous for premature infants, the elderly and immunocompromised patients. Despite years of efforts, there are no FDA-approved vaccines to prevent RSV disease.
James Crowe, M.D., and colleagues are trying a new vaccine vector: Venezuelan equine encephalitis replicon particles (VRPs). Other studies have shown that VRPs induce a protective response at the mucosal surface, which would offer an advantage in combating respiratory viruses like RSV. The investigators engineered VRPs expressing RSV surface proteins and showed that intranasal delivery of these RSV-VRP vaccine candidates to mice and cotton rats induced immune responses comparable to or greater than those following wild-type virus infection. The RSV-VRPs also protected vaccinated animals against an intranasal RSV challenge. The findings, reported in the Journal of Virology, support further development of RSV-VRPs as an RSV vaccine candidate. Vanderbilt has applied for a patent to support the use of this vaccine strategy.
— Leigh MacMillan |
Russell Crowe wanted to play Zeus with a Greek accent.
However, Waititi wasn't sold and had him shoot his scenes once in a Greek accent and then in a British accent.
"Russell was right all along," Waititi said. They went with the Greek accent.
It might seem like a no-brainer that Russell Crowe would be speaking with a Greek accent to play Zeus in "Thor: Love and Thunder," but writer-director Taika Waititi wasn't convinced when they shot the movie.
In fact, Crowe did all his scenes twice, one time with a Greek accent and a second time with a British accent, Waititi told Insider.
"We actually talked at length about the accent," he said. "We wondered if someone did a Greek accent of a Greek god, is it going to be a farce? Will it be too silly?"
Related video: The physics of Thor's 'Infinity War' weapon
However, Crowe was very much in the camp of doing the god with a Greek accent. So Waititi came up with a compromise.
"We ended up doing two versions of every take with Russell," he said. "One in a Greek accent and then another in a British accent. Because I felt people would think Zeus would sound British like Laurence Olivier in "Clash of the Titans." In the 1981 movie based on the Greek myth of Perseus, English actor Olivier plays Zeus.
When post-production came around, it was finally time to come to a decision. And that's when Waititi realized something.
"It's actually more offensive to the Greeks to have Zeus sound like he's British," he said. "And test audiences loved the Greek accent. I'm really happy with it. But, yeah, he had to do every take once in the Greek accent and once with a British accent because I couldn't make up my mind. But Russell was right all along."
In "Love and Thunder," Thor (Chris Hemsworth) looks for the support of Zeus to take on Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale). However, it leads to Thor not getting help and instead has his clothes flicked off by Zeus.
"Thor: Love and Thunder" is currently playing in theaters.
Read the original article on Insider |
The mass exodus of doctors and health workers in other specialties has left Nigeria grappling with a shortage of manpower, leading to an unpleasant Doctor-Patient ratio.
Amid this, the Nigerian Medical Association, NMA is worried over the shortage of doctors in Ogun state, South West Nigeria. They put the current ratio at one doctor to 6,400 patients.
The NMA Chairman in the state, Dr. Azim Ashimi, revealed that in the last four years, about 25 percent of doctors practicing in the state had “left the state for other states in the country and other countries outside of Nigeria, while some have retired from active service.
Ashimi said that the state with over six million people has only 1,000 doctors in the public and private hospitals.
The World Health Organisation recommends a
-to-patient ratio for member countries, to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, SDG target in healthcare.
Based on the NMA’s list of active doctors in the state, the association insisted that the ratio in Ogun State was approximately ten times worse than the WHO-recommended ratio.
Almost all the government health institutions in the state are battling health worker shortages as they cannot cope with the high number of patients that throng the government hospitals.
Statistics show that approximately 1,197 Nigerian-trained doctors moved to the United Kingdom since May 29, 2023, to date.
According to the register of the General Medical Council of the UK, Nigeria is set to overtake Pakistan and become the country with the second-highest number of foreign-trained doctors in the UK.
Currently, India remains the country with the highest number of foreign-trained doctors in the UK.
Though about 1,197 Nigerian-trained doctors were licensed between May 29, 2023, and December 1, 2023, the total number of Nigerian doctors licensed to practice in the UK is now 12,198.
Ashimi listed communicable diseases like malaria and water and food-borne diseases as the most common health conditions in the state. The physician lamented that public hospitals were running below standards and had to reduce the number of patients’ intake so as not to overstretch the available facilities and healthcare workers.
According to him, many of these facilities are making use of any available doctors to cover where there are shortages of specialists or specialties.
The NMA chair said, “Roughly there are presently about 1,000 (one thousand) doctors left in Ogun State. These include doctors in public and private hospitals. Federal Medical Centre Abeokuta remains the single largest employer of doctors and other healthcare practitioners.
Many in the country have expressed concern over Nigeria’s poor health sector and the rate of doctors’ exodus.
President Bola Tinubu had on Tuesday, December 12, appealed to Nigerian health workers practicing abroad to “sacrifice their time to come back home and serve their people.”
He said his administration was prioritizing and improving Nigeria’s health sector through massive investments and an increased allocation of funds in the proposed 2024 budget. |
Religious Rights Of Border Detainees Under Scrutiny As Black Ministers Condemn Trump’s Baby Snatcher Immigration Policy
The Rev. Al Sharpton calls on the Trump administration to allow detainees to receive clergy visits.
Copy and paste this URL into your WordPress site to embed
Copy and paste this code into your site to embed |
Health care refers to any field concerned with improving or maintaining physical and mental wellbeing through medical procedures and methods, including doctors, nurses, dentists, therapists, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies.
Health insurance is a form of financing used to cover the costs associated with medical services. Similar to car or home insurance policies, individuals or employers choose a plan and pay a premium; then the insurer agrees to cover a portion of covered costs.
Healthcare encompasses any measures taken by licensed and trained professionals to restore or preserve physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual wellbeing. This encompasses primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary medical treatment as well as preventive services.
Insurance is a contract between an individual and an insurance provider that reimburses health care expenses in return for monthly premium payments. Policies may be private or public and governed at either state or federal levels.
Health insurance costs can be driven up significantly by the prices set by doctors, nurses, therapists, dentists, pharmaceutical companies and hospital systems for their products and services. Therefore, insurance providers frequently offer discounted copayments or coinsurance when individuals visit an in-network provider to ensure quality meets cost effectively.
Health care and insurance provide access to various forms of treatment, from prescription drugs and doctor visits, to hospitals and pharmaceutical companies providing these services.
People can purchase coverage for themselves and their family through state-regulated, federally subsidized, and private plans – such as Medicare, Medicaid, self-insured group insurance plans and individual/family health plans.
People should select a plan with comprehensive coverage that minimizes out-of-pocket expenses during claims and offers greater financial security, taking into account both premium costs and coverage benefits.
Copays are an integral component of many health care and insurance plans. A copay is a fixed sum you pay directly to your doctor or insurer for medical services, prescription drugs and other forms of covered healthcare services.
Certain copays don’t count towards deductibles while others do – this could have a huge effect on your health care costs.
Insurance providers set copays as part of their strategy to detect fraud and limit members from overusing their coverage, but studies have revealed that certain groups of people may actually spend less with copay structures (Gruber 2006).
Co-insurance allows you and your health insurer to share in the cost of medical services provided, similarly to how deductibles and copays work. It’s one of three cost-sharing features commonly included with health plans, along with these other two cost-sharing elements.
Deductible: Your plan’s deductible is the minimum payment you must make before it will cover any medical costs for the rest of the year. Once met, however, they’ll provide partial coverage.
Coinsurance typically applies after you meet your deductible and continues until the out-of-pocket maximum on your plan has been reached. Your coinsurance percentage can be found on an Explanation of Benefits (EOB).
Choosing a plan
As there is so much information available about health care and insurance plans, making an informed decision can be difficult. Therefore, it’s essential that you take time to select a plan that works for both yourself and your family.
Open enrollment period typically falls from November through January for most employers and individuals; however, should life events such as moving or having a baby arise that necessitate changes outside this window, you may be eligible to make changes outside open enrollment.
When selecting plans, it’s essential to carefully evaluate both out-of-pocket costs and monthly premium payments when comparing plans. This will allow you to identify which options best meet your healthcare needs and budget. |
Types of Degrees
Types of Degrees
Below you will see a list of the different types of degrees and awards offered at ACC. You can find more information about different degrees and view a listing of Degrees and Certifications by type in the ACC Catalog.
Associate of Science, Associate of Arts, Associate of Arts in Teaching
AS, AA, and AAS degrees are designed specifically to facilitate the transfer and application of credits earned at Austin Community College to the bachelor degree requirements of most public colleges and universities.
Associate of Applied Science
AAS Degrees are offered in technical programs, designed to prepare students for immediate employment on graduation.
Level 1 and Level 2 Certificates
Level 1 and Level 2 Certificates prepare students to enter a specialized career/technical field or upgrade skills for job advancement. Most certificate awards are structured to allow students to move to a higher level certificate or an Associate of Applied Science (AAS) Degree. Students do not need to meet TSI requirements to enroll in a Level 1 Certificate.
Advanced Technical Certificates
Advanced Technical Certificates are designed for students who have completed a related bachelor’s or associate’s degree. ATCs prepare students for a career field with more specialized training.
Enhanced Skills Certificate
Enhanced Skills Certificates are pursued after the completion of an AAS and prepare students for a career field with more specialized training.
Occupational Skills Award
Occupational Skills Awards provide workforce training designed to lead to job entry. Students do not need to meet TSI requirements to enroll in an OSA.
Bachelor’s Degrees at ACC
The Bachelor of Applied Science (BAS) Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) and Bachelor of Applied Technology (BAT) degrees prepare individuals with a prior Associate of Applied Science in a technical field to enhance their credentials and provide upward mobility in the workforce.
Tip: Associate of Arts, Associate of Science, and Associate of Arts in Teaching are the three degree plans most likely to have most courses transfer to a public university in Texas. Associate of Applied Arts degrees and certificates are designed for students who want to learn a skill and jump right into the workforce.
You can check the program that you requested when you applied to ACC and email [email protected] if you need to change programs to something that better suits your goals. |
“There is a high likelihood that south Georgia will experience lows between 20 and 25 oF. [Temperatures in the] teens are not out of the realm of possibility,” said David Stooksbury, UGA state climatologist. “In middle Georgia, lows in the low teens to single digits are expected, while the mountains can expect lows around zero or below.”
Associated with the variable nature of this winter’s weather, Stooksbury says cold periods will be separated by relative mild periods.
“It will seem as if the air temperature is on a roller coaster,” he said.
Precipitation is expected to be near normal, but “because of the variability in temperatures, more than normal snow [fall] would not be a surprise,” he said.
The amount of snow depends on the right combination of cold air and moisture. With more variable conditions, the likelihood of the necessary combination for snow occurring is increased.
Unlike recent years, neither El Nino or La Nina weather patterns are expected to develop this fall and winter. Without either pattern, the atmosphere is considered to be in a neutral pattern.
“Under the neutral weather pattern, the southeast is more easily invaded by cold air from Canada,” said Stooksbury. “However, Georgia is far enough south that the cold air is usually modified within a few days.”
With more Canadian cold fronts expected this fall and winter, the likelihood of severe weather including thunderstorms and tornados is higher.
Severe weather during the fall and winter is common across the state.
“In Georgia, severe weather can occur at any time,” he said. “Tornado outbreaks at night are just as likely as during the day.”
Stooksbury says he views the purchase of a NOAA weather radio as a wise investment to help insure your family’s personal safety.
“An inexpensive NOAA weather radio can warn of impending danger as well as give updated weather conditions and forecasts,” he said.
Farmers and gardeners alike should plan ahead for the up-coming weather conditions.
“Agricultural producers and home gardeners should plan for high variability in fall and winter temperatures,” said Stooksbury. “Late in the winter, the primary concern will be plants breaking dormancy before the last hard freeze.”
Because of the expected cold weather extremes, energy demand for heating is expected to be high this fall and winter, too, he added.
(David Emory Stooksbury is the state climatologist and a professor of engineering and atmospheric sciences in the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.) |
Organize your professional network. Keep all of your contacts in one place and streamline your outreach and follow up. For Valorant, LoL, R6 and more from newsworker.ru Mastfuyi Network Cable Tester, Cable Tracer with Probe Tone, RJ11 RJ45 Line Finder, Wire Tracker Multifunction, Ethernet LAN Network Cat5 Cat6 Cable. Tracker Network. Insights to evolve your game and so much more. Tracker Network is the leading network of community run gaming stats sites in the world. Use this endpoint to get the network-level trackers for your specified app. Before you begin. To use this endpoint, you need an Adjust API token. Follow the.
Tracker here. Submit a Story. Search Stories Network (GEN) Editors Lab, News Organizations: The Tracker, Co-operative News, CoLab Radio, Coda Story. Who's connected to your network? Track users and endpoint devices by MAC and IP address, and verify how switches and ports are being used with SolarWinds. Easily switch between games with the tap of a button. This stats tracker is the ideal companion to keep an eye on your performance. Every game we support has. Network Asset Tracker Pro SE to scan all computers in your network. ⚛ Hardware Inventory ⚛ Software Inventory ⚛ Get complete information about operating. However, Google to avoid legal problems, is holding back the find my network launch until Apple is ready to let the Apple find my network. I plug their names into this networking spreadsheet to track people I want have follow-up conversations with. That way I don't have to refer back to their. We track R6 Stats on Xbox, Playstation and Uplay/Steam! We track all the R6 stats available, leave your page open to auto-refresh and capture R6 match history. Since as far back as , Tracker have been leading the way in the field of vehicle tracking and car telematics. In that time there have been over 1 million. Features & Benefits: · Advanced Cable Tracker · Trace Network Cables · Continuity Check · Cable Length Meter · PoE Test · Port Blinking · NCV induction pen. About this app. arrow_forward. Tracker Network is the preferred stats tracker app for Valorant players around the world. Our mobile app has been thoughtfully. Read reviews, compare customer ratings, see screenshots, and learn more about iHTTP Tracker -Network monitor. Download iHTTP Tracker -Network monitor and.
Tracker Network LLC | followers on LinkedIn. Tracking leaderboards & stats of over million players worldwide in top competitive titles. Use this tracker for your stats in games like Valorant, R6 Siege, League of Legends, Apex Legends and many more with Tracker Network (newsworker.ru). Network Cable Tester, Cable Tracer with Probe Tone, RJ11 RJ45 Line Finder, Wire Tracker Multifunction, Ethernet LAN Network Cat5 Cat6 Cable Maintenance. AirCard is the first card-sized tracker in the world with an integrated digital business card, working exclusively with Apple Find My network. Automatically discover network devices connected to your network. Detect issues, receive alerts, and create reports using SolarWinds User Device Tracker. The Tracker Network. Since BackTrack began operations, it has proved to be a highly effective program with sustainable long-term results. Thanks to this success. Simple Networking Tracker This base is designed to track a wide network to ensure you stay on top of the connections you've made or want to make. We track all the Fortnite stats available, leave your page open to auto-refresh and capture all of your Fortnite matches. We track more Fortnite players than. Network Asset Tracker is a comprehensive network inventory solution that enables you to scan all the nodes of your network with just one click.
Tracking new Rivian Adventure Network stations, service locations and more | Note: we are not officially associated with @Rivian | -0—— Sign into The Tracker Network with your TRN Account. Remember Me. IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Network Infrastructure Tracker® provides a quantitative view of key network infrastructure technologies. All markets are further. Analysys Mason's Private LTE/5G networks tracker tracks the deployment of private LTE and 5G networks worldwide. gg's Battlefield Stats Tracker is a Tracker Network project. newsworker.ru provides Battlefield stats, as well as global and regional leaderboards for players. |
Blackjack is one of the most preferred gambling enterprise video games worldwide, and with the rise of online Sportwetten anbieter mit deutscher lizenz gaming, it has actually ended up being much more available. As an enthusiastic blackjack gamer, you may want checking out the globe of Neteller gambling enterprises. This post will act as your best guide to Neteller gambling establishments blackjack, providing you with all the essential information to have a satisfying and effective pc gaming experience.
Neteller is an extensively approved e-wallet that enables you to make protected deals online. Several on the internet gambling enterprises accept Neteller as a settlement technique, giving you with a hassle-free way to down payment and withdraw funds. Integrating the advantages of Neteller with the exhilaration of playing blackjack can take your gaming experience to the following degree.
Why Select Neteller Online Casinos for Blackjack?
There are a number of reasons Neteller gambling enterprises are an excellent option for blackjack gamers:
- Protection: Neteller gives an extra layer of protection for your monetary purchases. By using Neteller, you don’t require to share your financial institution details or charge card information with the on-line casino site, lowering the risk of fraud.
- Benefit: Neteller allows for quick and problem-free down payments and withdrawals. You can quickly manage your funds and transfer money to your gambling enterprise account within mins.
- Wide Availability: Many trusted online casino sites accept Neteller as a repayment approach. This offers you a vast array of options when picking where to play blackjack, ensuring you can locate an online casino that suits your preferences.
- Special deals: Some Neteller casino sites offer unique promotions and perks for gamers who use Neteller as their repayment method. Making the most of these deals can improve your blackjack experience.
Exactly How to Get Going with Neteller Casino Sites Blackjack
Getting going with Neteller casino sites blackjack is an uncomplicated process. Follow these actions to begin your pc gaming journey:
- Produce a Neteller Account: Go to the Neteller site and sign up for a complimentary account. Give the required details and finish the registration process.
- Fund Your Neteller Account: Once your Neteller account is established, you require to include funds to it. You can do this by connecting your checking account or charge card to your Neteller account.
- Choose a Neteller Gambling Establishment: Research and choose a respectable online gambling enterprise that accepts Neteller as a settlement method. Think about variables such as game variety, consumer assistance, and user testimonials.
- Create an Account at the Chosen Online Casino: See the on-line gambling establishment’s website and develop an account. Complete the required details and confirm your account if required.
- Make a Down payment: After creating your gambling enterprise account, browse to the cashier section and pick Neteller as your favored settlement method. Get in the quantity you desire to down payment and comply with the motivates to complete the transaction.
- Insurance claim Perks: If Casas de apuestas con bitcoin the gambling establishment provides any perks or promotions for Neteller individuals, make certain to assert them before starting your blackjack gameplay. These perks can offer you with extra funds to have fun with.
- Begin Playing Blackjack: When your down payment is processed, browse to the blackjack section of the online casino and choose a blackjack game that fits your preferences. Place your bets and enjoy the exhilaration of playing blackjack.
- Withdraw Your Earnings: When you prepare to squander your profits, go to the gambling establishment’s cashier section and pick Neteller as your withdrawal technique. Go into the amount you want to withdraw and comply with the directions to finish the deal.
Tips for Playing Blackjack at Neteller Casino Sites
Playing blackjack at Neteller casinos can be a thrilling experience. Here are some suggestions to enhance your gameplay:
- Pick the Right Gambling Enterprise: Select a reliable online gambling enterprise with a wide variety of blackjack video games. Search for factors such as high payment portions, reasonable gameplay, and positive individual evaluations.
- Exercise Basic Approach: Acquaint yourself with fundamental blackjack method to optimize your opportunities of winning. Discover when to strike, stand, increase down, or split based upon your hand and the supplier’s upcard.
- Handle Your Bankroll: Set a budget for your blackjack sessions and stick to it. Stay clear of chasing losses and understand when to walk away if you’re on a losing streak.
- Make Use Of Rewards: Keep an eye out for special promos and benefits used by Neteller casino sites. These can give you with added funds or cost-free spins, providing you extra chances to win.
- Play Live Supplier Blackjack: If you like a more immersive and genuine blackjack experience, try playing online supplier blackjack at Neteller gambling establishments. Interact with genuine suppliers with an online video clip stream, including an extra degree of enjoyment to your gameplay.
Neteller online casinos blackjack offers a protected, convenient, and thrilling gaming experience for blackjack lovers. By picking Neteller as your preferred settlement approach, you can appreciate the advantages of problem-free deals and special bonuses. Adhere to the steps described in this guide to get going with Neteller casinos blackjack and take advantage of your on-line blackjack sessions. Bear in mind to play properly and always have fun! |
The one person who loves cheesecake more than me is my mother-in-law. And with her coming to visit, I made the decision to thoroughly investigate which cheesecake shops in New York City offer the best cheesecake.
Having tasted them all, I’ve rated them according to their flavor, consistency, and my overall impression of the bakery. Instead of gate-keeping, I thought I’d write this short article to help any fellow connoisseurs out there!
Visiting New York City? If you haven’t decided where to stay (yet) check out our helpful guide on Where to Stay in New York City (10 Best Neighborhoods +3 to Avoid). Don’t have time? Here’s our favorite hotel in NYC, hands down.
Best Cheesecake in NYC
Table of Contents: New York City Cheesecake Spots
Table of Contents: Where to Find the Best Cheesecake in New York City
- Best Cheesecake in NYC
- The One Cheesecake in NYC to Avoid
- Best Cheesecake in New York City (Post Summary)
- Best NYC Cheesecake (Helpful Map)
Posh Pop Bakeshop
New York City is land for innovation, and Posh Pop Bakeshop is remaking all your favorite sweet treats but gluten-free. Committed to the belief that desserts should be inclusive for everyone, regardless of dietary restrictions, they have mastered the art of crafting some of the best cheesecakes in NYC.
The heavenly treats come in a variety of flavors including ube, peanut butter, and strawberry shortcake. As enticing as they are, the best flavor I’ve found is the Funfetti Cheesecake – a tried and true Posh Pop favorite.
You’d think it’s going to be too sweet, but the beloved NYC cheesecake is perfectly balanced. The richness of the cheesecake is adorned in a vibrant slew of colors and flavors, creating a dance party in your mouth with every bite.
Since its opening in 1996, Magnolia Bakery has become an essential pit stop for any first-time visitor. While the bakery initially gained national fame for its divine banana pudding, its menu extends beyond cupcakes and puddings. Offering a wide range of desserts, one of the most notable options is the outstanding cheesecakes.
The cheesecakes are celebrated for their exceptional quality, rich flavors, and luscious textures. The beloved dessert comes in five flavors: vanilla bean, red velvet, key-lime, caramel pecan, and (my favorite) blueberry.
I love savoring my steak. The still-dripping juicy bites of tender goodness are worth taking your time, but at Gallaghers Steakhouse I can’t help but stuff my face to get to dessert quicker.
The steakhouse makes some of the best cheesecake in NYC! They only offer a traditional New York slice to compliment your hearty meal. Only having one option makes sense, considering Gallaghers is a classic establishment impressing with the quality of food, not the quantity.
The ability to have a phenomenal dinner followed by a tasty treat makes Gallaghers Steakhouse a premier date-night destination, especially if you’re in search of the best cheesecake in NYC.
Little Cupcake Bakeshop
Since opening in Brooklyn in 2005 it’s been a shot to the top for Little Cupcake Bakeshop. Renowned for making the best cupcakes in America, they also make some of the best cheesecakes in NYC. With sweet treats this addicting it’s no wonder celebrities will brave the public eye for a bite.
The NYC cheesecake comes in tiramisu, cookies & cream, strawberry, and white chocolate raspberry flavors. If you’re lucky they’ll have a seasonal flavor that you can pair with a classic (you know, one for now one for later).
The shop has three locations, one in Bay Ridge, another in Prospect Heights, and a sole location in Manhattan in SoHo. The best cheesecake in NYC is always within reach thanks to the wide availability!
Martha’s Country Bakery
Martha’s Country Bakery has become one of the best bakeries in Brooklyn thanks to good old-fashioned hard work. In a world where everyone is trying to create the next best thing, Martha’s is staying true to the classics but executing them extremely well. This includes some of the best cheesecake in NYC.
Made fresh and on-site using quality ingredients, the NYC cheesecake is consistently a home run. Part of being the best in reliability, and Martha’s Country Bakery is old faithful in the world of sweets. In fact, this year they’re celebrating their 50th anniversary in business. It’s safe to say Martha’s Country Bakery has a bit of experience making tasty treats.
Plus I’ll add that Martha’s Country Bakery also has a generous amount of different styles of cheesecakes. With 10 different flavors the hard part isn’t finding the best cheesecake in NYC, it’s deciding what to order.
Keki Modern Cakes
Take everything you think you know about cheesecake and toss it out the window. Keki’s bouncy cheesecake is one of the most unique you’ll find in NYC. It’s silky, it’s airy, it’s perfect. But the cheesecake is not the only thing that dances. After one bite you’ll be busting out your happy moves and jiggling in harmony, enjoying each bite more than the last.
Since opening in 2014, Mah-Ze-Dahr has risen to the top of most “best bakeries in NYC” lists within a mere seven years. No easy feat in a city chock-full of bakeries and steep competition. They make some of the best cheesecake in NYC, which is reason alone to visit.
The owner, Umber Ahmad is a James Beard Award semi-finalist (a huge deal in the culinary world) who left the lofty confines of the financial world to pursue her dream of baking. She’s lovingly called a banker-turned-baker, and let me tell you — we are all better for it, she’s incredibly talented.
The cheesecake is incredibly light (which has fooled me into eating more than I should have) and has a tasty, lemon zest with every bite. It’s refreshing, which can’t be said of most rich cheesecakes in NYC.
Little Grace Bakery
Little Grace Bakery is a baking powerhouse, with more than 2,700 reviews on Google and a 4.5 star rating. I had to see what the hype was about and so I visited, shocked to learn that they make some of the best cheesecake in NYC.
The secret is in a blend of two cultures and two flavors. By combining New York cheesecake and Japanese soufflé cheesecake, Little Grace Bakery makes Basque Burnt Cheesecakes (they didn’t invent it, though). By cooking the cake at an insanely hot temperature they’re able to give it a caramelized, burnt exterior and a creamy interior. Each bite is a flavor bomb that sets off fireworks in your mouth.
The unique New York City cheesecake is a fan favorite, and now Little Grace Bakery even ships the cake through Goldbelly. If you’re shopping for the best cheesecake in NYC you can enjoy it anywhere in the country.
Veniero’s Pasticceria & Caffe
Veniero’s Pasticceria has been around since 1894, (yes you read that correctly). They truly don’t make ’em like they used to! This old-school Italian bakery is family-owned and operated, over 120 years later.
What originally started as a pool hall serving espresso and candy, eventually shifted from billiards to baked good. Using fresh ingredients, this East Village bakery has kept folks coming back for generations.
They make some of the best cheesecake in NYC, both in a classic New York slice and an Italian variation. If you order the Italian version you’ll enjoy a ricotta-based filling that will have you crawling over the counter for more. And if you need a full-sized cake for the party you’re having next week? Guess what, Veniero’s has you covered. They even ship nationwide, so you can enjoy the best cheesecake in NYC no matter where you are.
S & S Cheesecakes
If you take the 1 train north, all the way up to the second to last stop, you’ll be a stone’s throw away from some of the best cheesecake in NYC. S & S Cheesecakes has been a local favorite for more than 60 years.
Still, family owned and operated you’ll find a time-tested recipe has kept locals wrapped around their fingers. If I’m honest, the cheesecake doesn’t look like much. You wouldn’t assume it’s some of the best cheesecake in NYC solely based on looks, but it more than makes up for it with flavor.
Interesting tidbit: Fred Schuster, founder and owner of S & S Cheesecakes, was born in Nazi Germany in 1925 and moved to New York at 16 years old in 1941. He opened S & S Cheesecakes in 1960 and still works at the bakery.
Eileen’s Special Cheesecake
A fan favorite since 1974, Eileen’s Special Cheesecake is a beloved NYC institution. As the name suggests, they make some of the most popular cheesecake in NYC and I’m proud to say I’ve fallen under their spell.
Founded by a mom who now has help from her two daughters, Eileen’s is a woman-owned business we can all be proud of. And the work speaks for itself, they don’t only make some of the best cheesecake in NYC, Food & Wine ranked them as some of the best in America.
Unlike most New York cheesecakes that are dense and rich, Eileen’s is fluffy, airy and soft. Biting into a slice is such a joy, I bring all of my fellow cheesecake loving friends here to share the fun.
And when it comes to variety Eileen’s Special Cheesecake has mastered more than one recipe. Coconut, salted caramel and pineapple are some of my favorites but there’s more than 15 kinds.
The One Cheesecake in NYC to Avoid
Junior’s Cheesecake has been a New York City institution since 1950, but I can’t recommend it in good faith. True, its iconic flashing lights and various locations draw in a lot of tourists, but the cheesecake falls short.
It’s inconsistent, and more times than not dry and crumbly. I feel the company is riding the coattails of its former glory, and at the time of writing is one of the biggest tourist traps in New York City.
Best Cheesecake in New York City (Post Summary)
- Posh Pop Bakeshop
- Magnolia Bakery
- Gallaghers Steakhouse
- Little Cupcake Bakeshop
- Martha’s Country Bakery
- Keki Modern Cakes
- Junior’s Cheesecake
- Little Grace Bakery
- Veniero’s Pasticceria & Caffe
- S & S Cheesecakes
- Eileen’s Special Cheesecake
Further Reading for Desserts in New York City
Delicious Cookies in NYC: 10 Tantalizing New York City Cookies (Worth the Wait)
Chocolate Cake in NYC: 10 Top-Tier Chocolate Cakes in New York City (You Won’t Want to Miss)
Best Birthday Cakes in NYC: 10 Best Birthday Cakes in New York City (Local’s Discuss)
Donuts in NYC: 15+ Best Doughnuts in New York City (Worth the Calories)
Iconic Spots in NYC Everyone Needs to Try
Best Pizza in NYC: 15 Best Pizza Joints in New York City
Iconic Restaurants in NYC: 10 Iconic New York City Restaurants Every Local Needs to Try
Mouthwatering Bagels in NYC: 15 BEST Bagels in New York City
Unbelievable Brunch Spots in NYC: 18 Prime Brunch Spots in New York City Worth the (Inevitable) Wait
Best NYC Cheesecake (Helpful Map)
And there you have it, our list of the best Cheesecake in NYC. As always, don’t hesitate to let us know if we missed anything. Cheers! |
19-year-old Isabelle Strahan, who is the daughter of Michael Strahan, has been undergoing a grueling health battle. Recently, the family shared another unexpected turn her cancer battle took.
Keep reading to know what happened…
Isabelle Strahan is currently undergoing her first round of chemotherapy for brain cancer. The 19-year-old is the daughter of Good Morning America co-anchor Michael Strahan. She has been documenting her battle against cancer with vlogs. She began her cancer battle series after she had a large medulloblastoma in her cerebellum removed last October.
She explained in a video how she had been in a hospital for three days, she said, “I’ve just been getting a lot of fevers,” she explained in the video. “If you get a fever over 100.4, you have to go in.”
Her three days in the hospital were quite tough on her. During the stay, she underwent a blood transfusion, an MRI, and her chemo port was cleaned. She shared how it was “really painful,” and she was glad to be out of the hospital, writing “Get me outta here!” in the video.
But just less than 12 hours later, she was back in the hospital.
“I catfished everyone,” she joked in the vlog. “I got a fever of 102 and had to come back in. So we’re trying to figure out what’s wrong but no one can find out what’s wrong.”
“This is the worst fever I think I’ve had,” she shared. “I don’t feel as horrible as I did the first time. I just have a really bad headache so I thought nothing of it and now we’re in the ER.”
“I don’t feel great. I don’t feel horrible,” Isabella said. “I’ve felt worse but I don’t feel good. I feel like I can barely walk now.” Her father’s girlfriend Kayla Quick can be heard saying in the background how she had been walking in the hospital just two days ago, to which Isabella commented, “It’s really declined.”
Unfortunately, that night, Isabella vlogged an unpleasant surprise. She updated everyone that she had to undergo an unexpected surgery to drain fluid from the back of her head.
“I have surgery last minute now to drain fluid from the back of my head,” she said in the video. “So they’re just going to stick a needle in my head and drain it.”
“I’ll be under anesthesia,” she told the camera, “but still very not what I planned to do because I didn’t plan on coming back to the hospital.”
“The last three days have been a little rough because she had a fever that kind of comes and goes,” the 52-year-old Straha told his co-anchors about his daughter. “I had to take her to the hospital and thought she’d come home a few hours later. …It’s been three days, but hopefully, she’ll be home today.”
The former NFL star shared that the side effects of chemotherapy are something they ‘expected’ but nonetheless have been difficult.
“It is tough to see her go through it, but I know she’s a tough young lady and she’s going to make it through it,” he added.
Michael also shared how much he and his daughter appreciated the support they had gotten from everyone; friends, family, and fans.
“I think, for her, so many people have reached out and said, ‘I’m glad you’re doing this,’ ‘Thank you for doing this,’ ‘This has really helped us,’ and all that support that she is getting from people she doesn’t know, on top of people that she does know, has kept her in a very positive space,” he said to his co-anchors. “So thank you to everybody.”
We are wishing Isabelle Strahan a speedy recovery and send her and her family support during this difficult time. Share this with others so they can support the family too! |
Listen to audio from NFPA Journal’s interview with Erin
Baumgartner. In this clip, Baumgartner discusses some of the
projects her lab at MIT, the Senseable City Lab, is working on and
why first responders should care.”
The NFPA Podcast is the place for safety professionals to stay up to speed on the fast-paced world of electrical, fire, and life safety. Hear in-depth conversations with people out in the field about how they are confronting new challenges and staying on top of emerging technologies to keep the world safe. Listen the second and fourth Tuesday of every month.
Email [email protected] to send feedback or recommend a topic for future episodes. |
Like a lot of people, I hate the sound of my own voice. It doesn’t sound like what I imagine it to, and that always freaks me out. Day 7 of THE TRAJECTORY OF DREAMS book tour plays on my weird self-loathing–by offering a video reading! What better way to get over all that, right?
Head over to Jamie Grey’s website to behold the splendor of me doing a reading from the novel…and enter to win a 2-chapter manuscript critique! Woohoo! |
Mr. Francis Bartholomew Chima, the People’s Democratic party (PDP) candidate for the House of Representatives, in Ajeromi/Ifelodun Federal constituency, Lagos State, has asked a Lagos Federal High Court to dismiss suit filed by All Progressive Congress (APC), seeking his disqualification in the 2023 general election.
APC and his candidate, Mr. Paul Adeboye Kalejaiye, who is also seeking election into the same seat, have dragged Francis before the court, challenging his emergency as the PDP’s candidate, in the coming general election, on the ground that the party’s primary election, which produced him, was not in conformity with the Section 84(13) of the new electoral Act.
APC and Kalejaiye in their suit marked FHC/L/CS/1316/2022, filed, by their counsel, Mr. Lawal Pedro (SAN) listed Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and People’s Democratic Party (PDP), as Francis’ co-respondents.
Lawal (SAN) while moving his clients’ motion on Wednesday, urged the court for the following reliefs; “a declaration that by virtue of the provision of Section 84 (1) of the Electoral Act 2022, the second respondent (PDP), when seeking to nominate a candidate to contest against the applicants the 2023 general election for the Ajeromi Ifelodun Federal Constituency of Lagos State seat in the National Assembly, has an obligation to hold primary election for aspirants from its party to elect a candidate.
“A declaration that by virtue of the provisions of section 84 (13) of the Electoral Act 2022, the nomination of the third respondent (Francis) as a candidate of the second respondent (PDP) to contest against the applicants in the 2023 general election for the Ajeromi Ifelodun Federal Constituency of Lagos State seat in the National Assembly is null and void, for failure of the second respondent to comply with the provisions of Sub Section 1 of Section 84 of the Act to conduct primary election for his nomination as a candidate
“A declaration that the second respondent has no valid candidate to contest against the applicants the 2023 general election for the Ajeromi Ifelodun Federal Constituency Lagos State seat in the National Assembly.
“A declaration that the third respondent (Francis) is not entitled and has no right to contest against the applicants in the 2023 general election for the Ajeromi Ifelodun Federal Constituency Lagos State seat in the National Assembly. And a declaration that by virtue of the provisions of section 84(13) of the Electoral Act 2022, the first respondent (INEC) has a public duty and obligation not to include the name of the third respondent as a candidate of the second respondent to contest against the applicants the 2023 general election for the Ajeromi Ifelodun Federal Constituency of Lagos State seat in the National Assembly.
“A order of perpetual injunction restraining the first respondent, its servants, agents and howsoever from recognizing or including the name of the third respondent as a candidate to contest against the applicants the 2023 general election for the Ajeromi Ifelodun Federal Constituency of Lagos State seat in the National Assembly.”
However, the PDP candidate in his preliminary objections to the suit, filed and argued by his team of lawyers led by Mr. Emeka Ozoani and Professor Joseph Abugu, both SANs, asked the court to dismiss the suit, for been frivolous, vexatious and an abuse of Court process, as the same have been caught by the limitation of time within which to file Pre-election matters under section 285(9) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 as amended.
The two senior lawyers, apart from asking the court to dismiss the suit having been caught by statute of limitation, also asked the court and to decline jurisdiction in entertaining it and to award a substantial cost of N10 million, against the APC and Kalejaiye.
The PDP candidate in his affidavit in support of the preliminary objections stated that he was an aspirant in the INEC’s Primary elections scheduled for May, 23 and 24, 2022 in the Federal Constituencies in Lagos State to select and nominate 1st Defendant’s candidate for the Ajeromi/Ifelodun Federal Constituency of Lagos State into the Federal House of Representatives Elections 2023.
He stated that upon his expression of interest to serve in the Federal House of Representations, he purchased, filled and submitted the requite Expression of Interest Form as well as the Nomination Form issued by the INEC for the Ajeromi/ Ifelodun Federal Constituency. And the he was duly screened by a Panel constituted by the INEC and issued a Certificate of Provisional Clearance to contest in the primaries of the INEC, for the purpose of selecting the candidate for the Ajeromi/Ifelodun Federal Constituency.
He stated that he duly completed and submitted to the first defendant, INEC Form EC 13D: Nomination Form for Member, House of Representatives. And that INEC scheduled three days: May 22, 23 and 24, 2022 for the conduct of all its Primaries into the Federal Constituencies in Lagos State.
He stated that the said Primaries election was supervised and closely monitored by the INEC’s National, State and Local Government officers, representatives of the Nigerian Police, Department of State Security and members of the Press. And that the said Primary election was held and conducted in a peaceful and serene environment devoid to any scintilla of rancor, conflict or violence. It was accordingly adjudged by all party faithfuls, and the delegates to be the fairest and freest primary elections in Ajeromi/Ifelodun Federal constituency of Lagos state in recent times.
In a 36 paragraph affidavit deposed to by Chima, the third respondent himself, listed other candidates who participated in the primary as; Dr. Oladipupo Diriwari, Hon. Rita Orji Odichi and Mrs. Ezeude Emilia.
He averred that Hon. Orji voluntary withdrew from the Primaries but nonetheless received some votes from the delegates. He noted that even though the plaintiff’s name was in the ballot for the Primaries, she had voluntarily withdrawn and was not present at the Primaries even though her agents attended.
He stated that upon the count of recorded votes, he won the election with 22 Votes as opposed to his three contenders who scored as follows: Dr. Diriwari (3 votes); Hon. Rita Orji (4 votes) and Mrs. Ezeude (3 votes). Whilst one (1) vote was voided. The Result of the election as recorded in the 1st Defendant’s Result Sheet with No. 0410 is attached and marked Exhibit EE1.
“I also rely on Certified True Copies of the INEC Monitors |
Two hundred and one residents of Sharada Quarters, Kano, were on Friday hospitalised after inhaling chemicals from a cylinder dismantled by metal scrappers.
The victims were rushed to Murtala Muhammad Specialist Hospital, Sharada Industrial Hospital and Ja’en Hospital, for urgent medical attention.
The Kano Territorial Coordinator of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), Dr Nuradeen Abdullahi, confirmed the incident to NAN in Kano.
“The cylinder chemical explosion occurred on Friday at about 4:00 p.m., at Sharada Industrial Area.
“The victims were suffocated and unconscious,” he said.
A witness, Sani Muhammad, said the victims collapsed and became unconscious after inhaling toxic substance from the cylinder dismantled by some metal scrappers.
He said the chemicals contained in the cylinder escaped into the air and made those who inhaled it to become unconscious.
The Chief Medical Director of Murtala Muhammad Specialist Hospital, Dr Hussaini Muhammad, said they received over 70 victims out of which, 65 were now in stable condition.
“Thirty-five victims received treatment at Sharada Industrial Hospital and 96 at Ja’en Hospital,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Hajiya Sadiya Faruk, has sent a representative to visit the victims at the hospital.
She was represented by the Humanitarian Affairs Permanent Secretary, Dr Nasir Sani-Gwarzo.
The minister commended the hospitals managements, NEMA, SEMA and the Nigerian Red Cross, for their support to the victims during the incident.
She assured that the ministry would support the victims.
NEMA, Nigerian Red Cross, Kano State Emergency Management Agency were part of the rescue team. |
- By default, Windows audio quality can be technically inferior as has been shown in this measurement.
- ASIO drivers or similar can improve audio output significantly by bypassing Windows resampling and other not-so-well implemented audio processing stages.
This post arose as a consequence of testing the USB-input of H-DAC. Its PCM2707C-circuit is capable of “only” 48 kHz / 16-bit audio so I was not expecting superb measurement results but was still amazed how bad they actually were. This is purely a technical inspection but the differences are significant so I can easily imagine some golden ears can spot the difference.
Take a look at the spectrum below showing 997 Hz 0 dBFS signal played with foobar2000. This signal is generated in foobar with 48 kHz sample rate and Windows sound device is set to 48 kHz / 16-bit output. You would imagine there was no resampling and output would be quite clean, if not bit-perfect. Well, that is far from clean. And the results are even worse if sample rate is set to 44.1 kHz. Obviously there is some resampling or whatever and the implementation is very poor, likely to achieve faster execution. THD+N level of the signal below is -78 dBV which is quite bad number for a modern digital audio device.
Before I pointed my finger at Windows, I spend hours trying to figure out what is wrong with the PCM2707C circuit in my H-DAC. I took my miniDSP miniStreamer (as it was the only USB to digital audio gadget I had besides my H-DAC) to my workplace and investigated the issue with APx585 audio analyser. I hooked the miniStreamer to the APx via S/PDIF and played sine tones with foobar and the results are seen below. These are 48 kHz / 24 bits signals measured in digital domain, USB to S/PDIF, so all we see is actually present in the signal, there is no analog conversion.
997 Hz -100 dBFS signal. This is a noise floor test. All good. We have tiny signal coming out from extremely low (24-bit) noise floor. Remember, this is all digital.
After raising the level to -60 dBFS (common signal level for dynamic range test), we see something odd forming although distortion level is still very low – way below analog noise floor.
0 dBFS and the spectrum is almost identical to the analog output seen in H-DAC via USB, thus the odd components are not generated during DA-conversion. Remember this is all digital – from PC to S/PDIF via USB interface. We should not see any distortion, only signal and noise.
At this point it is clear that something is happening in the digital domain and likely before the USB-I2S gadget, namely in Windows. To bypass Windows sound processing, some form of direct connection is required. One such connection is ASIO driver. Although ASIO is generally a feature of professional sound interfaces, ASIO4All is a driver that can be used with any sound device.
Next one is the same as above but with ASIO4All drivers instead of Windows sound driver. Now we have very clean output with only extremely tiny second and fourth harmonics.
Based on this small experiment I would say case closed. Windows has been found guilty.
Below is H-DAC analog output via USB input using ASIO4All drivers. When compared to the first figure, the difference is massive.
Comparing the first and the last FFT image tells a lot. I have tried these with one Windows 7 computer and one Windows 10 computer and with two different USB audio devices: miniStreamer and PCM2707C-based H-DAC. For these tests I used foobar2000 but also tried Windows Media Player and Spotify. Results vary depending on how the test tones are created, what is the sample rate of the file, the setting in Windows, etc. Spotify uses lossy audio codec causing some extra spectral deficiencies. However, the only result that looked good in FFT was achieved with ASIO drivers. Anyway, I still cannot say that what is seen here would always be the case. Maybe some players can perform better, I do not know as I am not expert in Windows audio. And not many are. Therefore, I dare to say that if you want to make sure you are getting the best possible audio, I suggest using ASIO drivers or similar methods to leave Windows mixer, interpolation, etc. out of the equation.
I have used ASIO4All and have to say it is not a perfect solution either. When software with ASIO is used, it reserves the sound device and no other software can use it in the meantime. The device should be released when the ASIO-software is closed or the sound device set to something else. However, it did not work so easily for me and ASIO seemed to reserve the device for good and I could not play anything even after closing the player or changing the sound device – whatever the reason. It may be good to have two sound devices in one PC, for example USB for “audiophile playback” with foobar or similar player, and Toslink for other playback.
References and further reading:
- Headphone addict: Bit perfect playback in foobar tutorial, this is how I set up my ASIO4All drivers in foobar
- Archimago’s Musings: MEASUREMENTS: Windows 10 “Audio Stack” / DirectSound Upsampling, after my own measurements I found this regarding Windows upsampling – and the results are not pleasing
If you have references to more detailed explanation of how Windows audio works, feel free to comment. Also, I would like to hear if some more “hifi” solutions (for example, DAC or streamer from known hifi manufacturer) have dedicated drivers that can bypass Windows audio processing. I would not be happy if I spent my money on a high-end USB audio device and all this would still be happening in Windows. |
Stephen Sera Studio
I am a sculptor, I come from generations of sculptors.
I’ve worked in graphics, industrial design, and as a photographer I spent years in France
where photography and sculpture are both native arts.
Once Back In New York I came home to metal.
I’ve made furniture; architectural ornament; Jewelry,
(selling through the American Museum of Art and Design.)
To a sculptor, it’s all sculpture.
My pieces are each unique and of museum quality, using
techniques from all ages and arts.
My work is my signature. |
"I first requested a Flood Analysis Memo from No Flood Florida where I learned I may be eligible to change the flood zone designation of my home to a low risk. I emailed them a 25-year-old elevation certificate. They quickly worked to get the documents and calculations ready and submit to FEMA. No Flood Florida was able to get the flood zone changed in less than a month. I am no longer required to have a flood insraunce on my home. You guys did an awesome job!" |
In The Current Issue...
Login To: Non-Sport Update's Card Talk
To proceed, you must be a member of this site. Please login or join below.
I am registered on: Non-Sport Update's Card Talk
I am not registered on: Non-Sport Update's Card Talk
Remember me on this site
Powered by Social Strata
Please Wait. Your request is being processed...
Terms of Service
© Non-Sport Update 2013 |
3 Graphs that Show What You Need to Know About Today’s Real Estate Market
The Housing Market has been a hot-topic in the news lately. Depending on which media outlet you watch, it can start to be a bit confusing to understand what’s really going on with interest rates and home prices!
The best way to show what’s really going on in today’s real estate market is to go straight to the data! We put together the following three graphs along with a quote from Chief Economists that have their finger on the pulse of what each graph illustrates.
“The real estate market is thawing in response to the sustained decline in mortgage rates and rebound in consumer confidence – two of the most important drivers of home sales. Rising sales demand coupled with more inventory than previous spring seasons suggests that the housing market is in the early stages of regaining momentum.” – Sam Khater, Chief Economist at Freddie Mac
“A powerful combination of lower mortgage rates, more inventory, rising income and higher consumer confidence is driving the sales rebound.” – Lawrence Yun, Chief Economist at NAR
“Price growth has been too strong for several years, fueled in part by abnormally low interest rates. A mild deceleration in home sales and Home Price Index growth is actually healthy, because it will calm excessive price growth — which has pushed many markets, particularly in the West, into overvalued territory.” – Ralph DeFranco, Global Chief Economist at Arch Capital Services Inc.
These three graphs indicate good news for the spring housing market! Interest rates are low, income is rising, and home prices have experienced mild deceleration over the last 9 months. If you are considering buying a home or selling your house, contact a local real estate professional that can help you understand this data at the local level and its impact on you. |
Our Complete Hair Treatment Bundle (6 Products)
For Normal to Dry Hair
Healthy hair starts with a healthy scalp.
This comprehensive bundle contains everything you need to give your hair and scalp a fresh start. Our classic shampoos and conditioner work together to completely deep-clean and strip your hair of sebum, grease, build-up, and debris from hair styling products. They work together to deliver essential vitamins, minerals, and nutrients that are vital to hair health and growth.
Combining the shampoos and conditioner with our all-natural herbal supplements ensures that all elements for hair growth are available. Anti-Stress works to relieve the body of physical, emotional, and environmental stressors that negatively impact the hair and scalp. Our Healthy Hair supplements target the root causes of thinning hair in men and women–including stress, hormones, and aging. It's packed with key nutrients that are natural antioxidants, antibacterial, and anti-inflammatory agents.
Our Spray-on Shine Serum contains evening primrose oil to keep your hair healthy and shiny. Ingredients like Vitamin A, Keratin, & Argan Oil Extract provide your hair with essential vitamins, nutrients, and minerals to strengthen and protect hair.
- Healthy Hair & Anti-Stress contain natural adaptogens*
- Shampoos and conditioner contain Allium Sativum which is known to help improve hair growth and enhance the strength of hair strands
- 100% drug-free
- Targets the root causes of thinning hair in men and women–including stress, hormones, and aging
- Key vitamins and minerals that are scientifically proven to nourish thinning hair and promote existing hair growth from within
- Natural antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and antifungal properties
- Packed with essential vitamins, minerals, and nutrients to stimulate hair growth
- Delivers key nutrients to the hair and scalp
- For normal to dry hair types
- Non-GMO and no harmful preservatives
- 100% cruelty-free & never tested on animals
- Manufactured at an FDA-registered facility
*Adaptogens increase the state of non-specific resistance in stress and decrease sensitivity to stressors, which results in stress protection, and prolong the phase of resistance (stimulatory effect). Instead of exhaustion, a higher level of equilibrium (the homeostasis) is attained the heterostasis.
Study Credit: Alexander Panossian and Georg Wikman
This bundle contains the following:
Regular price if purchased individually is $158.10 package price $106.95, saving you $55.37
These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Results may vary. |
There is a core difference between professional players and amateurs. Where professionals use psychology and skills, amateurs rely on their emotions and the need to gain as much profit as possible. However, being balanced and using psychological methods is key to your success as a professional casino player.
When you play a casino online or choose the next slot to enjoy, you need to calm your nerves and think about your budget. If you set the budget, have a fixed deposit limit and Gamble responsibly, you will gain much more.
Everybody wants to know how to be a good gambler. So do you want to gamble and win? We know exactly how to do that.
Basic of Psychology
Let us start with the basics of psychology. This science is not only needed when you are playing poker. Psychology is also relevant when you are playing with a slot or any other game in the casino. The more you know about psychology, probability theory, and how casinos might influence how you gamble, the more you are getting as a player.
We have a really good example to inspire you to gamble while using psychology. For instance, when the player uses their knowledge of various psychological methods and plays on trust sites, they can have best casino offers in a few games. It is because they are calm and collected instead of being driven by their emotions. If you want to play online and gamble, you need to realize that you are doing so to win and not lose your money.
What Psychological Methods are Used in the Casino?
There are different psychological methods that casinos are using on you.
- Color scheme: Have you noticed that casinos are always bright, and you look coherent? Everything is done in order to distract your attention from how much money you’re winning or losing.
- Sound design: Music plays a crucial role when it comes to our mental state. Soundesign is specifically important for online casinos as it influences you as a player.
- Free drinks: Even though this point doesn’t include online casinos, real-life ones are very famous for getting you free stuff. You can get drinks, food, or extra Spins. However, never lose your head because of them.
But it doesn’t mean that you cannot use different psychological methods the way casinos usually do.
How Can Psychology Help You Double Your Winnings?
Skills casino players value include:
- Probability theory
- Knowledge of combinatorics
- The basics of psychology
Do you have these skills casinos like so much? Congratulations, you are a professional casino player. Getting all these skills is your answer to how to be a good gambler.
We do advise you to do some preparations even if you have these skills. First and foremost, try setting your budget and deposit. Second of all, time how many minutes or hours do you spend playing. Lastly, never spend money you don’t have right now on your hands.
Overall, if you play responsibly and view gambling as your profession, you can get a lot of wins. Always remember: knowing when to stop is one of the skills casino values.
Conclusions on the Psychology of Gambling
By now you understand the difference between amateurs and professional players. As a professional, you must use psychological techniques in order to win. To do that, you must never be distracted by the glitz and glamor of casinos. You also need to set your budget and time limit. Don’t gamble with something you don’t have.
Moreover, if you stop playing once you double your wins, you will have lower chances to lose that money. It is one of the most important skills casino requires. Know when and where to stop.
Finally, always play responsibly. Casinos, whether online or in real life, always want you to play as much as possible. But setting a goal and sticking to it is your strongest weapon. So test your luck and have fun! |
Archives by date
You are browsing the site archives by date.
By P Gosselin on 30. September 2017
Yet another study has been published showing that regional climate cycles are related to solar activity. The most recent suggest that blizzards in North America are related to solar activity cycles. Blizzard in Kansas. Photo: NOAA – public domain. ========================================== More Blizzards in North America During Solar Weak Phases By Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. […] |
A 26-year-old female presented with acute onset distal paraparesis, upper limb tremor and bilateral facial palsy. Neurophysiology revealed a sensorimotor demyelinating polyneuropathy and lumbar puncture revealed an albuminocytologic dissociation. Neuroaxis MRI revealed bilateral facial nerve and cauda equina enhancement. Initially diagnosed as Guillain-Barré Syndrome, poor response to intravenous immunoglobulin, persistent deterioration, anti-neurofascin-155 antibodies and clinical response to steroid therapy led to diagnosis of acute-onset chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP). CIDP patients with anti-neurofascin-155 antibodies are younger, with distal predominant weakness, tremor, and poor response to intravenous immunoglobulin. Up to 16% can present acutely, however bilateral facial weakness is rare.
- Facial nerve
- Nerve enhancement |
Angel number 77777 is a divine message from your guardian angels reassuring you of your intelligence, wisdom, and skills. Use this angelic sign as the push you need to expand your horizons and seek new experiences with confidence.
The celestial beings sent this number sequence as a reminder to be optimistic when you’re faced with life’s challenges. They want you to let go of negativity and embrace the talented and capable person you are inside.
Approach all aspects of your life with the spirit of hard work, determination, and accepting things as they come. With a positive mindset, you will find the success you desire in this life.
Continue reading to learn more about the power and meaning behind angel number 77777 and the messages it has for you.
Table of Contents
Angel Number 77777 Meaning and Significance
Angel number 77777 gains its meaning and significance from the repetition of the number 7. When a single digit appears multiple times in an angelic numeral, its energy is amplified exponentially.
In numerology, number 7 is highly spiritual and is considered the bridge between human beings and the celestial world. It resonates with the vibrations of spiritual awakening and enlightenment and the power of connection to the divine realm.
This lucky number delivers the message that your guardian angels are always there to offer you divine guidance if you embrace your spiritual side and reach out to them for advice and wisdom.
The number 7 also prompts you to connect with your inner self and find your passion in life. Its message encourages you to nurture your talents and abilities and discover your true life’s purpose.
Angel number 77777 takes the energies of the repeated number 7 and intensifies their meaning. It conveys that it’s time to be brave and step forward into a new chapter in your life.
The angelical beings want you to let go of limiting beliefs about yourself and the world around you. It’s time to leave your comfort zone and seek out new life experiences that allow you to grow and develop as a person.
Through the 77777 angel number, your angels also advise you to have a positive attitude when you experience hardship or challenges. During difficult times, maintain your self-control and have faith in the lessons these obstacles will teach you.
To ensure you remain on the right path for future successes, open yourself up to the power of the Universe. With your angels by your side, you will finally see how far you can go!
What Does Angel Number 77777 Mean Spiritually?
The spiritual significance of angel number 77777 is related to the connection between the Earthly and Heavenly realms.
This numerical sequence is infused with such divine energy, and those who see it are on the right track to receiving blessings, abundance, and more miracles from the celestial beings.
It is also an extremely positive sign indicating that the divine realm wants to offer you guidance and support.
Your angels want you to harness your spiritual energy to connect with your inner voice and intuition and discover your true vision, values, and beliefs.
Commit to spiritual practices such as yoga, prayer, or meditation to forge a deeper connection with yourself and your spirit guides. Through this, you can access your inner wisdom and find the courage to pursue your passions and interests.
What is the Symbolism of Angel Number 77777?
The symbolic message of angel number 77777 highlights the importance of appreciating what you have and accepting everything (and everyone) as they are.
Showing gratitude for what you already possess will help you remove pessimism and negativity from your life. Embracing an optimistic mindset also enables you to focus on fulfilling your life’s mission and achieving your spiritual goals.
Not everything in life will work out the way you want it to, and there will always be external things affecting your life beyond your control. If you can recognize this and learn to accept things as they come, you may become more resilient and capable of overcoming the challenges you face.
Your guardian angel wants you to know that you have everything within you to succeed in life. You have been blessed with intelligence, wisdom, talents, and skills – now it’s time to develop your self-mastery and continue working diligently to realize your greatest ambitions.
Why Do I Keep Seeing Number 77777?
Angel numbers are spiritual symbols sent directly from the divine realm to guide you towards the right life path and help you find your life purpose.
You have seen the number sequence 77777 for a reason, and its presence in your life suggests that it’s time to start believing in yourself and your abilities.
Release yourself from the emotional burden of self-doubt and remove anything from your life that no longer serves to move you forward. While life will never be completely stress-free, undertaking positive efforts to build strength and resilience will help you create a happy life for yourself.
This angelic numeral is a good sign of positive changes to come, and with hard work and focus, you can receive good fortune in this life. You just have to have faith in your abilities and trust that with the right mindset, you can make your dreams come true.
What Does Angel Number 77777 Mean In Love?
The appearance of angel number 77777 will greatly impact your love life as its vibrational energies reveal the importance of a stable and harmonious relationship.
Stability and balance in a relationship facilitate better healing and healthier behaviors, offer you a greater sense of purpose, and make you less responsive to psychological stress.
All these factors play important roles in helping you make full use of your talents and in realizing your goals and ambitions in life.
To achieve harmony in your relationship, provide space for open communication where you both feel comfortable expressing your wants and needs. Spend quality time with your partner and encourage them to pursue their interests and passions.
When conflict arises, be mindful of your response and avoid uncontrolled reactions. You can’t avoid feeling negative emotions when faced with relationship issues, but you can control how you react when they happen.
Allow each other forgiveness and the room to learn from mistakes so you can grow into better partners for one another. If you treat your partner with appreciation and respect for the person they are, you can expect the same from them.
Build your relationship on a solid foundation of love, honesty, and consideration, and you can create a satisfying and happy life together.
The spiritual energy of your angels and the Ascended Masters is infused in the secret meaning and symbolism of the 77777 angel number.
Your angels want to empower you to pursue your passions with self-belief and a positive outlook. They truly believe that you have the inner strength, quick wit, and determination to manifest your desires.
It’s time to take charge of your destiny and harness your own spiritual energy to stop letting fears, doubts, or worries prevent you from achieving your goals.
It’s up to you to dig deep and bring your talents and skills to the surface. You have everything you need within you to realize your dreams and build the life you deserve. |
Issue on organizational structure, in particular hospital structure has suffered a great deal of transformation over the past few decades. The structure not only represents the culture and target, but also exhibits and evaluates the correlation between individuals who work within a hospital, so as to facilitate the productivity and job efficiency (Madden, Courtney, Montgomery, Nash 2006, p.283). Laschinger, Finegan, and Sharmian (2001, p.60) indicate that a reasonable organizational structure has significant impact on promoting work efficiency in hospital, thus better healthcare services can be given to patients. Moreover, it is considerred that the design of organizational structure can be largely affected by different factors, such as organization’s vision, mission, and strategy (Madden et al. 2006, p.272). Consequently, a well-structured health care organization will facilitate self-development, so as to enhance satisfaction on both patients and employee.
1.2 Thesis Statement
A critical analysis of the organizational structure and the relationship to the mission and vision in regards to Concord Repatriation General Hospital in Sydney, Australia.
This paper will be separated into three sections, which contain background information of the health care facility, then critically analyse the organizational structure in relations to its mission, and last but not least, a sound reasonable conclusion and recommendation will be elicited according to analysis.
Background Information of the Health Care Facility
This paper will focus on the critical analysis of Concord Repatriation General Hospital, which is also simply known as Concord Hospital in Sydney, Australia. Concord Hospital represents not only one of the most superior hospitals with the provision of a range of specialty inpatient and outpatient services in Sydney, but also an educational facility for offering training and placement opportunities for medical students. Moreover, the hospital has built up a comprehensive system, which received highly appreciation by Australian Council on Healthcare Standards for providing timely and excellent patients care, in particular, Burns Unit plays a major role across the states (Concord Repatriation General Hospital (CRGH), 2009).
If you need assistance with writing your nursing essay, our professional nursing essay writing service is here to help!Find out more
According to Concord Hospital (2008), the combined mission statement and vision state that “practising clinical excellence, leading in teaching, contributing to health research, responding to the special needs of Veterans, and changing with the needs of the community.” And this can be achieved throughout “taking care of individual patient needs; providing quality services; promoting healthy lifestyles; as well as valuing health care teams (CRGH, 2008).” Thus, from its organizational point of view, the primary or principal goal of Concord Hospital is more consumers concentrated, in order to provide better health care services. For example, a five-year programme finished by the hospital in 2006 in regarding to capital works provides assistance in the expansion of care and services for patients in several areas, such as Aged Care and Rehabilitation, co-locating some specialties outpatient and inpatient services, so as to bring benefits to both patients and non-patients (CRGH, 2008).
Figure 1 illustrates the detailed organizational structure of Concord Hospital. It can be seen that there are five branches under General Manager, which comprise Director of Medicine, Director of Nursing, Director of Corporate and Clinical Support Services, Director Performance and Informatics, as well as Demand Management Unit. The Academic and Research lies alongside with the link of broken line (CRGH, 2008).
Figure 1: The detail organizational structure of Concord Hospital (CRGH, 2008)
3. 1 Critical analyse the hospital organizational structure in relation to its mission
According to Figure 1, the organizational structure of Concord Hospital can be treated as line or functional structure, as it classifies alike disciplines together (Robbins, Bergman, Stagg, Coulter 2006, p.336). It is shown that both its mission accomplishment, and hospital collaborates its structure with mission are more likely to reflect positive employee action (Bart, DeGroote, Bontis, Taggar 2001, p.19). In addition, this organizational structure not only enormously shows the culture and target of the hospital, such as build up Anzac Research Institution, but also offer a clear line of authority, which points out the hierarchy lies within different departments, so as to maximum benefits healthcare services to patients and employee (Madden et al. 2006, p.283).
3.2 The advantages and limitations of the structure for health care delivery
Concord Hospital is more based upon a concept of functional structure. Chain of command, as a concept of organizational design states the authority is developed and ranked from upper level of the hospital to its lower position (Robbins et al. 2006, p.327). According to figure 1, the chart deploys the hierarchy from the advanced to lower level position, for example, Director of Nursing to Assistance in Nursing. Critically speaking, this type of organizational structure shows the ability of economizing expenditure, it can be considerred that this organizational structure not only minimizes the recurrence of employee and capital, but also increases the efficiency in use of resources, so as to deliver better quality of care to patients in a particular treatment unit. By contraries, it cannot be denied that professionals or staff can be isolated under this structure with very limited information in regarding to other departments’ work. Again, the deficiency in exchange of thoughts between employees may induce the downside of quality in healthcare services that provided to patients (University of Western Sydney (UWS)2010, p. 19).
Our nursing and healthcare experts are ready and waiting to assist with any writing project you may have, from simple essay plans, through to full nursing dissertations.View our services
3.3 The key lines of authority and responsibility for achieving organizational goals
The key lines of authority and duty in Concord Hospital to be broken down into several subordinates. According to figure 1 (CRGH, 2008), each level of authorities from upper to lower level has been detailed illustrated under different specialties. It is believed that the authority is generally derived from managerial level, and then tasks are given to employee to complete (Robbins et al. 2006, p.327). In other words, for those who are in higher level have predominant rights than lower level employee. This organizational structure also purely explains the hierarchy of work, and the responsibility of each level(Madden et al. 2006, p.283). For instance, nursing manager has absolute authority and occupies full responsibility in managing nursing related stuff. It can be thought that authorized person needs to utilize resources efficiently and effectively, thus assists in achieve organizational goals via granted lines of authority and responsibility (Chandler 2003, p.48).
3.4 The utility of the structure in relation to the achievement of the organization’s mission and goals
The utility of the structure of an organization should encourage in the achievement of organizational mission and vision. It breaks down organizations’ employee into specific sections, in order to produce harmonious adjustment between each other (Mintzberg, Quinn, Ghoshal 1995, p. 352). It is obviously that Concord Hospital establishes a full range of departments for providing better quality of care to patients. For example, the Centre for Education and Research on Ageing (CERA) links the hospital itself with its teaching university focus on the provision of effective care, and better their living standards among ageing patient group (The University of Sydney, 2010). This accordingly shows the comprehensive quality of care to be given to a specific group of patients in order to enable the hospital missions which are providing quality services to patients, leading in teaching, contributing to health research to be accomplished (CRGH, 2008).
3.5 Aspects of the structure which facilitate or impede performance and potential solutions
Organizational structure can be seen as an effective tool for promoting interaction between various departments within an organization. Also the distribution of responsibility between specialties in the hospital aims to speed the combination of healthcare services among patient (Stoelwinder, Blandford, Perkins 2006, p.319-320). The traditional structure is used by Concord Hospital which classifies same groups of professions into one specialty, it can be seen that this type of structure mainly concentrate on professional training and development, then better quality of care can be given to patient. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the structure affects the provision of efficient healthcare services, as health professions are grouped into different facilities, which leads to the lack of coordination and communication between departments, thus compromise on healthcare to be given to patient. Whereas, some mixed structures can be considered under this circumstance, such as a traditional functional structure mixes with product structure, so as to not only benefits healthcare professions, but also brings much more attention to patient care (Stoelwinder et al. 2006, p. 322).
This paper concentrates on the critical analysis of organizational structure and relationship to mission and vision for Concord Hospital. The hospital is one of the most superior hospitals with the provision of a range of specialty inpatient and outpatient services in Sydney. Concord Hospital has a combined mission statement and vision, and this can be achieved throughout “taking care of individual patient needs; providing quality services; promoting healthy lifestyles; as well as valuing health care teams.”
The organizational structure of Concord Hospital by using line structure shows that its mission accomplishment, and hospital collaborates its structure with mission are more likely to reflect positive employee action. Moreover, it can be considered that this organizational structure minimizes the recurrence of employee and capital, as well as increases the efficiency in use of resources, so as to deliver better quality of care to patients in a particular treatment unit. By contraries, it cannot be denied that professionals or staff can be isolated under this structure with very limited information in regarding to other departments’ work, the lack of communication results in the downside of quality in healthcare services that provided to patients.
The key lines of authority and the duty in Concord Hospital to be broken down into several subordinates. It is believed that for those who are in higher level have predominant rights than lower level employee. Furthermore, the utility of the structure of an organization assists in the achievement of organizational mission and vision. Overall, the structure of Concord Hospital is considerably well designed. It is obviously that the hospital establishes a series of full range departments and specialties for providing better quality of care to patients. The organizational structure in terms of type, authority lines, and structure utility has largely impacts on its organizational mission and vision.
Cite This Work
To export a reference to this article please select a referencing stye below:
Related ServicesView all
DMCA / Removal Request
If you are the original writer of this essay and no longer wish to have your work published on the NursingAnswers.net website then please: |
Our customers report up to 75% reduction in the car line wait time and improved accountability.
CurbSmart is a modern application for schools, camps, afterschool programs, and day care facilities for a safe and efficient student release.
Learn more about CurbSmart, a school dismissal management program that is easy to use and is surprisingly affordable.
How does CurbSmart work for school dismissal?
Families are assigned one placard number per household. Parents or guardians display this number on a hangtag in their rearview mirror as they arrive to the pick-up location. Parents or guardians can check in from their device or administrators can check them in on the CurbSmart app.
Inside dismissal administrators see the numbers and names of the students appear on their device of choice and release the students.
- Manage all types of school dismissal (car, bus, walkers, afterschool dismissal)
- Designed by public & private institutions to fit any dismissal process
- Ease of Use for your Parents & Teachers
- Parent App use is optional
- Improve Student Dismissal Efficiency
- Increase Safety and Security concerns
- Eliminate Communication Breakdowns
- Reduce area Traffic and Congestion
- Works on multiple technology platforms (smartphones, PC’s, tablets)
- Highly rated customer support to help you through it!
- Free parent school dismissal app
- Parents can manage carpools and way home changes
- Guardians ability to check-in with Geofencing
- Aftercare management such as check-in / check-out
- Create arrival questionnaires such as health screenings
- Release from groups anywhere in the facility
- Filter screen to only show students you are responsible for
- Automatically reroute students to a different pickup type
- Create ‘silent’ announcements or ‘all-calls’
- Auto assign pickup location and station
- Verify approved adults for every child
- Create multiple release times
- Verify approved adults submitted by parents
- Add photos of students and parents
- Set classroom schedules for older children
- Reunification messaging for emergencies
- Assign students pickup spots such as cones or colors
- Site license for all users and parents
- Customize every user for ease of users
- Administration panel to manage all settings
“CurbSmart has provided our school community with a reliable product to ensure the safety of our students during the dismissal process. CurbSmart has also shortened the time it takes us to dismiss students each afternoon, providing our staff more time to focus on tasks related to academic achievement.”
“Our campus has experienced a lot of success with CurbSmart. This is our first school year using the online system. The teachers and parents have seen the efficiency during the school dismissal time. CurbSmart is very easy to use and was easy to train the staff on how to use it during dismissal. I am also very satisfied on how quick the CurbSmart representatives are able to answer my questions. Because this is a new system my school is using, I have had numerous questions and glitches to fix, and I have always had a quick response to help with my questions and school issues.”
“CurbSmart was exactly what we were looking for. It allows us to safely dismiss our students in a timely manner. The two most beneficial things CurbSmart offers include a user-friendly tool for our staff to quickly dismiss students and a history log for us to refer back to.” |
Crisis in Israel and Gaza
As conflict escalates, the urgent need for humanitarian assistance intensifies.
DIRECTOR – NETHERLANDS
Kito de Boer is a Dutch consultant, former senior McKinsey director, and former diplomat, having served as Head of Mission of the Office of the Quartet from January 2015 to June 2017. The Quartet is a foursome of nations, international, and supranational entities that mediates between Israelis and Palestinians. He joined McKinsey in London in 1985 before moving to New Delhi in 1993, and then Dubai in 1999. During his time with McKinsey, Kito led the Public Sector and Social Sector practices in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He was a leading member of the McKinsey Center for Government. |
NYC Businesses are still failing cooling tower inspections – even with fully compliant maintenance plans! Don’t let small mistakes lead to huge fines.
You can do all the work of complying with extensive cooling tower regulations in NYC, but if you aren’t documenting the process meticulously, you’ll still fail your cooling tower inspection.
Why do all that work, then get fined as if you weren’t doing it at all?
Protect your business by requesting an internal audit from NYC Cooling Tower Inspections & Services. Our certified cooling tower professionals will conduct a similar inspection as the NYC Cooling Tower Inspectors, including a thorough review of your compliance documentation, so you can see where you are at risk of failing before the real inspectors arrive.
Inspectors come randomly at any point during the year. Ensuring full cooling tower compliance now can protect your business from huge fines for whenever your building is selected for inspection.
Mitigate your risk with the experts at NYC Cooling Tower Inspections and Services. Call us to schedule a FREE consultation today! (718) 799-5204. |
Subsets and Splits