title: Thames Barrier

text: A Thames Barrier flood defence closure is triggered when a combination of high tides forecast in the North Sea and high river flows at the tidal limit at Teddington Lock indicate that water levels would exceed in central London. Though Teddington marks the Normal Tidal Limit, in periods of very high fluvial flow the tidal influence can be seen as far upstream as East Molesey on the Thames.


title: Thames Barrier

text: , there have been 206 flood defence closures. The barrier was closed twice on 9 November 2007 after a storm surge in the North Sea which was compared to the one in 1953. The main danger of flooding from the surge was on the coast above the Thames Barrier, where evacuations took place, but the winds abated a little and, at the Thames Barrier, the 9 November 2007 storm surge did not completely coincide with high tide.


title: Thames Barrier

text: On 20 August 1989, hours after the "Marchioness" disaster, the barrier was closed against a spring tide for 16 hours "to assist the diving and salvage operations".


title: Thames Barrier

text: On 27 October 1997, the barrier was damaged when the dredger MV "Sand Kite" hit one of the piers in thick fog. As the ship started to sink she dumped her 3,300-tonne load of aggregate, finally sinking by the bow on top of one of the barrier's gates, where she lay for several days. Initially the gate could not be closed as it was covered in a thick layer of gravel. A longer-term problem was the premature loss of paint on the flat side of the gate caused by abrasion. The vessel was refloated in mid-November 1997.


title: Thames Barrier

text: The annual full test closure in 2012 was scheduled for 3 June to coincide with the Thames pageant celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II. Environment Agency said the pageant provided "a unique opportunity to test its design for a longer period than we would normally be able to", and performance under conditions of "a higher water level upstream than downstream"; also that the "more stable tidal conditions … in central London … will help the vessels taking part".


title: Thames Barrier

text: The barrier was originally commissioned by the Greater London Council under the guidance of Ray Horner. After the 1986 abolition of the GLC it was operated successively by Thames Water Authority (dissolved 1989) and then the National Rivers Authority until April 1996 when it passed to the Environment Agency.


title: Thames Barrier

text: The barrier was originally designed to protect London against a very high flood level (with an estimated return period of one hundred years) up to the year 2030, after which the protection would decrease, while remaining within acceptable limits. At the time of its construction, the barrier was expected to be used 2–3 times per year. By the mid-2000s it was being operated 6–7 times a year. In the 2010s, the barrier was generally (as a median) closed twice a year but the average is still 6–7 due to the extreme of 50 times in 2013–14.


title: Thames Barrier

text: This defence level allowed for long-term changes in sea and land levels as understood at that time (c. 1970). Despite global warming and a consequently greater predicted rate of sea level rise, recent analysis extended the working life of the barrier until around 2060–2070. From 1982 until 19 March 2007, the barrier was raised one hundred times to prevent flooding. It is also raised monthly for testing, with a full test closure over high tide once a year.


title: Thames Barrier

text: Released in 2005, a study by four academics contained a proposal to supersede the Thames Barrier with a more ambitious 16 km (10 mi) long barrier across the Thames Estuary from Sheerness in Kent to Southend-on-Sea in Essex.


title: Thames Barrier

text: In November 2011, a new Thames Barrier, further downstream at Lower Hope between East Tilbury in Essex and Cliffe in Kent, was proposed as part of the Thames Hub integrated infrastructure vision. The barrier would incorporate turbines to generate renewable energy and include road and rail tunnels, providing connections from Essex to a major new Thames Estuary Airport on the Isle of Grain.


title: Thames Barrier

text: In a January 2013 letter to "The Times", a former member of the Thames Barrier Project Management Team, Dr Richard Bloore, stated that it was not designed with increased storminess and sea level rises in mind, and called for a new barrier to be looked into immediately. The Environment Agency responded that it did not plan to replace the Thames Barrier before 2070, as it was designed with an allowance for sea level rise of per year, which has not happened in the intervening years. At the time, the barrier was around halfway through its designed lifespan. The standard of protection it provides will gradually decline over time after 2030, from a 1-in-1000-year event. The Environment Agency is examining the Thames Barrier for its potential design life under climate change, with early indications being that subject to appropriate modification, the Thames Barrier will be capable of providing continued protection to London against rising sea levels.


title: Thames Barrier

text: Architects Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands and marine engineers Beckett Rankine launched a proposal for a pedestrian and cycle bridge located next to the Thames Barrier; the scheme, called the Thames Barrier Bridge, was promoted as the only location in east London where a low-level opening bridge across the Thames could have relatively moderate opening spans of about .


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, theoretical psychology and philosophy of science, as well as its obvious influence on political philosophy and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Marxist theorist Louis Althusser, for example, defined the philosophy as "class struggle in theory", thus radically separating himself from those who claimed philosophers could adopt a "God's eye view" as a purely neutral judge.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: The philosopher Étienne Balibar wrote in 1996 that "there is no Marxist philosophy and there never will be; on the other hand, Marx is more important for philosophy than ever before." So even the existence of Marxist philosophy is debatable (the answer depends on what is meant by "philosophy"). Balibar's remark is intended to explain the significance of the final line of Karl Marx's 11 "Theses on Feuerbach" (1845), which can be read as an epitaph for philosophy: "The philosophers have only "interpreted" the world, in various ways; the point is to "change" it".


title: Marxist philosophy

text: If this claim (which Marx originally intended as a criticism of German Idealism and the more moderate Young Hegelians) is still more or less the case in the 21st century, as many Marxists would claim, then Marxist theory is in fact the practical continuation of the philosophical tradition, while much of philosophy is still politically irrelevant. Many critics, both non-Marxist and some Marxist philosophers, feel that this is too quick a dismissal of the post-Marxian philosophical tradition.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Much sophisticated and important thought has taken place after the writing of Marx and Engels; much or perhaps even all of it has been influenced, subtly or overtly, by Marxism. Simply dismissing all philosophy as sophistry might condemn Marxism to a simplistic empiricism or economism, crippling it in practice and making it comically simplistic at the level of theory.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Nonetheless, the force of Marx's opposition to Hegelian idealism and to any "philosophy" divorced from political practice remains powerful even to a contemporary reader. Marxist and Marx-influenced 20th century theory, such as (to name a few random examples) the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, the political writing of Antonio Gramsci, and the neo-Marxism of Fredric Jameson, must take Marx's condemnation of philosophy into account, but many such thinkers also feel a strong need to remedy the perceived theoretical problems with orthodox Marxism.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Such problems might include a too-simple economic determinism, an untenable theory of ideology as "false consciousness," or a simplistic model of state power rather than hegemony. So Marxist philosophy must continue to take account of advances in the theory of politics developed after Marx, but it must also be wary of a descent into theoreticism or the temptations of idealism.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Étienne Balibar claimed that if one philosopher could be called a "Marxist philosopher", that one would doubtlessly be Louis Althusser:


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Althusser proposed a 'new definition' of philosophy as "class struggle in theory"... Marxism had proper signification (and original "problematic") "only" insofar as it was the theory of "the" tendency towards communism, and "in view" of its realization. The criteria of acceptance or rejection of a 'marxist' proposition was always the same, whether it was presented as 'epistemological' or as 'philosophical': it was in the act of rendering intelligible a "communist policy", or not." ("Ecrits pour Althusser", 1991, p.98).


title: Marxist philosophy

text: However, "Althusser never ceased to put in question the "images of communism" that Marxist theory and ideology carried on: but he did it in the name of communism itself." Althusser thus criticized the evolutionist image which made of communism an ultimate stage of history, as well as the apocalyptic images which made it a "society of transparence", "without contradiction" nor ideology. Balibar observes that, in the end, Althusser enjoined the most sober definition of communism, exposed by Marx in "The German Ideology": "Communism is "not a state of the future, but the real movement which destroys the existing state of being."."


title: Marxist philosophy

text: There are endless interpretations of the "philosophy of Marx", from the interior of the Marxist movement as well as in its exterior. Although some have separated Marx's works between a "young Marx" (in particular the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844") and a "mature Marx" or also by separating it into purely philosophical works, economics works and political and historical interventions, Étienne Balibar has pointed out that Marx's works can be divided into "economic works" ("Das Kapital", 1867), "philosophical works" and "historical works" ("The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte", the 1871 "Civil War in France" which concerned the Paris Commune and acclaimed it as the first "dictatorship of the proletariat", etc.)


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Marx's philosophy is thus inextricably linked to his critique of political economy and to his historical interventions in the workers' movement, such as the 1875 "Critique of the Gotha Program" or "The Communist Manifesto", written with Engels (who was observing the Chartist movement) a year before the Revolutions of 1848. Both after the defeat of the French socialist movement during Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's 1851 coup and then after the crushing of the 1871 Paris Commune, Marx's thought transformed itself.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Marxism's philosophical roots were thus commonly explained as derived from three sources: English political economy, French republicanism and radicalism, and German idealist philosophy. Although this "three sources" model is an oversimplification, it still has some measure of truth.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: On the other hand, Costanzo Preve (1990) has assigned four "masters" to Marx: Epicurus (to whom he dedicated his thesis, "Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus", 1841) for his materialism and theory of clinamen which opened up a realm of liberty; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from which come his idea of egalitarian democracy; Adam Smith, from whom came the idea that the grounds of property is labour; and finally Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: "Vulgar Marxism" (or codified dialectical materialism) was seen as little other than a variety of economic determinism, with the alleged determination of the ideological superstructure by the economical infrastructure. This positivist reading, which mostly based itself on Engels' latter writings in an attempt to theorize "scientific socialism" (an expression coined by Engels) has been challenged by Marxist theorists, such as Lukacs, Gramsci, Althusser or, more recently, Étienne Balibar.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Marx developed a comprehensive, theoretical understanding of political reality early in his intellectual and activist career by means of a critical adoption and radicalization of the categories of 18th and 19th century German Idealist thought. Of particular importance is Hegel's appropriation of Aristotle's organicist and essentialist categories in the light of Kant's transcendental turn.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Marx builds on four contributions Hegel makes to our philosophical understanding. They are: (1) the replacement of mechanism and atomism with Aristotelean categories of organicism and essentialism, (2) the idea that world history progresses through stages, (3) the difference between natural and historical (dialectical) change, and (4) the idea that dialectical change proceeds through contradictions in the thing itself.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: (a) Hegel adopts the position that chance is not the basis of phenomena and that events are governed by laws. Some have falsely attributed to Hegel the position that phenomena are governed by transcendent, supersensible ideas that ground them. On the contrary, Hegel argues for the organic unity between universal and particular. Particulars are not mere token types of universals; rather, they relate to each other as a part relates to a whole. This latter has import for Marx's own conception of law and necessity.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: (b) In rejecting the idea that laws merely describe or independently ground phenomena, Hegel revives the Aristotlean position that law or principle is something implicit in a thing, a potentiality which is not actual but which is in the process of becoming actual. This means that if we want to know the principle governing something, we have to observe its typical life-process and figure out its characteristic behavior. Observing an acorn on its own, we can never deduce that it is an oak tree. To figure out what the acorn is - and also what the oak tree is - we have to observe the line of development from one to the other.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: (c) The phenomena of history arise from a whole with an essence which undergoes transformation of form and which has an end or telos. For Hegel, the essence of humanity is freedom, and the telos of that essence is the actualization of that freedom. Like Aristotle, Hegel believes the essence of a thing is revealed in the entire, typical process of development of that thing. Looked at purely formally, human society has a natural line of development in accordance with its essence just like any other living thing. This process of development appears as a succession of stages of world history.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Human history passes through several stages, in each of which is materialized a higher level of human consciousness of freedom. Each stage also has its own principle or law according to which it develops and lives in accordance with this freedom. Yet the law is not free-standing. It is delivered by means of the actions of men which spring from their needs, passions, and interests. Teleology, according to Hegel, is not opposed to the efficient causation provided by passion; on the contrary, the latter is the vehicle realizing the former. Hegel consistently lays more stress on passion than on the more historically specifiable interests of men. Marx will reverse this priority.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Hegel distinguishes as Aristotle did not between the application of organic, essentialist categories to the realm of human history and the realm of organic nature. According to Hegel, human history strives toward perfectibility, but nature does not. Marx deepens and expands this idea into the claim that humankind itself can adapt society to its own purposes rather than adapting themselves to it.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Natural and historical change, according to Hegel, have two different kinds of essences. Organic natural entities develop through a straightforward process, relatively simple to comprehend at least in outline. Historical development, however, is a more complex process. Its specific difference is its "dialectical" character. The process of natural development occurs in a relatively straight line from the germ to the fully realized being and back to the germ again. Some accident from the outside might come along to interrupt this process of development, but if left to its own devices, it proceeds in a relatively straightforward manner.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Society's historical development is internally more complex. The transaction from potentiality to actuality is mediated by consciousness and will. The essence realized in the development of human society is freedom, but freedom is precisely that ability to negate the smooth line of development and go off in novel, hitherto unforeseen directions. As humankind's essence reveals itself, that revelation is at the same time the subversion of itself. Spirit is constantly at war with itself. This appears as the contradictions constituting the essence of Spirit.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: In the development of a natural thing, there is by and large no contradiction between the process of development and the way that development must appear. So the transition from an acorn, to an oak, to an acorn again occurs in a relatively uninterrupted flow of the acorn back to itself again. When change in the essence takes place, as it does in the process of evolution, we can understand the change mostly in mechanical terms using principles of genetics and natural selection.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: The historical process, however, never attempts to preserve an essence in the first place. Rather, it develops an essence through successive forms. This means that at any moment on the path of historical change, there is a contradiction between what exists and what is in the process of coming-to-be. The realization of a natural thing like a tree is a process that by and large points back toward itself: every step of the process takes place in order to reproduce the genus. In the historical process, however, what exists, what is actual, is imperfect. It is inimical to the potential. What is trying to come into existence - freedom - inherently negates everything preceding it and everything existing, since no actual existing human institution can possibly embody pure human freedom. So the actual is both itself and its opposite (as potential). And this potential (freedom) is never inert but constantly exerts an impulse toward change.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Marx did not study directly with Hegel, but after Hegel died Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils, Bruno Bauer, a leader of the circle of Young Hegelians to whom Marx attached himself. However, Marx and Engels came to disagree with Bruno Bauer and the rest of the Young Hegelians about socialism and also about the usage of Hegel's dialectic. Having achieved his thesis on the "Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus" in 1841, the young Marx progressively broke away with the Prussian university and its teachings impregnated by German Idealism (Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel).


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Along with Engels, who observed the Chartist movement in the United Kingdom, he cut away with the environment in which he grew up and encountered the proletariat in France and Germany. He then wrote a scathing criticism of the Young Hegelians in two books, "The Holy Family" (1845), and "The German Ideology" (1845), in which he criticized not only Bauer but also Max Stirner's "The Ego and Its Own" (1844), considered one of the founding book of individualist anarchism. Max Stirner claimed that all ideals were inherently alienating, and that replacing God with Humanity, as did Ludwig Feuerbach in "The Essence of Christianity" (1841), was not sufficient. According to Stirner, any ideals, God, Humanity, the Nation, or even the Revolution alienated the "Ego". Marx also criticized Proudhon, who had become famous with his cry "Property is theft!", in "The Poverty of Philosophy" (1845).


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Marx's early writings are thus a response towards Hegel, German Idealism and a break with the rest of the Young Hegelians. Marx, "stood Hegel on his head," in his own view of his role, by turning the idealistic dialectic into a materialistic one, in proposing that material circumstances shape ideas, instead of the other way around. In this, Marx was following the lead of Feuerbach. His theory of alienation, developed in the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844" (published in 1932), inspired itself from Feuerbach's critique of the alienation of Man in God through the objectivation of all his inherent characteristics (thus man projected on God all qualities which are in fact man's own quality which defines the "human nature").


title: Marxist philosophy

text: But Marx also criticized Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialistic, as Stirner himself had pointed out, and explained that the alienation described by the Young Hegelians was in fact the result of the structure of the economy itself. Furthermore, he criticized Feuerbach's conception of human nature in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach as an abstract "kind" which incarnated itself in each singular individual: "Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man ("menschliche Wesen", human nature). But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations."


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Thereupon, instead of founding itself on the singular, concrete individual subject, as did classic philosophy, including contractualism (Hobbes, John Locke and Rousseau) but also political economy, Marx began with the totality of social relations: labour, language and all which constitute our human existence. He claimed that individualism was the result of commodity fetishism or alienation. Some critics have claimed that meant that Marx enforced a strict social determinism which destroyed the possibility of free will.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: In the same way, following Babeuf, considered one of the founders of communism during the French Revolution, he criticized the 1789 "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" as a "bourgeois declaration" of the rights of the "egoistic individual", ultimately based on the "right to private property", which economism deduced from its own implicit "philosophy of the subject", which asserts the preeminence of an individual and universal subject over social relations. On the other hand, Marx also criticized Bentham's utilitarianism.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Alongside Freud, Nietzsche, and Durkheim, Marx thus takes a place amongst the 19th century philosophers who criticized this pre-eminence of the subject and its consciousness. Instead, Marx saw consciousness as political. According to Marx, the recognition of these individual rights was the result of the universal extension of market relations to all of society and to all of the world, first through the primitive accumulation of capital (including the first period of European colonialism) and then through the globalization of the capitalist sphere. Such individual rights were the symmetric of the "right for the labourer" to "freely" sell his labor force on the marketplace through juridical contracts, and worked in the same time as an ideological means to discompose the collective grouping of producers required by the Industrial Revolution: thus, in the same time that the Industrial Era requires masses to concentrate themselves in factories and in cities, the individualist, "bourgeois" ideology separated themselves as competing homo economicus.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Marx's critique of the ideology of the human rights thus departs from the counterrevolutionary critique by Edmund Burke, who dismissed the "rights of Man" in favour of the "rights of the individual": it is not grounded on an opposition to the Enlightenment's universalism and humanist project on behalf of the right of tradition, as in Burke's case, but rather on the claim that the ideology of economism and the ideology of the human rights are the reverse sides of the same coin. However, as Étienne Balibar puts it, "the accent put on those contradictions can not not ring out on the signification of 'human rights', since these therefore appears "both" as the language in which exploitation masks itself and as the one in which the exploited class struggle express itself: more than a truth or an illusion, it is therefore a "stake"". "Das Kapital" ironizes on the "pompous catalogue of the human rights" in comparison to the "modest "Magna Charta" of a day work limited by law":


title: Marxist philosophy

text: But the communist revolution does not end with the negation of individual liberty and equality ("collectivism"), but with the "negation of the negation": "individual property" in the capitalist regime is in fact the "expropriation of the immediate producers." "Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor... The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: What distinguished Marx from Feuerbach was his view of Feuerbach's humanism as excessively abstract, and so no less ahistorical and idealist than what it purported to replace, namely the reified notion of God found in institutional Christianity that legitimized the repressive power of the Prussian state. Instead, Marx aspired to give ontological priority to what he called the "real life process" of real human beings, as he and Engels said in "The German Ideology" (1846):


title: Marxist philosophy

text: In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Also, in his "Theses on Feuerbach" (1845), in which the young Marx broke with Feuerbach's idealism, he writes that "the philosophers have only described the world, in various ways, the point is to change it," and his materialist approach allows for and empowers such change. This opposition between various subjective interpretations given by philosophers, which may be, in a sense, compared with "Weltanschauung" designed to legitimize the current state of affairs, and effective transformation of the world through "praxis", which combines theory and practice in a materialist way, is what distinguish "Marxist philosophers" with the rest of philosophers.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Indeed, Marx's break with German Idealism involves a new definition of philosophy; Louis Althusser, founder of "Structural Marxism" in the 1960s, would define it as "class struggle in theory". Marx's movement away from university philosophy and towards the workers' movement is thus inextricably linked to his rupture with his earlier writings, which pushed Marxist commentators to speak of a "young Marx" and a "mature Marx", although the nature of this cut poses problems.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: A year before the Revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels thus wrote "The Communist Manifesto", which was prepared to an imminent revolution, and ended with the famous cry: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!". However, Marx's thought changed again following Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's December 2, 1851 coup, which put an end to the French Second Republic and created the Second Empire which would last until the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Marx thereby modified his theory of alienation exposed in the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844" and would later arrive to his theory of commodity fetishism, exposed in the first chapter of the first book of "Das Kapital" (1867). This abandonment of the early theory of alienation would be amply discussed, and several Marxist theorists, including Marxist humanists such as the Praxis School, would return to it. Others, such as Althusser, would claim that the "epistemological break" between the "young Marx" and the "mature Marx" was such that no comparisons could be done between both works, marking a shift to a "scientific theory" of society.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: In 1844–1845, when Marx was starting to settle his account with Hegel and the Young Hegelians in his writings, he critiqued the Young Hegelians for limiting the horizon of their critique to religion and not taking up the critique of the state and civil society as paramount. Indeed, in 1844, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844", a text that most explicitly elaborated his theory of alienation), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses: the study of law, religion, and the state; the study of natural philosophy; and the study of political economy.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: He chose the last as the predominant focus of his studies for the rest of his life, largely on account of his previous experience as the editor of the newspaper "Rheinische Zeitung" on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression against Prussian censorship and made a rather idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants' customary right of collecting wood in the forest (this right was at the point of being criminalized and privatized by the state). It was Marx's inability to penetrate beneath the legal and polemical surface of the latter issue to its materialist, economic, and social roots that prompted him to critically study political economy.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Marx summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history, otherwise known as historical materialism (this term was coined by Engels and popularised by Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov), in the 1859 preface to "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy":


title: Marxist philosophy

text: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: In this brief popularization of his ideas, Marx emphasized that social development sprang from the inherent contradictions within material life and the social superstructure. This notion is often understood as a simple historical narrative: primitive communism had developed into slave states. Slave states had developed into feudal societies. Those societies in turn became capitalist states, and those states would be overthrown by the self-conscious portion of their working-class, or proletariat, creating the conditions for socialism and, ultimately, a higher form of communism than that with which the whole process began. Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently by the development of capitalism from feudalism, and by the prediction of the development of socialism from capitalism.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: The base-superstructure and stadialist formulations in the 1859 preface took on canonical status in the subsequent development of orthodox Marxism, in particular in dialectical materialism ("diamat", as it was known in the Soviet Union). They also gave way to a vulgar Marxism as plain economic determinism (or economism), which has been criticized by various Marxist theorists. "Vulgar Marxism" was seen as little other than a variety of economic determinism, with the alleged determination of the ideological superstructure by the economical infrastructure. However, this positivist reading, which mostly based itself on Engels' latter writings in an attempt to theorize "scientific socialism" (an expression coined by Engels) has been challenged by Marxist theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci or Althusser.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Some believe that Marx regarded them merely as a shorthand summary of his huge ongoing work-in-progress (which was only published posthumously over a hundred years later as "Grundrisse"). These sprawling, voluminous notebooks that Marx put together for his research on political economy, particularly those materials associated with the study of "primitive communism" and pre-capitalist communal production, in fact, show a more radical turning "Hegel on his head" than heretofore acknowledged by most mainstream Marxists and Marxiologists.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: In lieu of the Enlightenment belief in historical progress and stages espoused by Hegel (often in a racist, Eurocentric manner, as in his "Lectures on the Philosophy of History"), Marx pursues in these research notes a decidedly empirical approach to analyzing historical changes and different modes of production, emphasizing without forcing them into a teleological paradigm the rich varieties of communal productions throughout the world and the critical importance of collective working-class antagonism in the development of capitalism.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Moreover, Marx's rejection of the necessity of bourgeois revolution and appreciation of the obschina, the communal land system, in Russia in his letter to Vera Zasulich; respect for the egalitarian culture of North African Muslim commoners found in his letters from Algeria; and sympathetic and searching investigation of the global commons and indigenous cultures and practices in his notebooks, including the "Ethnological Notebooks" that he kept during his last years, all point to a historical Marx who was continuously developing his ideas until his deathbed and does not fit into any pre-existing ideological straitjacket.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Some varieties of Marxist philosophy are strongly influenced by Hegel, emphasizing totality and even teleology: for example, the work of Georg Lukács, whose influence extends to contemporary thinkers like Fredric Jameson. Others consider "totality" merely another version of Hegel's "spirit," and thus condemn it as a crippling, secret idealism.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: Theodor Adorno, a leading philosopher of the Frankfurt School, who was strongly influenced by Hegel, tried to take a middle path between these extremes: Adorno contradicted Hegel's motto "the true is the whole" with his new version, "the whole is the false," but he wished to preserve critical theory as a negative, oppositional version of the utopia described by Hegel's "spirit." Adorno believed in totality and human potential as ends to be striven for, but not as certainties.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: The status of humanism in Marxist thought has been quite contentious. Many Marxists, especially Hegelian Marxists and also those committed to political programs (such as many Communist Parties), have been strongly humanist. These humanist Marxists believe that Marxism describes the true potential of human beings, and that this potential can be fulfilled in collective freedom after the Communist revolution has removed capitalism's constraints and subjugations of humanity. A particular version of the humanism within the Marxism is represented by the school of Lev Vygotsky and his school in theoretical psychology (Alexei Leontiev, Laszlo Garai). The Praxis school based its theory on the writings of the young Marx, emphasizing the humanist and dialectical aspects thereof.


title: Marxist philosophy

text: However, other Marxists, especially those influenced by Louis Althusser, are just as strongly anti-humanist. Anti-humanist Marxists believe that ideas like "humanity," "freedom," and "human potential" are pure ideology, or theoretical versions of the bourgeois economic order. They feel that such concepts can only condemn Marxism to theoretical self-contradictions which may also hurt it politically.


title: Tito's Vodka

text: Tito's Handmade Vodka is a vodka brand made by Fifth Generation, founded by Tito Beveridge in 1997 in Austin, Texas – specializing in vodka made from yellow corn, rather than potatoes or wheat. It is distilled 6 times and unaged.


title: Tito's Vodka

text: Marketing its brand as "Tito's Handmade Vodka", the company originally craft-distilled its products in copper pot stills at Texas' first legal distillery. By 2001, the brand was no longer a micro-distillery, having surpassed the industry standard of 40,000 cases for a craft distillery as defined by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS).


title: Tito's Vodka

text: Now made in a facility with ten-floor-to-ceiling stills and equipment bottling 500 cases an hour, the brand recorded a sales volume of approximately 3.8 million 9-liter cases in the United States as of 2016 and a market share of 7.1% of the United States Vodka market as of 2017.


title: Tito's Vodka

text: Bert Butler "Tito" Beveridge II is a native of San Antonio, Texas. He received the diminutive nickname "Bertito", shortened to "Tito", from his Latino caregivers in childhood. Beveridge attended the University of Texas where he became a member of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity.


title: Tito's Vodka

text: Beveridge first produced his spirits as a hobby after making infusions of inexpensive vodka as gifts and using a pot still. Commercial production began in 1997 when Beveridge formed Fifth Generation, Inc. and established the Mockingbird Distillery, producing 1,000 cases that year. In 2007, the brand sold over 160,000 cases. Production remains at the heavily expanded southeast Austin distillery.


title: Tito's Vodka

text: Sales and distribution of "Tito's Handmade Vodka" expanded in 2001 after Tito's Handmade Vodka won the Double Gold Medal for vodka at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition. Also that year, it received a four-star ranking from "Spirit Journal" and won four stars again in the 2007 edition. Beginning in 2013, United Airlines began serving only "Tito's" for its inflight vodka beverages.


title: Tito's Vodka

text: Tito's is distributed throughout the United States and Canada. The distillery transitioned to making industry approved hand sanitizer during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tito's also made a grant of $1 million towards the development of COVID-19 vaccine Corbevax.


title: Tito's Vodka

text: In 2014, two false advertising lawsuits were filed against Tito's in California and Florida. The California lawsuit alleged that Tito's vodka cannot be described as "handmade" because it is distilled in a large industrial complex with modern, technologically advanced stills; and is produced and bottled in extremely large quantities. Since the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which regulates labeling of liquor in the US, does not actually define "handmade," both lawsuits rely on the dictionary definition of the word. By 2016, the lawsuits had either been settled out of court or dismissed.


title: Tito's Vodka

text: Tito's Vodka funds the annual Tito's Prizean annual $15,000 award for one Austin-based artist, facilitated by the nonprofit gallery Big Medium. The award also includes a solo exhibition at the Big Medium Gallery at Canopy. It is the largest award devoted to Austin-based artists.


title: Tito's Vodka

text: Previous Tito's Prize winners are Ariel René Jackson and Michael J. Love (2021), Betelhem Makonnen (2019), Steve Parker (2018), and Zack Ingram (2017).


title: Supervisor

text: A supervisor, or lead, (also known as foreman, boss, overseer, facilitator, monitor, area coordinator, line-manager or sometimes gaffer) is the job title of a lower-level management position that is primarily based on authority over workers or a workplace. A supervisor can also be one of the most senior in the staff at the place of work, such as a professor who oversees a PhD dissertation. Supervision, on the other hand, can be performed by people without this formal title, for example by parents. The term supervisor itself can be used to refer to any personnel who have this task as part of their job description.


title: Supervisor

text: An employee is a supervisor if they have the power and authority to do the following actions (according to the Ontario Ministry of Labour):


title: Supervisor

text: If an employee cannot do the above, legally, they are probably not a supervisor, but in some other category, such as a work group leader or lead hand.


title: Supervisor

text: A supervisor is first and foremost an overseer whose main responsibility is to ensure that a group of subordinates get out the assigned amount of production, when they are supposed to do it and within acceptable levels of quality, costs and safety.


title: Supervisor

text: A supervisor is responsible for the productivity and actions of a small group of employees. The supervisor has several manager-like roles, responsibilities, and powers. Two of the key differences between a supervisor and a manager are (1) the supervisor does not typically have "hire and fire" authority, and (2) the supervisor does not have budget authority. Supervisors are not considered part of the organization's proper management and instead are seen as senior members of the workforce. Unlike middle managers, supervisors presence is essential for the execution of the work.


title: Supervisor

text: Lacking "hire and fire" authority means that a supervisor may not recruit the employees working in the supervisor's group nor does the supervisor have the authority to terminate an employee. The supervisor may participate in the hiring process as part of interviewing and assessing candidates, but the actual hiring authority rests in the hands of a Human Resource Manager. The supervisor may recommend to management that a particular employee be terminated and the supervisor may be the one who documents the behaviors leading to the recommendation but the actual firing authority rests in the hands of a manager.


title: Supervisor

text: Lacking budget authority means that a supervisor is provided a budget developed by management within which constraints the supervisor is expected to provide a productive environment for the employees of the supervisor's work group. A supervisor will usually have the authority to make purchases within specified limits. A supervisor is also given the power to approve work hours and other payroll issues. Normally, budget affecting requests such as travel will require not only the supervisor's approval but the approval of one or more layers of management.


title: Supervisor

text: As a member of management, a supervisor's main job is more concerned with orchestrating and controlling work rather than performing it directly.


title: Supervisor

text: Supervisors are uniquely positioned through direct daily employee contact to respond to employee needs, problems, and satisfaction. Supervisors are the direct link between management and the work force and can be most effective in developing job training, safety attitudes, safe working methods and identifying unsafe acts.


title: Supervisor

text: "Doing" can take up to 70% of the time - (this varies according to the type of supervisory job - the doing involves the actual work of the department as well as the planning, controlling, scheduling, organizing, leading, etc.).


title: Supervisor

text: Supervisors often do not require any formal education on how they are to perform their duties but are most often given on-the-job training or attend company sponsored courses. Many employers have supervisor handbooks that need to be followed. Supervisors must be aware of their legal responsibilities to ensure that their employees work safely and that the workplace that they are responsible for meets government standards.


title: Supervisor

text: In academia, a supervisor is a senior scientist or scholar who, along with their own responsibilities, aids and guides a postdoctoral researcher, postgraduate research student or undergraduate student in their research project; offering both moral support and scientific insight and guidance. The term is used in several countries for the doctoral advisor of a graduate student.


title: Supervisor

text: In colloquial British English, "gaffer" means a foreman, and is used as a synonym for "boss". In the UK, the term also commonly refers to sports coaches (football, rugby, etc.).


title: Supervisor

text: The term is also sometimes used colloquially to refer to an old man, an elderly rustic. The word is probably a shortening of "godfather", with ""ga"" from association with "grandfather". The female equivalent, "gammer", came to refer colloquially to an old lady or to a gossip. The use of "gaffer" in this way can be seen, for example, in J.R.R. Tolkien's character Gaffer Gamgee.


title: Supervisor

text: In 16th century English a "gaffer" was a man who was the head of any organized group of labourers. In 16th and 17th century rural England, it was used as a title slightly inferior to "Master", similar to "Goodman", and was not confined to elderly men. The chorus of a famous Australian shearer's song, "The Backblocks' Shearer" (also known as "Widgegoeera Joe"), written by W. Tully at Nimidgee, NSW (c.1900), refers to a gaffer:


title: Supervisor

text: As industrial and commercial enterprises grew in size - especially after introduction of techniques of the industrial revolution - the perceived need for supervisors and foremen grew in tandem. One example is the development of the hierarchical model and practices of the plantation economies in the antebellum American South, where the overseer provided the interface between the planter and the indentured servants, and later slaves.


title: Supervisor

text: By 1894 speakers of U.S. English had begun to refer to a subordinate or assistant foreman - sometimes contemptuously - as a straw boss,


title: Ford C-Max

text: The Ford C-Max (stylized as Ford C-MAX and previously called the Ford Focus C-Max) is a car produced by the Ford Motor Company from 2003 to 2019. It has a five-door compact multi-purpose vehicle (MPV) design. The Ford Grand C-Max has a longer wheelbase.


title: Ford C-Max

text: Ford introduced the C-Max in the United States as its first hybrid-only line of vehicles, which includes the C-Max Hybrid, released in September 2012, and the C-Max Energi plug-in hybrid, launched in October 2012. Although the C-Max was initially available only in Europe, the first generation was partially available in New Zealand.


title: Ford C-Max

text: The Ford Focus C-Max is preceded by the eponymous show car, which was designed by Daniel Paulin and unveiled at the 2002 Paris Motor Show.


title: Ford C-Max

text: C-Max Mk I was the first product to use the Ford C1 platform, also used by the Ford Focus Mk II and the compact MPV Premacy/Mazda5. Its internal code name is C214.


title: Ford C-Max

text: It seats five passengers and has a large amount of cargo space, which can be increased by folding the rear seats flat. Some models feature diagonally sliding outer rear seats. It also shares the control blade independent rear suspension from the Focus.


title: Ford C-Max

text: 1.8 L Ford flexifuel, aka 1.8f, was a flexible-fuel hybrid engine sourced from Volvo B4204S5 able to run on gasoline and ethanol (E85). Ethanol added about 25 hp extra for a total 125hp, although with higher consumption


title: Ford C-Max

text: 1.6/2.0 L Duratorq Ford/PSA made diesels were available along with Ford's 1.8 L Endura engine which is upgraded and named Duratorq


title: Ford C-Max

text: Transmissions mated with engines are Ford IB5 (1.6/1.8 Duratec), Ford Durashift (2.0 Duratorq), MTX-75 (2.0 Duratec / 1.6-1.8 Duratorq) manual and Ford Powershift double-clutch transmission available with 2.0 Duratorq. The 4F27E mated with the 2.0 Duratec engine. A CVT automatic was also available


title: Ford C-Max

text: In December 2006, the facelifted version of the C-Max was revealed at the 2006 Bologna Motor Show and went on sale in late spring 2007. The pre-facelift version of the car (2003–2007) was called the Ford Focus C-Max. The name change to C-Max is attributable to Ford's MPV strategy of creating a 'Max' branded line of MPVs, starting with the Ford S-Max, launched in 2006.


title: Ford C-Max

text: The facelift brought the car in line with Ford's 'Kinetic Design' design language, evidenced through its twin trapezoidal grilles, large wheel arches and angular headlights. However, as the car does not have a bodyshell originally designed for 'Kinetic Design,' Ford officially states that the car contains only 'elements' of the design language.


title: Ford C-Max

text: Alongside the third generation Ford Focus Mk III, the second generation C-Max (C344) is built on Ford's new Global C platform. The appearance is inspired by the Iosis Max concept, shown at the 2009 Geneva Motor Show. In addition, Ford added a long wheelbase, seven-seat minivan variant of the C-Max, the Ford Grand C-Max.


title: Ford C-Max

text: The vehicle was unveiled at the 2009 Frankfurt Motor Show. Early European models include 5 seats, and 7-seat models entered the market at the end of 2010 (except Russia, where there is only the 7-seat model). At the 2011 North American International Auto Show, Ford announced a 7-seat C-MAX for the North American market. However, this model was cancelled prior to launch.


title: Ford C-Max

text: Ford unveiled the Ford C-Max Energi plug-in hybrid and the C-Max Hybrid at the 2011 North American International Auto Show. Like the conventional C-Max, the C-Max Energi and Hybrid are five-seat only. They replace the Ford Escape Hybrid and Mercury Mariner Hybrid since Ford discontinued the Mercury brand after the 2011 model year and the Escape Hybrid after the 2012 year model. The C-Max is Ford's first hybrid-only line of vehicles. Both the plug-in and hybrid version designs are based on the European gasoline- and diesel-powered versions.


title: Ford C-Max

text: The C-Max Hybrid was released in the United States in September 2012 as a 2013 model year, followed by the release of the plug-in Energi version by mid October 2012.


title: Ford C-Max

text: Production of the C-Max Energi in the United States ended in September 2017, while Hybrid production ended in 2018.


title: Ford C-Max

text: The redesigned C-Max features flat folding third row seats, a hands free power lift gate, rear view camera, park assist, and panoramic sunroof. HD Radio, Sirius XM, Sync, dual-zone climate control system, and navigation system come as standard or as available options on the different trim lines.


title: Ford C-Max

text: The aerodynamics (drag coefficient, "c") of the car has been improved, being 0,30 for the 5 seater and 0,32 for the Grand C-Max.


title: Ford C-Max

text: Like the previous C-Max, the new C-Max also comes with a range of petrol and diesel four-cylinder engines which are shared with the Focus:


title: Ford C-Max

text: Transmissions mated with engines are Ford IB5 (1.6 Duratec Ti-VCT), B6 (1.6 EcoBoost/1.6 Duratorq), Durashift MMT6 (2.0 Duratorq) manual and Ford Powershift double-clutch transmission available with the 2.0 Duratorq engine.


title: Ford C-Max

text: The Ford C-MAX was facelifted in 2015 and the 1.6 Ecoboost changed to the three-cylinder 1.0 Ecoboost along with the 1.6 TDCI 115PS Duratorq changing to the 1.5 TDCI single overhead cam unit.


title: Ford C-Max

text: Ford developed the C-Max Hybrid with the aim to become "America’s most affordable hybrid utility vehicle." The gasoline-electric hybrid model base pricing starts at , including destination and delivery.


title: Ford C-Max

text: The front-wheel drive hybrid has a 2.0-liter four-cylinder Atkinson cycle engine mated to an electric motor and a 1.4 kWh lithium-ion battery for total power output of . The top speed in all-electric mode of and the car's top speed in hybrid mode is .


title: Ford C-Max

text: The hybrid has a maximum cargo volume of with rear seats folded flat, and in the cargo area behind the rear seats, providing more room than the regular Prius liftback, but less cargo room than the Prius v, which provides with the rear seats folded.


title: Ford C-Max

text: The SE features eco-friendly cloth seating surfaces, Ford SYNC system with A/M-F/M stereo with single-disc CD/MP3 player, USB and auxiliary input jacks, six speakers, a multi-informational gauge cluster and color display screen, keyless entry, alloy wheels, and split-folding rear bench seat, plus a security alarm.


title: Ford C-Max

text: The SEL adds leather seating surfaces, MyFord Touch with AM/FM HD Radio stereo with single-disc CD/MP3 player and USB and auxiliary input jacks, a Sony premium surround sound system, SIRIUS Satellite Radio, power dual front seats, keyless access, push-button start system, and other luxury features. For the 2017 model year, the SEL trim level on both the C-Max Hybrid and Energi will be renamed to the Titanium trim level and also all the 2017 Ford C-Max Hybrids and plug-in Energis are expected to have restyled headlights and taillights.


title: Ford C-Max

text: The Energi Plug-In Hybrid is only available in SEL trim. But for the 2017 model year the C-Max Energi is also available on the SE trim level.


title: Ford C-Max

text: Ford's design aimed for the C-Max Hybrid to deliver better fuel economy than the Toyota Prius V. Ford had reduced its estimated fuel economy twice, once in 2013 and again in 2014, with the second revision placing fuel economy below the Prius V. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) initially rated the hybrid model at with the same rating for combined/city/highway cycles. These ratings allowed the C-Max Hybrid to improve the fuel economy of the Toyota Prius v by on the city cycle, by on the highway cycle and by combined. However, after criticism and lawsuits about worse-than-expected real-world fuel economy, in August 2013 Ford voluntarily lowered the EPA ratings and issued customer rebates. The revised fuel economy ratings were reduced to for city driving, for combined and for highway. The revised rating for the updated 2013 C-Max Hybrid is still better than the combined rating for the Toyota Prius v. A second downward revision was made during June 2014.


title: Ford C-Max

text: Ford boosted the on-road fuel efficiency of its three 2013 model year hybrids through changes in the cars' vehicle control software in an effort to improve customer satisfaction. The upgrade was offered free of charge to existing owners of these hybrids. Some of the changes include:


title: Ford C-Max

text: A total of 969 units were sold during September 2012, allowing the C-Max Hybrid to rank as the ninth-best selling hybrid car in the United States that month. During October, its first full month in the market, 3,182 units were sold, outselling the Prius v by more than 400 units, which had ranked as the fourth most sold hybrid in the previous months. Sales of the C-Max Hybrid also led Ford to achieve its best October hybrid sales month ever with a total of 4,612 sales, up 142% over October 2011. Ford reported that 25% of C-Max Hybrid sales took place in California, with Los Angeles and San Francisco as the top selling regional markets. A total of 10,935 C-Max Hybrids were sold during 2012, and a total of 28,056 units in 2013. After Ford cut the car's EPA fuel economy rating by to in the middle of 2012, the car experienced its three worst sales months since it debuted in the U.S. Since its inception, a total of 72,330 units have been sold in the United States through December 2015.


title: Ford C-Max

text: In December 2012, Motor Trend reported that Consumer Reports and Green Car Reports have found that the 2013 Ford C-Max Hybrid and 2013 Ford Fusion Hybrid, which share the same powertrain, do not deliver their triple EPA ratings in real-world use. After running both vehicles through Consumer Reports real-world tests, the magazine found that C-Max hybrid achieved a combined fuel economy average of , with and for city and highway. Green Car Reports found that the C-Max delivered over of mixed freeway and urban driving, and over mostly at freeway speeds.


title: Ford C-Max

text: Consumer Reports concluded that the overall fuel economy for the C-Max Hybrid is off by , representing a deviation of about 20%. The consumer magazine said that their overall fuel economy results are usually close to the EPA's combined-mpg estimate, and among current models tested, more than 80% fall within margin. The largest discrepancy the magazine has previously found was for the Toyota Prius C and the Prius hatchback, respectively. Ford responded in a statement, saying that, ""Early C-MAX Hybrid and Fusion Hybrid customers praise the vehicles and report a range of fuel economy figures, including some reports above . This reinforces the fact that driving styles, driving conditions, and other factors can cause mileage to vary"."


title: Ford C-Max

text: A few days later the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it would review claims that two new Ford hybrid vehicles were not delivering the advertised 47 mpg. Linc Wehrly, Director of Light-duty Vehicle Center Compliance Division at EPA's National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Michigan commented that hybrids had far more variability in miles per gallon than conventional vehicles. All vehicles are run through the same EPA fuel-efficiency test but the test is not administered by the EPA; instead the automakers conduct the test and EPA often conducts reviews. Most vehicles's real-world gas mileage is less than the EPA sticker number, and can often be 20% less than depending on speed, temperature and other factors. The EPA explained that with hybrids the gap was much wider, as high as 30%.


title: Ford C-Max

text: The problem lay with EPA's rules that allowed automakers to group similar vehicles and apply the same ratings, which Ford did with the Fusion hybrid and C-Max hybrids.


title: Ford C-Max

text: Ford Motor Co. officials said the real-world fuel-efficiency in the C-Max Hybrid depended on driving style and other factors, and that the company did not expect the car's fuel efficiency numbers to change, as they followed EPA's test guidelines. Ford said they were working closely with the EPA to determine if their hybrid vehicle testing procedures needed to be changed. They explained that several factors could affect hybrid fuel economy more than that of regular gasoline engines, including speed (as the difference between could produce a 7-mpg difference in fuel economy); outside temperature (the difference between could result in a 5 mpg difference); and vehicle break-in (a 5 mpg difference could occur from the difference ).


title: Ford C-Max

text: Due to the criticism and lawsuits, in July 2013 Ford announced it would boost the on-road fuel efficiency of the C-Max and its other two 2013 hybrids through changes in the vehicle control software, in an effort to improve customer satisfaction. The carmaker voluntarily reduced the official EPA ratings in August 2013. They also announced they would issue rebates to some 32,000 C-Max owners who would be notified by mail. The payment would be to U.S. customers who purchased C-Maxes, and to customers who had leased them.


title: Ford C-Max

text: After the Ford announcement, the EPA stated that it will update the test procedures used to assign fuel economy ratings to cars ""to ensure that the requirements keep pace with industry trends and innovations in advanced high-efficiency vehicles"." Ford used the Fusion Hybrid test to generate the fuel economy label for the C-Max Hybrid following EPA's rules. These, which date to the 1970s, specify that automakers can use the same fuel economy numbers for similar-size vehicles equipped with the same engines and transmissions. The EPA requires automakers to test the fuel economy of the biggest-selling model in a specific category. In its midsize hybrid class, Ford tested the Fusion sedan version because it was the top seller, and Ford was allowed to apply the achieved with the Fusion Hybrid in combined, city and highway driving to the C-Max hybrid. Ford has no plans to change the fuel economy ratings on the 2013 Fusion hybrid.


title: Ford C-Max

text: The C-Max Energi plug-in hybrid started at including the destination fee. According to its battery size, the plug-in car qualified for a federal tax credit of , and it is eligible for additional incentives at the state and local level, such as California's rebate.


title: Ford C-Max

text: The C-Max Energi was designed with total in hybrid mode delivered by a 2.0-liter Atkinson cycle four-cylinder gasoline engine plus an electric motor powered by a 7.6 kWh lithium-ion battery pack, which is smaller and lighter than nickel–metal hydride batteries used in previous Ford generation hybrids. The electric drivetrain can produce a peak power of , limited by the size of the electric motor and the power delivery capability of the battery pack, and delivers a total system power of in charge-depleting mode (EV mode). The C-Max Energi is capable of reaching a top electric-only speed of , exceeding the Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrid (Prius Prime in North America) by more than . The top speed in hybrid mode is .


title: Ford C-Max

text: The C-Max Energi uses a regenerative braking system capable of capturing and reusing more than 95% of the braking energy normally lost during the braking process. The charging time for the C-Max Energi is 7 hours with a 120 volt charger, and 2.5 hours with a 240 volt charger. The charge port has an LED light ring like the Ford Focus Electric and is located on the driver’s side and near the front of the car. The light ring illuminates to indicate charge status. The battery is covered by an eight years or component warranty.


title: Ford C-Max

text: Ford equipped the C-Max Energi with a button mounted in the center stack that enables drivers to choose an electric-only driving mode, and allows the driver to switch vehicle operation between three modes: electric-only driving without gasoline engine power ("EV Now" setting); normal hybrid mode where the powertrain blends electric and gasoline engine power as appropriate ("EV Auto" setting); or a battery-saving mode that reserves the battery power for later use ("EV Later" setting). Like the Ford Fusion Hybrid, the C-Max Energi comes with a SmartGauge with EcoGuide that provides in-vehicle customizable displays, including instantaneous fuel economy readings and coaching functions to help drivers understand and optimize their fuel efficiency. The plug-in hybrid also features ECO Cruise which saves energy by relaxing acceleration compared to standard cruise control.


title: Ford C-Max

text: Ford designed the C-Max Energi plug-in hybrid to deliver better miles per gallon equivalent (MPG-e) in all-electric mode than the Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrid. Initially, the EPA rated the Energi combined city/highway fuel economy in all-electric mode at 100 MPG-e (). Later, when owners complained of not achieving the sticker fuel economy, and following a technical review, the official EPA rating in EV mode was downgraded to 88 MPG-e (). In a similar way, initially the EPA rating in hybrid-gasoline mode was , but it was later downgraded to . EPA's rating for combined EV/hybrid operation is 51 MPG-e (4.6 L gasoline equivalent/100 km), which allows the C-Max Energi to rank in sixth place, together with the Fusion Energi, among the top ten EPA-Rated Fuel Sippers since 1984.


title: Ford C-Max

text: The C-Max Energi has an all-electric range of , for a total EPA certified range of , which in 2012 surpassed both the first-generation Chevrolet Volt (), and the Prius Plug-in Hybrid ().


title: Ford C-Max

text: Ford released the C-Max Energi in the U.S. market by mid October 2012, and during that month 144 units were delivered to U.S. retail customers, and ended with 2,374 units delivered in 2012. The C-Max Energi ranked as the fifth top selling plug-in electric car in the U.S. during 2013, and climbed to number fourth in 2014. Over 35,700 units have been sold in North America and Europe through December 2016, with 33,509 units delivered in the U.S. through December 2016, 967 units in Canada through December 2016, and 1,229 in the Netherlands in 2015.


title: Ford C-Max

text: Ford Motor Company announced the C-MAX Solar Energi concept, a solar PV-powered vehicle to run electrically without depending on the electric grid for fuel. The C-MAX Solar Energi Concept was unveiled at the 2014 International CES in Las Vegas. This is a collaborative project of Ford, SunPower Corp. and the Georgia Institute of Technology.


title: Ford C-Max

text: For the North American market, the C-Max Hybrid was assembled alongside the 2012 Focus and Ford Focus Electric at Ford's Wayne plant in Michigan. The C-Max Energi was also assembled in Michigan. Since 2015, all European versions are built in the Saarlouis Body & Assembly, Germany. Ford of Europe announced that it would end production of both the C-Max and Grand C-Max in Germany by the end of the second quarter of 2019.


title: Ford C-Max

text: In Europe, the C-Max is designed with lower VOC and allergens, along with several other Ford vehicles.


title: Streaking

text: Streaking is the act of running, often naked, through a public area for publicity, as a prank, a dare, or a form of protest. Streaking is often associated with sporting events, but can occur in more secluded areas. Streakers are often pursued by sporting officials or the police.


title: Streaking

text: The word has been used in its modern sense only since the 1960s. Before that, "to streak" in English since 1768 meant "to go quickly, to rush, to run at full speed", and was a re-spelling of "streek": "to go quickly" (c.1380); this in turn was originally a northern Middle English variant of "stretch" (c. 1250).


title: Streaking

text: In December 1973, a graduate of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota wrote to "Time" magazine that the term "streaking" was coined because the nude students ran primarily during the winter months of January and February, and "unless one appeared as a streak against the landscape, the Minnesota winter was triumphant and streaker became statue." The school's newspaper, "The Carletonian", used the term "streaking" as early as 1967, but initially in negative terms: "Examples of [Carleton's social problems] are the large number of departing female students, the rise of class spirit, low grades, streaking, destruction, drinking, and the popularity of rock dances."


title: Streaking

text: Historical forerunners of modern-day streakers include the neo-Adamites who travelled naked through towns and villages in medieval Europe, and the 17th-century Quaker Solomon Eccles, who went nude through the City of London with a burning brazier on his head. At 7:00 PM on 5 July 1799, a man was arrested at the Mansion House, London, and sent to the Poultry Compter. He confirmed that he had accepted a wager of 10 guineas (equal to £ today) to run naked from Cornhill to Cheapside.


title: Streaking

text: Fines of between £10 and £50 were imposed on streakers by British and Irish magistrates in the early 1970s. The offences used for prosecution were typically minor, such as the violation of park regulations. Nevertheless, the chief law in force against streaking in England and Wales at that time remained the 16th-century vagrancy law, for which the punishment in 1550 had been whipping.


title: Streaking

text: The first recorded incident of streaking by a college student in the United States occurred in 1804 at Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) when senior George William Crump was arrested for running naked through Lexington, Virginia, where the university is located. Crump was suspended for the academic session, but later went on to become a U.S. Congressman.


title: Streaking

text: In June 1973, the press reported on a "streaking" trend at Michigan State University. In December 1973, "Time" magazine called streaking "a growing Los Angeles-area fad" that was "catching on among college students and other groups". A letter writer responded, "Let it be known that streakers have plagued the campus police at Notre Dame for the past decade", pointing out that a group of University of Notre Dame students sponsored a "Streakers' Olympics" in 1972.


title: Streaking

text: In February 1974, the press began calling it a "streaking epidemic." By the first week of March, college campuses across the country were competing to set streaking records. On March 11, 1974, several Americans imported streaking to Japan, where a series of copycat incidents occurred over the next month.


title: Streaking

text: The prominence of streaking in 1974 has been linked both to the sexual revolution and a conservative backlash against feminism and the campus protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s.


title: Streaking

text: Colleges and universities with documented traditions of campus streaking include the University of Chicago (Polar Bear run), Denison University (Naked Week), Oberlin College, Pennsylvania State University, Wellesley College, and Wheaton College (the "Kingdom Run").


title: Streaking

text: Dartmouth College has two streaking-related challenges: The Ledyard Challenge, in which students swim naked across the Connecticut River and run nude back across the bridge, and the Blue Light Challenge, in which streaking students attempt to press the alarm on every one of the campus's blue light emergency phones. As of 2005, a Thursday Night Streaking Club regularly streaks at various events and public places.


title: Streaking

text: In 1986, the University of Michigan's Naked Mile celebrated the last day of class with a group streak across campus along an approximate one-mile path. At the height of its popularity in the late 1990s, between 500 and 800 students participated, including several hundred females. Over 1,400 students participated one year and well over one thousand during another year. However, due to enforcement of public indecency laws and pressure from administration officials concerned about increasing spectator crowds and videotaping, participation declined. By 2001, a mere 24 students participated, signaling the effective end of the Naked Mile. Students were warned by college administrators that streakers would be arrested and required to register as sex offenders for life under Megan's Law.


title: Streaking

text: The students at Union College held midnight "Pajama Parade" events in 1862, 1914 and several times in the 1950s. The real streaking tradition, which was nationally popular since 1973, arrived at the campus in the 1990s in the form of a nocturnal lap around the Nott Memorial known as the "Naked Nott Run."


title: Streaking

text: To celebrate the school year's first night of heavy rainfall, a well-known tradition called "First Rain" is enacted at the University of California, Santa Cruz by students who for the entirety of the day to midnight, run around campus nearly or completely nude. Beginning at Porter, the run proceeds throughout the other colleges.


title: Streaking

text: At the University of Vermont, a Naked Bike Ride is traditionally held at midnight at the end of each semester. Participants run, bike, unicycle, carry kayaks, push shopping carts, or pull sleds. The topic of the Naked Bike Ride has been a touchy one among UVM police, who have tried several times to do away with it. In 2011, Interim President John Bramley ended school funding for the event. This resulted in the student body creating the UVM Green Caps, a group of student volunteers stationed around campus throughout the evening for the safety of students.


title: Streaking

text: At the University of the Philippines, members of the Alpha Phi Omega fraternity streak around the campus in an annual event known as the Oblation Run. The run started in 1977 to protest the banning of the movie, "Hubad na Bayani", which depicted human rights abuses in the martial law era. The event continued to occur as a protest action.


title: Streaking

text: The first instance of streaking in English football took place on 23 March 1974. Prior to the start of the league match between Arsenal and Manchester City at Arsenal Stadium, a middle aged man named John Taylor ran around the field. He was eventually caught by three policemen, forcibly made to wear trousers, and removed from the stadium. Taylor was fined £10 by the North London Court the next day.


title: Streaking

text: In the sport of cricket, it is not uncommon for a male streaker to run out to the field purely for shock and entertainment value or political purposes. The first known instance of streaking in cricket took place on 22 March 1974, the first day of the third test between Australia and New Zealand at Auckland. Half an hour before the end of the day's play, while New Zealand was batting, "a dark-haired young man" ran from near the sightscreen, through mid-wicket and disappeared between the stands near the square-leg boundary. The incident occurred quickly and police did not have time to react. Reports differ on whether the man was completely naked, with some accounts stating that he may have been wearing a flesh-coloured T-shirt. On the evening of the second day, while Australian batsman Ian Redpath was on strike, an "athletic young man" was caught on television cameras running across the ground on the leg-side. The streaker ran to the men's restroom and was chased by police. When police entered the restroom, they found 20 people inside—all of whom were clothed—and authorities were unable to identify the streaker. One of the best-known instances of streaking occurred on 5 August 1975, when former Royal Navy cook Michael Angelow ran naked across Lord's during an Ashes Test. This was the first instance of streaking during a cricket match in England, and commonly mistakenly believed to be the first ever instance of streaking in cricket.


title: Streaking

text: Another example was in the First Test of the Australia versus the I.C.C. World XI, when a rather drunken man darted out toward the field naked, shocking the Australian and World XI players, halting play until he was spear tackled to the ground by field personnel. In one notable incident in 1977, Australian test cricketer Greg Chappell spanked an invading streaker named Bruce McCauley with his cricket bat; McCauley then fell to the ground and was arrested by police.


title: Streaking

text: The English glamour model Linsey Dawn McKenzie performed a topless streak at a televised England v. West Indies cricket match at Old Trafford in 1995. Wearing only a thong and a pair of trainers, she ran onto the field with the words "Only Teasing" written across her breasts.


title: Streaking

text: In the 1970s, at the height of streaking's popularity, a male streaker who broke into the Augusta National golf course in Augusta, Georgia (albeit not while the Masters was in play), was shot with buckshot and slightly wounded. In 1999, a female streaker named Yvonne Robb was arrested for kissing Tiger Woods on the 18th hole at Carnoustie.


title: Streaking

text: Streaking became popular at Australian rules football matches in the 1980s, particularly Victorian Football League Grand Finals. The trend was a trend started by Adelaide stripper Helen D'Amico at the 1982 VFL Grand Final between Carlton and Richmond, in which D'Amico streaked while wearing only a Carlton scarf. At the 1988 VFL Grand Final, a fully naked woman streaked during the final quarter and was promptly arrested. In another Melbourne Demons grand final in the 2021 Grand final, held in Perth a male streaker ran on to the ground wearing only his underwear. He was only on the ground for a few seconds before he was removed and arrested.


title: Streaking

text: In Super Bowl XXXVIII, streaker Mark Roberts disrupted the game by running onto the field. He was eventually leveled by New England Patriots linebacker Matt Chatham, and was subsequently apprehended. Despite the worldwide audience, this event was largely unnoticed due to that game's infamous halftime show in which Janet Jackson's nude breast was revealed due to what was called a "wardrobe malfunction". Roberts would return in 2007 during the first NFL regular season game held in England between the Miami Dolphins and New York Giants, streaking during the game at Wembley Stadium.


title: Streaking

text: In the 2006 Winter Olympics, streaker Mark Roberts interrupted the men's bronze medal curling match between the U.S. team and the UK team, wearing nothing but a strategically placed rubber chicken. For the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, officials warned visitors against streaking, amongst other forms of "bad behaviour".


title: Streaking

text: Michael O'Brien was the first known streaker at a major sporting event when on 20 April 1974, he ran out naked onto the ground of an England vs. France rugby union match at Twickenham. The 25-year-old Australian was captured by a policeman, PC Bruce Perry, who covered his genitals with his police helmet. The photograph of O'Brien under arrest became one of the most reproduced photographs of a streaker.


title: Streaking

text: On 22 March 2009, a female streaker ran onto the pitch brandishing a green flag during the televised match between London Irish and Northampton Saints. It was in front of the season's largest crowd away from Twickenham, 21,000 fans bearing witness.


title: Streaking

text: In a game against the Melbourne Storm at Olympic Park Stadium in 2007, a Brisbane Broncos fan streaked across the field waving his supporter jersey over his head. He was apprehended at the other side of the field to large applause.


title: Streaking

text: During an NRL finals match between the Wests Tigers and the New Zealand Warriors at the Sydney Football Stadium on 16 September 2011, a streaker ran onto the playing field forcing the game to come to a halt as security guards attempted to apprehend the man.


title: Streaking

text: During the final minutes of the third and deciding game of the 2013 State of Origin series, a streaker, Wati Holmwood, intruded naked upon the field, interrupting the play and possibly costing the Queensland team a try. He was tackled by security guards, escorted from the field and fined $5,500.


title: Streaking

text: The high point of streaking's pop culture significance was in 1974, when thousands of streaks took place around the world. A wide range of novelty products were produced to cash in on the fad, from buttons and patches to a wristwatch featuring a streaking Richard Nixon, in pink underwear that said "Too shy to streak."


title: Streaking

text: Perhaps the most widely seen streaker in history was 34-year-old Robert Opel, who streaked across the stage of The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles flashing a peace sign on national US television at the 46th Academy Awards in April 1974. Bemused host David Niven quipped, "Isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?" Later, evidence arose suggesting that Opel's appearance was facilitated as a publicity stunt by the show's producer Jack Haley Jr. Robert Metzler, the show's business manager, believed that the incident had been planned in some way; during the dress rehearsal Niven had asked Metzler's wife to borrow a pen so he could write down the famous line, which was thus not the ad-lib it appeared to be.


title: Streaking

text: Ray Stevens wrote and performed "The Streak", a novelty song about a man who is "always making the news / wearing just his tennis shoes". The song reached number one on the "Billboard" Hot 100 in May 1974.


title: Streaking

text: Parodied in a 6 May 1974 "Peanuts" comic strip, the character Snoopy, in his big man on campus persona Joe Cool; engages in the "latest campus fad" by removing his customary sunglasses and collar, then proceeds to go streaking by the fourth panel by appearing to be "naked" in doing so.


title: Streaking

text: In 1981, Japanese coin-op manufacturer Shoei produced an arcade game called "Streaking", a maze game in which a nude woman is being chased by police. It was distributed in the U.S. by Computer Games, Inc. as "Streaker", and by Computer Kinetics Corp. as "Stripper".


title: Streaking

text: In 2014, Russian project ChaveZZZ Reality released a single "Naked Runner" and a same-titled video-clip specifically dedicated to all streakers worldwide.


title: Streaking

text: In Bruce Weber's 2014 account of a bike ride across America "Life is a Wheel" he recounts a memory of his friend Billy streaking across the campus of Clark University at the age of 18.


title: Streaking

text: In 2019 the comic novella "Confessions of a Flash Artist" by Renald Iacovelli explored exhibitionism as an avant-garde art form.


title: Streaking

text: As of 2004, the record for the largest group streak was established at the University of Georgia with 1,543 simultaneous streakers on 7 March 1974.


title: Eastern Mediterranean

text: Eastern Mediterranean is a loose definition of the eastern approximate half, or third, of the Mediterranean Sea, often defined as the countries around the Levantine Sea.


title: Eastern Mediterranean

text: It typically embraces all of that sea's coastal zones, referring to communities connected with the sea and land greatly climatically influenced. It includes the southern half of Turkey's main region Anatolia, its smaller Hatay Province, the island of Cyprus, the Greek Dodecanese islands, and the countries of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.


title: Eastern Mediterranean

text: Its broadest uses can embrace the Libyan Sea thus Libya; the Aegean Sea thus European Turkey (East Thrace), the mainland and islands of Greece; and a central part of the Mediterranean, the Ionian Sea, thus southern Albania in Southeast Europe reaching, west, to Italy's farthest south-eastern coasts. Jordan is climatically, and economically part of the region.


title: Eastern Mediterranean

text: The countries and territories of the Eastern Mediterranean include Cyprus, Turkey (Anatolia), its smaller Hatay Province, the Greek Dodecanese islands, and the countries of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Israel, Jordan and Egypt.


title: Eastern Mediterranean

text: "North-eastern Mediterranean" has been put to print as a term for the Greater Balkans: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Romania. A five-author statistics-rich study of 2019 has sought to add Moldova and Ukraine beyond, which others link more to the Black Sea's economy and history. The three-word term is mainly a complex euphemism for the Balkan peninsula used by those who stigmatise the word "Balkanisation" and to suggest parallels with other conflicts of the Eastern Mediterranean.


title: Eastern Mediterranean

text: The WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean includes the Eastern Mediterranean as well as the other Muslim-majority regions of contiguous Afro-Eurasia: the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Central Asia.


title: Kingdom Hearts χ

text: In April 2017, "Unchained χ" was rebranded as Kingdom Hearts Union χ[Cross]. It was rebranded once again in June 2020 to Kingdom Hearts Union χ Dark Road with the release of the standalone game Kingdom Hearts Dark Road, the thirteenth installment in the series. "Dark Road" is accessed within "Union χ". It was announced in February 2021 that "Kingdom Hearts Union χ Dark Road" would be shutting down its online features and transitioning into an offline app, starting with "Union χ" in May 2021 and "Dark Road" in August 2022.


title: Kingdom Hearts χ

text: "Kingdom Hearts χ" is a prequel to the "Kingdom Hearts" series as a whole, taking place centuries prior. It takes place before the Keyblade War, which established the organization of the "Kingdom Hearts" universe as of the original game. The player assumes the role of a Keyblade wielder who joins one of five factions led by Keyblade Masters fighting for control of the limited light existing in the world. "Union χ" acts as a sequel, retelling part of the story of "Kingdom Hearts χ" before diverging and telling a new story set after its events. The game's plot is connected to "Kingdom Hearts III". The title refers to the χ-blade, a weapon central to the series' story arc. "Kingdom Hearts Dark Road" explores the origins of series antagonist Xehanort and his eventual turn to darkness.


title: Kingdom Hearts χ

text: The game was designed as a playing experience that newcomers to the series could come to. Its presentation was compared to that of a fairy tale, as depicting the usual style of the series would have been difficult on the platform. Both Tetsuya Nomura and Yoko Shimomura, veterans from the main series, returned as director and composer respectively. The game received favorable reception from critics. A companion film, "Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover", was released as part of "Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue" in January 2017.


title: Kingdom Hearts χ

text: "Kingdom Hearts χ" is a role-playing video game set in the universe of "Kingdom Hearts" which includes original characters and locations as well as ones from Disney and "Final Fantasy" media properties. Before beginning, players create their own character. Players can customize the gender, hair, and clothing, and choose accessories themed after both Square Enix and Disney universes present in the "Kingdom Hearts" series. Story missions are unlocked by the player. After a certain amount of the available content has been completed, new story missions become available. Players navigate their surroundings by dragging their cursor across the screen. Players navigate different worlds, defeating monsters known as the Heartless. The base game is free to play, with optional microtransactions. Actions use up AP, which can be replenished by either waiting or by using potions, which can be earned or bought. Rare items such as special cards can also be purchased. Alongside the single-player mode, there is a multiplayer mode where teams of players take on Raid Bosses, gigantic Heartless with high HP.


title: Kingdom Hearts χ

text: Enemies appear on-screen, and can be engaged by clicking on them. During the player's turn, three cards are randomly drawn from a deck of nine, each resulting in an attack. If the cards' combined strength and attached skills are insufficient to exhaust the enemy's HP, the heartless will counterattack. If the player survives this attack, or continues by spending additional AP, a new turn begins. Upon defeating an enemy, the player earns Lux (which unlocks rewards as it accumulates, but resets weekly), experience points (through which the player advances in level), and Munny (an in-game currency). The player also earns Fragments, cards based on the characters original to the "Kingdom Hearts" series and those from Disney and "Final Fantasy" franchises: the fragments are imbued with different properties depending on the character, such as physical or elemental strikes. Players can level up their cards to improve their attack and defense. Players can strengthen their Keyblade using materials found in each world, and new Keyblades are acquired as the story progresses. Each strengthens different types of cards; for example, Starlight is an all-around Keyblade offering boosts for Power-, Speed- and Magic-type cards, while the "Snow White"-inspired Treasure Trove is Power-type focused.


title: Kingdom Hearts χ

text: The mobile version of the game, entitled "Kingdom Hearts Union χ", shares multiple gameplay features with its browser counterpart: the main exception is that this version is tailored for a touch screen. The ability to travel freely between different Disney worlds is also replaced with a stage system. These stages, called quests, are confined to specific areas of specific worlds. Instead of spending AP on individual actions, AP is paid to start a quest, and the player can attack as many enemies, collect as many materials, and open as many chests as he or she can find before defeating a target Heartless. If the player's HP is fully depleted, a choice is offered between forfeiting all progress in the quest or continuing to fight by spending Jewels, a new general-purpose in-game currency. Lux is considered another name for character-leveling experience points. Clothing, hair, and accessories are obtained through Avatar Boards, which each contain an array of nodes on branching pathways. These nodes are unlocked, in set sequences, with Avatar Coins, and may also yield such benefits as increased limits for AP and HP. Cards from the browser version are here replaced by Medals, which are no longer drawn randomly in battle. Instead, each equipped Medal is presented one at a time, and the player is given the choice of attacking one enemy, attacking all enemies (dealing less damage), or using the special attack granted by the Medal (provided the Keyblade's special attack gauges are sufficiently filled). Medals can be combined with matching Medals to improve their special attacks.


title: Kingdom Hearts χ

text: "Kingdom Hearts χ" is set in a world called Daybreak Town, hundreds of years prior to the other games in the series. The game begins before the legendary Keyblade War, a conflict sparked due to disputes between Keyblade wielders over the light that created the world, triggering a calamity that reshaped the world into that seen in the rest of the "Kingdom Hearts" series. Prior to the war, a precognizant Keyblade Master known only as the Master of Masters bestows a Book of Prophecies to five of his six apprentices, the Foretellers, before disappearing. The book has the ability to manifest objects and people from the future, and contains an account of future events, from which the five Foretellers learn of a prophecy foretelling the world's destruction. To prevent this, the Foretellers use their books to manifest future worlds and defeat the Heartless infesting them to gather pieces of light, called Lux. Each Foreteller creates and leads their own "Union" themed around their individual animal icon: Unicornis, governed by Ira; Anguis, governed by Invi; Leopardus, governed by Gula; Vulpes, governed by Ava; and Ursus, governed by Aced. The player character, a newly awakened Keyblade wielder, chooses to support one of the Unions and works to ensure the chosen faction's supremacy. The future worlds created by the Book of Prophecies include several worlds introduced in previous series entries, including Dwarf Woodlands (based on "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"); Agrabah ("Aladdin"); Wonderland ("Alice in Wonderland"); Olympus Coliseum ("Hercules"); and Beast's Castle ("Beauty and the Beast").


title: Kingdom Hearts χ

text: "Kingdom Hearts Union χ" takes place shortly after the events of "Kingdom Hearts χ" in an alternate data worldline, with the player reliving the past to forget the events of the Keyblade War. Due to the Book of Prophecies' loss of power without the Master or Foretellers present, the Keyblade wielders instead visit simulated datascapes based on the various Disney worlds. The game initially repeats the story of the original, dubbed "Unchained χ", but diverges partway through the narrative in a new narrative titled "Union χ". New stories feature the player forming a new team with four other Keyblade wielders, who become friends, while a new set of union leaders must contend with new formless, sentient incarnations of True Darkness. Other major story events that do not involve the player were delivered via game updates, serving to expand on the story of "Kingdom Hearts χ" and continue the narrative after the events of the Keyblade War. All of the worlds from "Kingdom Hearts χ" reappear, alongside returning worlds Castle of Dreams ("Cinderella") and Enchanted Dominion ("Sleeping Beauty"). The game also introduces a new world, Game Central Station ("Wreck-It Ralph").


title: Kingdom Hearts χ

text: "Kingdom Hearts Dark Road" is set many years later, beginning 70 years prior to the events of "Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep". The story explores the origins of series antagonist Xehanort and his eventual turn to darkness. Scala ad Caelum, a world first seen in "Kingdom Hearts III", acts as a central hub for the characters in the story, while gameplay takes place in the worlds seen in "χ".


title: Kingdom Hearts χ

text: The player character receives a Keyblade and is given a choice of joining one of five Unions, after which a spirit called a Chirithy explains the player's role of destroying Heartless to collect Lux. Under their Chirithy's direction, the player visits projections of future worlds to carry out their mission. As they continue, Chirithy explains that the Foretellers have learned from the Book of Prophecies about a great battle in which the world will be consumed by darkness. To save the future, the Foretellers use the book's powers to project the future into their era, hoarding Lux to protect the world's light.


title: Kingdom Hearts χ

text: The player befriends Ephemer, a Keyblade wielder from a rival Union who wishes to explore the Foretellers' tower in the center of town. The player agrees to help, but Ephemer disappears shortly thereafter. Later, the player meets another wielder from Ephemer's Union named Skuld, who is investigating his disappearance. Exploring the tower, the player and Skuld are caught by Ava, who challenges them to a duel. Upon her defeat, Ava reveals that she has recruited Ephemer into the Dandelions, a group of Keyblade wielders intended to be kept out of the impending war so they may rebuild the world in its aftermath. Ava offers the same invitation to Skuld and the player; Skuld accepts, but the player is uncertain. As time passes, other wielders accuse one another of stealing Lux, and the Foretellers – suspecting one among themselves to be a traitor – begin rallying more wielders to their Unions to bolster their forces for the war.


title: Kingdom Hearts χ

text: Seeking a solution, the player, Skuld, and Chirithy find Gula, who believes the only one who can stop the war is the now missing Master of Masters. Ava tracks down the Master's sixth apprentice, Luxu, who vanished to watch the war unfold as per the Master's instructions; when Luxu reveals the true nature of the traitor, Ava attacks him, starting the war as prophesied. Skuld returns to the Dandelions while the player participates in the war alone, battling for as long as they can before collapsing in exhaustion. The war ends with the player as the sole survivor, reuniting with Chirithy, Skuld, and Ephemer before losing consciousness. Sometime later, Chirithy awakens the player and lies to them that the events surrounding the war were all a dream. Unbeknownst to them, Maleficent appears nearby – having traveled back in time after being defeated by Sora and his friends – and makes plans to conquer her world in the past.


title: Kingdom Hearts χ

text: Prior to the Keyblade War, the Master of Masters gives Ava a list of five Keyblade wielders who are to become the new Union leaders; against his orders, she gives a Book of Prophecies to one of them, Brain. Strelitzia, another of the new leaders, attempts to convince the player to join the Dandelions, but she is ambushed and killed by an unknown figure. The Master entrusts Luxu with his Keyblade and a black box, which he instructs him to never open, revealing his plan to end a greater war against thirteen willful embodiments of True Darkness by using his apprentices and the new Union leaders as vessels to contain them. The Master plans to travel into the future and escape into a fictional world with Luxu's help.