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Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface (support base). In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. Paintings may have for their support such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, clay, copper or concrete, and may incorporate multiple other materials including sand, clay, paper, gold leaf as well as objects. - Quotes are listed alphabetically by author - Mughal painting is a particular style of South Asian painting, generally confined to miniatures either as book illustrations or as single works to be kept in albums, which emerged from Persian miniature painting, with Indian Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist influences, and developed largely in the court of the Mughal Empire (16th - 19th centuries), and later spread to other Indian courts, both Muslim and Hindu, and later Sikh. - Sana Mahmoud Abbasi in: A Comparison Study between Rajput & Mughal Indian Miniature Paintings Volume : 2, Issue : 2, February 2013, Indian Journal of Research - Rais'd of themselves, their genuine charms they boast And those who paint 'em truest praise 'em most. - Joseph Addison, The Campaign, last line. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - In general, just as painters in working from models constantly gaze at their exemplar and thus strive to transfer the expression of the original to their own artistry, so too he who is anxious to make himself perfect in all the kinds of virtue must gaze upon the lives of the saints as upon statues, so to speak, that move and act, and must make their excellence his own by imitation. - Basil of Caesarea vol. 1, p. 17, Letters as translated by R. Deferrari (1926) - As certain as the Correggiosity of Correggio. - Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta, Emerson. Phrase found also in Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Chapter XII. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - In the Seljuk period, figurative themes of Turco-Mongol character are some what apparent in all the minor arts in both Iran and Iraq. The true Persian miniature, however, which is indisputably the most perfect figurative art on the soil of Islam, did not come into the world until after the conquest of Iran by the Mongols, and more precisely under the rule of the Īl-Khāns (1256). It is modeled upon Chinese painting with its perfect blend of calligraphy and illustration...The link between writing and image remains fundamental to Persian miniatures, which, belongs, as a whole, to the art of books; all the famous miniaturists were calligraphers before becoming painters. - From the mingled strength of shade and light A new creation rises to my sight, Such heav'nly figures from his pencil flow, So warm with light his blended colors glow. * * * * * * The glowing portraits, fresh from life, that bring Home to our hearts the truth from which they spring. - Lord Byron, Monody on the death of the Rt. Hon. R. B. Sheridan, Stanza 3. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - If they could forget for a moment the correggiosity of Correggio and the learned babble of the sale-room and varnishing Auctioneer. - Thomas Carlyle, Frederick the Great, Book IV, Chapter III. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - What avails, then, the folly of the painter, who from sinful love of gain depicts that which should not be depicted—that is, with his polluted hands he tries to fashion that which should only be believed in the heart and confessed with the mouth? He makes an image and calls it Christ. - If anyone shall endeavor to represent the forms of the Saints in lifeless pictures with material colors which are of no value (for this notion is vain and introduced by the devil), and does not rather represent their virtues as living images in himself, let him be anathema! - Iconoclastic Conciliabulum, 754 AD - A picture is a poem without words. - Cornificius, Anet. ad Her., 4. 28. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - Paint me as I am. If you leave out the scars and wrinkles, I will not pay you a shilling. - Oliver Cromwell, Remark to the Painter, Lely. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - Hard features every bungler can command: To draw true beauty shows a master's hand. - John Dryden, To Mr. Lee, on his Alexander, line 53. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - Pictures must not be too picturesque. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, Of Art. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - "Paint me as I am," said Cromwell, "Rough with age and gashed with wars; Show my visage as you find it, Less than truth my soul abhors." - James Thomas Fields, On a Portrait of Cromwell. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - Sixtenth century represents the zenith of Ottoman miniature painting. During this time, the influences of the late 15th and early 16th centuries—the encounters with western European portraiture, the growing emphasis on historiographical painting, the impact of ;nautical cartography, and the enduring influence of the Persian legacy – began to crystallize into distinctly Ottoman styles and genres. - Gábor Ágoston, Bruce Alan Masters in: Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire, Infobase Publishing, 1 January 2009, p. 268 - I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight. - Pieter Bruegel the Elder: My painting will have to tell many stories. It should be large enough to hold everything. Everything, all the people. There must be a hundred of them. I will work like the spider I saw this morning building its web.First it finds an anchoring point. Here, the heart of my web. - The Mill and the Cross written by Michael Francis Gibson and Lech Majewski - A flattering painter, who made it his care To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are. - Oliver Goldsmith, Retaliation (1774), line 63. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - The fellow mixes blood with his colors. - One picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of mankind, from generation to generation until the colors fade and blacken out of sight or the canvas rot entirely away. - Nathaniel Hawthorne, Marble Faun, Book II, Chapter XII. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - Well, something must be done for May, The time is drawing nigh— To figure in the Catalogue, And woo the public eye. Something I must invent and paint; But oh my wit is not Like one of those kind substantives That answer Who and What? - Thomas Hood, The Painter Puzzled. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - Delphinum sylvis appingit, fluctibus aprum. - He paints a dolphin in the woods, a boar in the waves. - Horace, Ars Poetica (18 BC), XXX. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - He that seeks popularity in art closes the door on his own genius: as he must needs paint for other minds, and not for his own. - Mrs. Jameson, Memoirs and Essays, Washington Allston. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - Nequeo monstrare et sentio tantum. - I only feel, but want the power to paint. - Juvenal, Satires, VII. 56. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint. - Frida Kahlo quoted in Time Magazine, "Mexican Autobiography" (27 April 1953) - The form of my painting is the content. - Ellsworth Kelly quoted in: "Abstract Art", Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson 1990, p. 173. - Ottoman miniature painting gave up the warmth, the whimsy, the theatricality, and the multiple meanings of Iranian art in favor of realism, which was also expressed in Ottoman maps, fortress plans and geographies. - Ira M. Lapidus in: Islamic Societies to the Nineteenth Century: A Global History, Cambridge University Press, 29 October 2012, p. 446 - The only good copies are those which exhibit the defects of bad originals. - François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, No. 136. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - The picture that approaches sculpture nearest Is the best picture. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Michael Angelo, Part II. 4. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - Vain is the hope by colouring to display The bright effulgence of the noontide ray Or paint the full-orb'd ruler of the skies With pencils dipt in dull terrestrial dyes. - Mason, Fresnoy's Art of Painting. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - Painting responded to the plague-darkened vision of the human condition provoked by repeated exposure to sudden, inexplicable death. Tuscan painters reacted against Giotto's serenity, preferring sterner, hieratic portrayals of religious scenes and figures. The "Dance of Death" became a common theme for art; and several other macabre motifs entered the European repertory. - William Hardy McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, Ch.4 (1976). - I mix them with my brains, sir. - I accept the fact that the important painting of the last hundred years was done in France. American painters have generally missed the point of modern painting from beginning to end.. ..Thus the fact that good European moderns (European artists who lived in the U.S. because of the Nazi-regime, fh) are now here is very important, for they bring with them an understanding of the problems of modern painting. I am particularly impressed with their concept of the source of art being the unconscious. These idea interests me more than these specific artists do, for the two artists I admire most, Picasso and Miró, are still abroad. - Jackson Pollock Art and Architecture Vol. 61 no. 2, February 1944; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, p. 138, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York, 1990. - He best can paint them who shall feel them most. - Alexander Pope, Eloisa and Abelard, last line. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - Lely on animated canvas stole The sleepy eye, that spoke the melting soul. - Alexander Pope, Second Book of Horace, Epistle I, line 149. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - Painting with all its technicalities, difficulties, and peculiar ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing. - John Ruskin, True and Beautiful, Painting, Introduction. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - If it is the love of that which your work represents — if, being a landscape painter, it is love of hills and trees that moves you — if, being a figure painter, it is love of human beauty, and human soul that moves you — if, being a flower or animal painter, it is love, and wonder, and delight in petal and in limb that move you, then the Spirit is upon you, and the earth is yours, and the fullness thereof. - John Ruskin, The Two Paths, Lect. I. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - Look here, upon this picture, and on this. - What demi-god Hath come so near creation? - I will say of it, It tutors nature: artificial strife Lives in these touches, livelier than life. - The painting is almost the natural man: For since dishonour traffics with man's nature, He is but outside; pencill'd figures are Ev'n such as they give out. - Wrought he not well that painted it? He wrought better that made the painter; and yet he's but a filthy piece of work. - With hue like that when some great painter dips His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse. - Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Revolt of Islam, Canto V, Stanza 23. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - … ζωγραφίαν ποίησιν σιωπῶσαν προσαγορεύει [sc. ὁ Σιμωνίδης], τὴν δὲ ποίησιν ζωγραφίαν λαλοῦσαν. - Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech. - Painting is silent poetry, poetry is eloquent painting. - See also: Ut pictura poesis - Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech. - There is no such thing as a dumb poet or a handless painter. The essence of an artist is that he should be articulate. - Algernon Charles Swinburne, Essays and Studies, Matthew Arnold's New Poems. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - But who can paint Like nature? Can Imagination boast, Amid its gay creation, hues like hers? - James Thomson, The Seasons, Spring (1728), line 465. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - Take a piece of glass of the size of a half sheet of royal folio paper, and fix it... between your eye and the object you wish to portray. Then move it away until your eye is two-thirds of a braccio away from the piece of glass, and fasten your head by means of an instrument in such a way as to prevent any movement of it whatsoever. Then close or cover up one eye, and with a brush or a piece of red chalk finely ground mark out on the glass what is visible beyond it; afterwards, copy it by tracing on paper from the glass, then prick it out upon paper of a better quality and paint it if you so desire, paying special attention to the aerial perspective. - If you wish to thoroughly accustom yourself to correct and good positions for your fingers, fasten a frame or a loom divided into squares by threads between your eye and the nude figure which you are representing, and then make the same squares upon the paper where you wish to draw the said nude but very faintly. You should then put a pellet of wax on a part of the network to serve as a mark which as you look at your model should always cover the pit of the throat, or if he should have turned his back make it cover one of the vertebrae of the neck. ...The squares you draw may be as much smaller than those of the network in proportion as you wish your figure to be less than life size... - Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci XXIX Precepts of the Painter, Tr. Edward MacCurdy (1938). - When you wish to see whether the general effect of your picture corresponds with that of the object represented after nature, take a mirror and set it so that it reflects the actual thing, and then compare the reflection with your picture, and consider carefully whether the subject of the two images is in conformity with both, studying especially the mirror. The mirror ought to be taken as a guide... you see the picture made upon one plane showing things which appear in relief, and the mirror upon one plane does the same. The picture is on one single surface, and the mirror is the same. ...if you but know well how to compose your picture it will also seem a natural thing seen in a great mirror. - They dropped into the yolk of an egg the milk that flows from the leaf of a young fig-tree, with which, instead of water, gum or gumdragant, they mixed their last layer of colours. - Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, Vol. I, Chapter II. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - In western India, Jainism, an Indian religion which expounded renunciation and asceticism, gave rise to unique miniatures which flowered into the school of Rajasthani painting. The miniature paintings commenced with the patronage of the Jain merchants of Gujarat in the fourteenth century. The painting they commissioned were of illustrations of Jain Royalty and deities which were painted on dried palm leaves and bound in wooden covers...when paper was introduced in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, as somewhat large format became available...They were part of the illustrated texts which were preserved in temple libraries. The illustrated text inspired much of the later Hindu miniature paintings. - Madhu Bazaz Wangu in: Images of Indian Goddesses: Myths, Meanings, and Models, Abhinav Publications, 1 January 2003, P.119 - The themes of Mithuna and Maithuna continued in paintings created during the Mughal and British rules (15-19th CE), mainly in Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh. The erotic themes of the Hindu miniature paintings represented loves of divine couples. - Madhu Bazaz Wangu in: "Images of Indian Goddesses: Myths, Meanings, and Models", P.119 - In such miniature paintings the theme of lyric poetry was depicted with strong confident lines, throbbing colours, and bold patterns, but controlled workmanship. The lively landscape created a standard for these outstanding illustrations. - Madhu Bazaz Wangu in: "Images of Indian Goddesses: Myths, Meanings, and Models", P.120 - The ornamental borders framing the miniature paintings seem to be inspired by the decorative designs on the Mughal carpets. - Madhu Bazaz Wangu in: "Images of Indian Goddesses: Myths, Meanings, and Models", P.147 - I would I were a painter, for the sake Of a sweet picture, and of her who led, A fitting guide, with reverential tread, Into that mountain mystery. - John Greenleaf Whittier, Mountain Pictures, No. 2. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77. - A portrait miniature is a miniature portrait painting, usually executed in gouache, water colour, or enamel. Portrait miniatures developed out of the techniques of the miniatures in illuminated manuscripts, and were popular among 16th-century elites, mainly in England and France, and spread across the rest of Europe from the middle of the 18th-century, remaining highly popular until the development of daguerreo types and photography in the mid-19th century. They were especially valuable in introducing people to each other over distances; a nobleman proposing the marriage of his daughter might send a courier with her portrait to visit potential suitors. Soldiers and sailors might carry miniatures of their loved ones while traveling, or a wife might keep one of her husband while he was away. The first miniaturists used water colour to paint on stretched vellum. During the second half of the 17th century, vitreous enamel painted on copper became increasingly popular, especially in France. In the 18th century, miniatures were painted with water colour on ivory, which had now become relatively cheap. As small in size as 40 mm × 30 mm, portrait miniatures were often used as personal w:Mementosmementos or as jewellery or snuff box covers. - George C. Williamson in: "The Work of Alyn Williams, P.R.M.S. (President of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters)" Pamphlet – January 1, 1920

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Use of complementary and alternative medicine by those with a chronic disease and the general population - results of a national population based survey © Metcalfe et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010 Received: 28 May 2010 Accepted: 18 October 2010 Published: 18 October 2010 The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is becoming more common, but population-based descriptions of its patterns of use are lacking. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of CAM use in the general population and for those with asthma, diabetes, epilepsy and migraine. Data from cycles 1.1, 2.1 and 3.1 of the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) were used for the study. The CCHS is a national cross-sectional survey administered to 400,055 Canadians aged ≥12 between 2001-2005. Self-reported information about professionally diagnosed health conditions was elicited. CCHS surveys use a multistage stratified cluster design to randomly select a representative sample of Canadian household residents. Descriptive data on the utilization of CAM services was calculated and logistic regression was used to determine what sociodemographic factors predict CAM use. Weighted estimates show that 12.4% (95% Confidence Interval (CI): 12.2-12.5) of Canadians visited a CAM practitioner in the year they were surveyed; this rate was significantly higher for those with asthma 15.1% (95% CI: 14.5-15.7) and migraine 19.0% (95% CI: 18.4-19.6), and significantly lower for those with diabetes 8.0% (95% CI: 7.4-8.6) while the rate in those with epilepsy (10.3%, 95% CI: 8.4-12.2) was not significantly different from the general population. A large proportion of Canadians use CAM services. Physicians should be aware that their patients may be accessing other services and should be prepared to ask and answer questions about the risks and benefits of CAM services in conjunction with standard medical care. A variety of definitions of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) have been reported in the literature. They range from "medical interventions that are not taught widely in medical schools or generally available in hospitals" to "strategies that have not met the standards of clinical effectiveness, either through randomized controlled clinical trials or though the consensus of the biomedical community" . Others avoid definitions and instead use a classification system that groups CAM practices into manual therapies, mind-body therapies, movement-based therapies, oral therapies, and support therapies . Rates of CAM use vary widely in the literature from 6% to 84% [1–8], and broadly show that women [4, 6, 8–10], those with high incomes [3, 4, 9], those with high education levels [3, 4, 8–10], certain ethnic groups [6, 7] and those with a chronic condition [4, 7, 8] are more likely to use CAM than the general population. CAM services are also widely reported to be used in conjunction with standard medical care [2, 3, 10, 11], but the use of these services is not often disclosed to health professionals . This lack of reporting is particularly concerning for patients with a chronic disease who seek advice from herbalists and who are taking multiple medications, as many serious adverse drug interactions between pharmaceuticals and herbs or traditional medicines have been reported . While research has been done examining CAM use in patients with specific diseases and for those with one or more chronic conditions, little attention has been paid in the literature to how CAM use differs by type of chronic disease. Very few studies could be found that compare CAM utilization among individuals with different types of chronic disease; however, most were not population-based [14–17], did not adjust for other predisposing characteristics [18–20], or grouped multiple chronic conditions together . One population-based United States (US) study concluded that after adjustment for demographic factors, individuals with arthritis, cancer, cardiovascular disease and lung disease were more likely to have used CAM services in the past 12 months . However, due to underlying health insurance and health care systems differences between the US and other developed countries, it is unknown if these results can be extrapolated beyond the US population. This study aims to examine how CAM use differs among patients with asthma, diabetes, epilepsy and migraine compared to the general Canadian population. The Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) is a national cross-sectional survey administered to 400,055 Canadians aged ≥12 between 2001-2007, excluding those who live on Indian reserves, in institutions, in certain remote areas, or are full-time members of the Canadian Armed Forces . CCHS surveys use a multistage stratified cluster design to randomly select a representative sample of Canadian household residents that represents approximately 98% of Canadians living in the provinces, 97% from the Northwest Territories, 90% from the Yukon and 71% from Nunavet . Interviews are conducted in-person when possible, and self-reported information about professionally diagnosed health conditions, utilization of health services and health-related behaviours was elicited . Data on chronic disease status was assessed from the following question: "Now I would like to ask you about certain chronic health conditions which you may have. We are interested in long-term conditions which are expected to last or have already lasted six months or more and that have been diagnosed by a health professional." A list of chronic conditions followed, and subjects were asked to respond yes or no. Asthma, diabetes, epilepsy, and migraine were chosen from the list of conditions in the CCHS as comparator groups for this study as they are conditions that can affect individuals throughout the life span and they are all chronic conditions that can be associated with episodic exacerbations that may require periodic acute treatment. Data on the use of CAM services was assessed in the following way: "In the past twelve months, have you seen or talked to an alternative health care provider such as an acupuncturist, homeopath or massage therapist about your physical, emotional, or mental health?" Those who answered yes were presented with a list of options for the type of CAM provider they could have consulted. This list included: Acupuncturist, Biofeedback Teacher, Chiropractor, Feldenkrais or Alexander Teacher, Herbalist, Homeopath or Naturopath, Massage Therapist, Reflexologist, Relaxation Therapist, Religious Healer, Rolfer, and Spiritual Healer. Data from cycles 1.1 (2001), 2.1 (2003) and 3.1 (2005) of the CCHS were merged and weighted estimates were constructed to examine the prevalence of CAM use. Statistics Canada's methodology for survey merging was followed, including the recommendation that bootstrapping not be used for merged surveys. Descriptive statistics (frequencies and crude odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs)) were calculated and logistic regression was used to construct a multivariable model examining what factors are associated with CAM use using Stata IC version 9. Demographic factors (sex, age, education, income, marital status, residence in an urban or rural area) and disease factors (self-reported asthma, diabetes, epilepsy or migraine) were initially added to the model. Variables not achieving statistical significance at the alpha = 0.05 level were removed until all variables remaining in the model were significant. This study was approved by the Conjoint Health Research Ethics Board at the University of Calgary. Demographic Characteristics of Sample Age (mean ± standard deviation) 45.4 ± 20.2 39.5 ± 19.2 62.9 ± 14.7 43 ± 17.7 41.1 ± 16.8 Female Gender (%, 95% CI) Marital Status (%, 95% CI) • Married/Common Law Income Quintiles (household) (%, 95% CI) • Low middle • Upper middle Residence (%, 95% CI) Highest Level of Education Completed (%, 95% CI) • Did not complete high school • Completed high school • Some post-secondary • Completed post-secondary Prevalence of CAM Use Predictors of CAM Use Predictors of CAM Use Odds Ratio (95% CI) 0 = No 1 = Yes 0 = No 1 = Yes 0 = No 1 = Yes 1 = male 2 = female 0 = 25-44 1 = 12-24 2 = 45-64 3 = ≥65 Highest Level of Education 1 = didn't graduate from high school 2 = high school grad 3 = some post-secondary 4 = post-secondary grad 1 = married/common law 2 = widowed/separated/divorced 3 = single Income Quintiles (based on household income) 1 = lowest 2 = low middle 3 = middle 4 = upper middle 5 = highest This study found that approximately 12% of Canadians used some sort of CAM service in the past 12 months, and that CAM use was associated with female gender, high income and high levels of education. An inverted U-shaped relationship was noted between CAM use and age. This pattern has also been observed in other studies [8–10], indicating that CAM use may either have generational effects or be what Millar refers to in his paper as a "mid-life phenomenon" . This study also shows that those with a chronic disease are not uniformly high users of CAM services. Those with epilepsy had slightly lower level of CAM use in the past year as the general population, but this did not reach statistical significance, while those with diabetes were significantly less likely to have used any CAM service in the past year. Additionally, those with different chronic conditions are consulting different CAM practitioners. That individuals with asthma, diabetes and migraine remain statistically more (in the case of asthma and migraine) or less (in the case of diabetes) likely to utilize CAM services after adjustment for demographic factors such as age, sex and income suggests that these differences cannot be explained by predisposing characteristics alone, and in fact, represent true differences between groups. This difference may be due in part to the relatively constant nature of diabetes, once adequate blood sugar control has been achieved, as opposed to the more sporadic and acute nature of asthma and migraine attacks. A study using data from Statistics Canada's National Population Health Survey (1994-1999) found that individuals with arthritis/rheumatism, asthma, back problems, bronchitis/emphysema, Crohn's disease, and migraine were more likely to use CAM services than the general population . However, once adjustments were made for chronic pain only those with asthma and back problems had significantly higher use than the general population . Another study found that approximately two-thirds of survey respondents reported using CAM because they felt that conventional treatments were not effective for treating their health problem . This may support the hypothesis that once adequate control of a chronic condition is achieved, individuals do not feel the need to seek out alternative treatments. Furthermore, current conventional care paradigms for diabetes tend to be holistic in nature and require patients to be actively involved in preventing further symptoms, while treatment for both migraine and asthma tends to be more reactionary when symptoms occur and focuses on pharmaceutical management. The finding of differential use of CAM services by type of chronic disease is important as it is commonly stated in the literature that many CAM users do not disclose or discuss their CAM use with their primary care physician, and due to polypharmacy, those with chronic disease are at an increased risk of complex drug interactions . A study examining herbal use in children presenting to a Canadian emergency room found that approximately 16% of children were taking medications and natural health products that could potentially interact . Additionally, a survey of patients receiving care from the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine found that only 58.5% of respondents discussed CAM use with their primary care physician, but 90.9% discussed their prescription medication use with their naturopathic physician . As this study and others show that individuals with certain chronic conditions are more likely to use CAM services, and these services are often used alongside standard medical care, this indicates that the onus has now been placed on care providers to specifically inquire about the use of CAM services. While approximately 70% of physicians do not ask their patients about the use of CAM services, physician inquiry has been shown to increase patient disclosure of CAM use by a factor of 19 (OR = 18.77, 95% CI: 5.06-69.62) . Research also shows that physicians are uncomfortable discussing CAM services with their patients as generally they have little formal knowledge or personal experience with these services . Ultimately, patients often seek out alternative treatments when they feel they are missing something from Canada's conventional health care system. A Canadian study examining why patients chose to use CAM services found that while the most commonly reported reasons that patients used CAM services were that these services allowed them to take a more active role in their health and they identified with the holistic approach . Additionally, 40.1% of respondents reporting using CAM services because they had problems communicating with their medical doctor, and approximately two-thirds of respondents reported that conventional medicine was not effective for their particular health issue, that they were desperate, and were at a point where they were willing to try anything . There are strengths and limitations to our study. The main strengths of the study include its population-based ascertainment and the very large sample size. Limitations of this study include its reliance on self-report data, and a lack of data on the type of health complaints that were addressed by CAM practitioners and rationales for seeking alternative treatments. Statistical correction for multiple testing was not undertaken, hence it is possible that a spurious association was found by chance alone. However, this is a descriptive study that is not aiming assess a specific hypothesis. Additionally, while information was collected on visits to herbalists, specific detailed information on the use of natural health products that were prescribed by a CAM practitioner or self-prescribed, which may have a greater probability of negatively interacting with standard medications, was not collected. In conclusion, Canadians appear to be using CAM services in conjunction with, not instead of, conventional care. Since scientific evidence has shown the benefits of some types of CAM, greater emphasis needs to be placed on how to better assess the use and impact of CAM services in those with chronic conditions. Physicians should also be prepared to ask and answer questions about the risks and benefits of CAM services in conjunction with standard medical care. While the research and analysis are based on data from Statistics Canada, the opinions expressed do not represent the views of Statistics Canada. This project was in part funded by Alberta Innovates Health Solutions as both N. Jetté and S. Patten hold salary support awards from this agency. N. Jetté also holds a salary support award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). A. Metcalfe has a doctoral research award in Genetics (Ethics, Law and Society) and a STIRRHS training grant in Maternal Fetal Newborn Health and Genes, Development and Child Health from CIHR. - Boon HS, Olatunde F, Zick SM: Trends in complementary/alternative medicine use by breast cancer survivors: comparing survey data from 1998 and 2005. BMC Womens Health. 2007, 7: 4-10.1186/1472-6874-7-4.View ArticlePubMedPubMed CentralGoogle Scholar - Samdup DZ, Smith RG, Il Song S: The use of complementary and alternative medicine in children with chronic medical conditions. Am J Phys Med Rehabil. 2006, 85 (10): 842-846. 10.1097/01.phm.0000233183.17059.b9.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar - Foltz V, St Pierre Y, Rozenberg S, Rossignol M, Bourgeois P, Joseph L, Adam V, Penrod JR, Clarke AE, Fautrel B: Use of complementary and alternative therapies by patients with self-reported chronic back pain: a nationwide survey in Canada. 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Health Rep. 2001, 13 (1): 9-21.PubMedGoogle Scholar - Wiles J, Rosenberg MW: 'Gentle caring experience'. Seeking alternative health care in Canada. Health Place. 2001, 7 (3): 209-224. 10.1016/S1353-8292(01)00011-9.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar - McFarland B, Bigelow D, Zani B, Newsom J, Kaplan M: Complementary and alternative medicine use in Canada and the United States. Am J Public Health. 2002, 92 (10): 1616-1618. 10.2105/AJPH.92.10.1616.View ArticlePubMedPubMed CentralGoogle Scholar - Andrews G, Boon H: CAM in Canada: places, practices, research. Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice. 2005, 11: 21-27. 10.1016/j.ctcp.2004.10.004.View ArticleGoogle Scholar - Busse JW, Heaton G, Wu P, Wilson KR, Mills EJ: Disclosure of natural product use to primary care physicians: a cross-sectional survey of naturopathic clinic attendees. Mayo Clin Proc. 2005, 80 (5): 616-623. 10.4065/80.5.616.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar - Goldman RD, Rogovik AL, Lai D, Vohra S: Potential interactions of drug-natural health products and natural health products-natural health products among children. J Pediatr. 2008, 152 (4): 521-526. 10.1016/j.jpeds.2007.09.026. 526 e521-524View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar - Cherniack EP, Senzel RS, Pan CX: Correlates of use of alternative medicine by the elderly in an urban population. J Altern Complement Med. 2001, 7 (3): 277-280. 10.1089/107555301300328160.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar - Lee GB, Charn TC, Chew ZH, Ng TP: Complementary and alternative medicine use in patients with chronic diseases in primary care is associated with perceived quality of care and cultural beliefs. Fam Pract. 2004, 21 (6): 654-660. 10.1093/fampra/cmh613.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar - Cheung CK, Wyman JF, Halcon LL: Use of complementary and alternative therapies in community-dwelling older adults. 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Climacteric. 2008, 11 (2): 124-134. 10.1080/13697130801930674.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar - Eisenberg DM, Kessler RC, Foster C, Norlock FE, Calkins DR, Delbanco TL: Unconventional medicine in the United States. Prevalence, costs, and patterns of use. N Engl J Med. 1993, 328 (4): 246-252. 10.1056/NEJM199301283280406.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar - Saydah SH, Eberhardt MS: Use of complementary and alternative medicine among adults with chronic diseases: United States 2002. J Altern Complement Med. 2006, 12 (8): 805-812. 10.1089/acm.2006.12.805.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar - Canadian Community Health Survey. [http://www.statcan.gc.ca/cgi-bin/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&SDDS=3226&lang=en&db=imdb&adm=8&dis=2] - Sirois FM: Motivations for consulting complementary and alternative medicine practitioners: a comparison of consumers from 1997-8 and 2005. BMC Complement Altern Med. 2008, 8: 16-10.1186/1472-6882-8-16.View ArticlePubMedPubMed CentralGoogle Scholar - Brown J, Cooper E, Frankton L, Steeves-Wall M, Gillis-Ring J, Barter W, McCabe A, Fernandez C: Complementary and alternative therapies: Survey of knowledge and attitudes of health professionals at a teritary pediatric/women's care facility. Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice. 2007, 13: 194-200. 10.1016/j.ctcp.2007.03.003.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar - The pre-publication history for this paper can be accessed here:http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6882/10/58/prepub This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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The argument is finally over about whether climate change is a global threat. We now know that not only were scientists correct in their warnings, but that the effects are coming more quickly than expected. NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen says we have 10 years to turn things around. The question now is what can we do? What solutions are up to the scale of the crisis? Our resources are a combination of some of the best science plus the most powerful actions available: :: TAKE ACTION :: GET INFORMED :: TAKE ACTION It will take major mobilization, a shift to renewables, and changes in well-worn habits, but the solutions are ready. Change starts with you. Be the spark that starts a fire of awareness and activism within your own community. The Climate Project invites individuals to Nashville, Tennessee, to be trained by Al Gore and a team of renowned scientists and environmental educators. Trainees also learn how to present Gore’s slide show, which An Inconvenient Truth is based on. www.theclimateproject.org 1Sky is a major initiative to unite climate change activists into a collective movement calling for green jobs, emissions reductions, renewable energy, and an end to coal plants. The goal is to formulate a clear policy platform while mobilizing at the grassroots to push it forward.www.1sky.org Green for All advocates for a strong green economy that tackles pollution and poverty at the same time. www.greenforall.org The US Climate Emergency Council offers activist tools. www.climateemergency.org Co-op America is a great resource for environmentally and socially responsible consumers, with information on sustainable products, companies, and investments. Their Take Action webpage features causes to fight for and easy suggestions of what you can do. www.coopamerica.org Center for a New American Dream advocates an alternative to consumer culture. Offers guides to responsible purchasing, escaping commercialism, simple holidays, and a campaign for “Carbon Conscious Consumers.” www.newdream.org Rising Tide North America is a decentralized network of groups and individuals organizing against the root causes of climate change. The website offers links, guides to issues, contact info for local groups, and news. risingtidenorthamerica.org/wordpress/principles Along with yearly teach-ins that gather students and communities in climate change dialogue, Focus the Nation also has suggestions for schools, faith groups, businesses, and civic groups of how they can get involved in advancing climate awareness. www.focusthenation.org SOS Yasuní is a website for activism and information regarding Ecuador’s plan to keep vast oil reserves in the ground to protect people and biodiversity in Yasuni National Park. www.sosyasuni.org Stop Global Warming is a virtual march of hundreds of thousands of citizens calling on political leaders to put freezes on greenhouse gas emissions. www.stopglobalwarming.org No War, No Warming builds awareness of the relationship between fossil fuels, the war in Iraq, and climate change by connecting organizations involved in the peace movement or the environmental movement. www.nowarnowarming.org Bioneers holds workshops and conferences focusing on biological and cultural diversity, as well as ecology, sustainability, traditional farming, community-building, and social justice. www.bioneers.org Based in Olympia, Washington, Climate Solutions works to accelerate action on climate change by generating investments and political movement in the region. www.climatesolutions.org The Ella Baker Center's Green Jobs Campaign addresses the need for green collar jobs and employment opportunities for low-income people and people of color. www.ellabakercenter.org :: CONNECT WITH ALLIES There are many advocacy groups involved in specific aspects of the climate crisis. You can join their part of the struggle or forge connections between your work and other people's efforts. Through the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, participating cities work towards carbon reductions set by the Kyoto Protocol and urge state and national leaders to pass greenhouse gas emissions regulations. usmayors.org/climateprotection/agreement.htm The Best Practices, a guide compiled by the Conference of Mayors, analyzes case studies about what worked in particular cities so that other cities and groups can use their ideas as models. usmayors.org/climateprotection/bestpractices.htm The Cities for Climate Protection campaign, a project of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, assists cities in adopting policies and implementing quantifiable measures to reduce local greenhouse gas emissions, improve air quality, and enhance urban livability and sustainability. www.iclei.org/index.php?id=810 Sierra Club Cool Cities campaign offers activist tools, best practice guides, technical information, campaign handouts, cities’ climate action plans, and a personal action guide. coolcities.us/resources.php Transition Towns is a forum for communities working towards the Transition Initiative. Involved groups can organize, post information, and communicate with each other through the website. www.transitiontowns.org On Transition Culture, Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Towns movement, blogs about Transition Towns and has useful links and archived articles. transitionculture.org Solar Richmond works to bring renewable energy and green collar jobs to Richmond, California. www.solarrichmond.org People's Grocery runs community-supported agriculture and youth-focused urban agriculture projects, and advocates for a healthy, equitable food system for urban America. www.peoplesgrocery.org Sustainable South Bronx works at improving transportation, land-use, and waste disposal in the Bronx, and offers inspiration and ideas to other urban communities looking for an economic and environmental makeover. www.ssbx.org Green Worker Cooperatives creates and supports green, worker-owned co-ops in the South Bronx. www.greenworker.coop Climate Challenge is a network of youth organizations offering resources for students who want to initiate climate change solutions on college campuses. The partners list links to the most active youth-led groups out there. climatechallenge.org The Energy Action Coalition, responsible for Power Shift 2007, is a youth-led network of organizations, supporting the youth movement for clean energy. www.energyaction.net The Cascade Climate Network is a regional body of youth, particularly college students, engaged in climate sustainability issues. cascadeclimate.org The Presidents' Climate Commitment is gathering pledges from colleges and universities that are committed to achieving climate neutrality. A breakdown of solutions provides a framework for setting up a campus's process towards zero emissions. www.presidentsclimatecommitment.org The Resource Center on the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education website has assessment tools, financing strategies, and ideas for incorporating sustainability into all aspects of college and university settings. www.aashe.org Business, environmental, labor, and community groups and leaders connect through the Apollo Alliance, which works to end America's energy dependence on foreign nations, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and increase green collar job opportunities. www.apolloalliance.org A network of unions, organizations, business leaders, and local officials, the Workforce Alliance advocates for policies that support the American labor force. www.workforcealliance.org The Industrial Areas Foundation is a network of organizations and groups working for equality and social change. www.industrialareasfoundation.org With offices around the globe, the Climate Action Network coordinates the exchange of climate change information between non-governmental organizations that are working to activate governments towards climate sustainability initiatives. www.climatenetwork.org Earth Share helps workplaces hold donation drives, the proceeds of which go to a network of environmental and conservation non-profits across the country. www.earthshare.org The Jewish holiday of Hanukkah is evoked by the Shalom Center's Green Menorah Covenant, which urges congregations and communities to reduce fossil fuel consumption by seven-eights, or use one day's oil to light eight days. www.shalomctr.org The Evangelical Environmental Network educates and encourages Christians to protect the Earth and call for environmentally responsible legislation. www.creationcare.org The Evangelical Climate Initiative calls evangelical Christians to act upon the looming climate crisis and the toll it will take on the world's less fortunate, listing action tips for individuals, congregations, and church leaders. www.christiansandclimate.org The Northwest Earth Institute's discussion courses give schools, faith groups, and communities a framework for talking about sustainability, globalization, deep ecology, and simple living. www.nwei.org Facing the Future has educational resources on global sustainability, population, poverty, health, and consumption and offers curriculum for teachers. www.facingthefuture.org The North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) is a professional association of environmental educators. NAAEE encourages educators to teach about environmental issues is a way that promotes critical thinking. www.naaee.org The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education develops sustainability coursework and professional development programs to be used by educators and school systems. www.sustainabilityed.org The Center for EcoLiteracy helps teachers with sustainability education by providing teaching tools and curricula and encouraging hands-on learning in the outdoors. www.ecoliteracy.org The Environmental Education Association of Washington is a support system for Washington State educators, connecting teachers with curriculum and organizing a yearly conference. :: GET INFORMED Natural Resources Defense Council offers a guide to the science and threat of climate change, as well as policy primers, petitions, and carbon cutting ideas. www.nrdc.org Nobel Peace Prize recipient Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues fact-heavy reports on climate change and its impact on the earth. www.ipcc.ch The World Resources Institute is an environmental think tank that publishes studies and policy suggestions about confronting climate change. www.wri.org The International Forum on Globalization looks at the effects of economic globalization and works at setting up diverse alternative systems. The annual IFG teach-in is captured on audio, video, and text. www.ifg.org. Redefining Progress is a think-tank working for a just economy and a sustainable world. They offer one of the better carbon footprint calculators out there, as well as lesson plans for educators. www.rprogress.org Grist offers a useful chart that lets you compare where presidential candidates stand on cap and trade, fuel economy, renewable energy, biofuels, coal, and nuclear energy. www.grist.org/candidate_chart_08.html RealClimate posts commentary from climate scientists, providing a valuable resource for students and journalists looking for sound scientific analysis of the latest climate change news. www.realclimate.org The Goddard Institute for Space Studies conducts and posts research on global change and has a host of graphs, satellite images, and analysis. http://www.giss.nasa.gov/ The Earth Policy Institute’s goal is to provide a vision of what a sustainable economy would look like. The website tracks news stories about progress toward an eco-economy. www.earth-policy.org ClimateCrisis is the support website for An Inconvenient Truth. Here you’ll find information on why a change is necessary, as well as some tips on cutting carbon and getting active. www.climatecrisis.net Rocky Mountain Institute publishes position papers and reports on climate solutions at many levels, including a guide of how one household went carbon neutral. www.rmi.org The Sightline Institute researches and promotes environmental sustainability in the Pacific Northwest. www.sightline.org The Sustainability Institute, through consulting, workshops, and leadership development, seeks to make sustainability practices widespread. www.sustainer.org The EPA carbon emissions calculator lets you calculate your own carbon footprint, plus it gives you an idea of how many pounds of carbon you can lose by being more fuel- and energy-efficient. www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ind_calculator.html It’s Getting Hot in Here postsblogs about the latest news in climate change and youth activism. www.itsgettinghotinhere.org The Film Connection has a website called Enviro-Film: Creative Solutions to Climate Change with a guide to independent and documentary films that you can rent for free. www.thefilmconnection.org/programs/770 EcoEquity's Greenhouse Development Rights set a framework for maintaining a stable climate while emphasizing global justice for the developing world. The Links page is a great resource for other organizations involved in environmental and climate justice. www.ecoequity.org England's Schumacher College offers four-day to three-week environmental sustainability short courses to groups and individuals. www.schumachercollege.org.uk The Au Sable Institute's four campuses in the U.S. and India teach university-level courses on environmental and sustainability issues, and also offer retreats, education, and outreach services for adults and children. www.ausable.org The Center for American Progress is a think tank promoting stronger communities and government and policies that are for the people. www.americanprogress.org :: CLIMATE CRISIS LIBRARY If you prefer to read on paper and want to get deeper into the issues check out this selection of recent titles on the climate crisis, that focus not only on the problem but offer practical solutions. Apollo's Fire, by Congressman Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks, investigates the people and technologies behind the many solutions to the energy crisis and the policies needed to bring these solutions into the mainstream. Island Press, 2008. Boiling Point, by Ross Gelbspan, calls out oil and coal companies, politicians, and the media for contributing to global warming by taking part in ‘denial and delay’ strategies. Perseus Books Group, 2004. Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free, by Arjun Makhijani and in partnership with the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, is a roadmap for an energy policy that will lead the U.S. away from climate disaster and towards a sustainable future. IEER Press and RDR Books, 2007. Climate Solutions, by Peter Barnes, clearly defines the climate policies on the table, who's behind them, and whether or not they would benefit the earth and the general public. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008. Discussion Guide on Global Warming: Changing CO2urse, a collection of essays by well-respected climate activists, tackles climate change, the solutions needed, and how we can steer towards an improved world and way of life. Northwest Earth Institute, 2007. Earth Under Fire, by Gary Braasch, is a comprehensive look at the world-wide effects of climate change. His book presents dramatic photographs, maps and quotes from world climate science leaders. See a sample. Earth & Word, edited by David Rhoads, is a collection of essays and sermons by theologians and environmentalists, clergy and activists who speak for the protection of the earth and the relationship between ecological and religious thought. Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2007. Fair Future, edited by Wolfgang Sachs and Tilman Santarius, looks at the stresses on the world's resources today and how future global economic policies can address these issues in a just and equitable way. Zed Books, 2007. Heat, by George Monbiot, investigates the pros, cons, costs, and possibilities behind climate change solutions and claims that we can indeed cut carbon emissions by 90% by 2030. South End Press, 2007. The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, by Thom Hartmann, details the reasons behind, the impacts of, and solutions to climate catastrophe. Three Rivers Press, 2004. Local Action, by Tommy Linstroth and Ryan Bell, looks at the power of small, local actions in addressing global warming and bringing about positive change. University of Vermont Press, 2007. Low Carbon Diet, by David Gerhson, gives readers tools and tips for cutting thousands of pounds of carbon out of their lives. Empowerment Institute, 2006. The Party's Over, by Richard Heinberg, traces fossil fuel's path through the industrial revolution and the wars of the past century and looks at how our society can transition smoothly into a post-peak oil era. New Society Publishers, 2005. Plan B 2.0, by Lester R. Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, lays out a plan to move beyond our throw-away economy and use existing technologies to restore and save our world. W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. Plug-In Hybrids, by Sherry Boschert, reveals why car companies resist making plug-in hybrids and the people who are fighting to get these valuable cars on the market. New Society Publishers, 2006. The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook, by Albert Bates, has hopeful, inspiring ‘recipes’ for managing your waste, changing your needs, and, if you're feeling ambitious, rebuilding civilization. New Society Publishers, 2006. Stormy Weather, by Guy Dauncey and Patrick Mazza, proposes 101 viable solutions that nations, cities, businesses, community groups, and individuals can get behind to help in reversing climate change. New Society Publishers, 2001. Urban Meltdown, by Clive Doucet, looks at the Earth's urban growth, its effects on global warming, and why politicians haven't moved on the issue. New Society Publishers, 2007. Who Owns the Sky?, by Peter Barnes, discusses the need for a carbon emissions cap, the policies being considered, and proposes a plan that would return cash dividends to all of the population. Island Press, 2001. You Can Prevent Global Warming, by Dr. Jeffrey Langholz and Kelly Turner, lists 51 easy, low-cost ways to save significant amounts of energy and money. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2003. Inspired by our articles about green buildings, clean energy, cool cars, and sustainable food and forests? Here you can dig deeper and find out more about what is possible in a post-carbon world. The Architecture 2030 Challenge urges the architecture industry to work towards carbon neutral buildings. Join the challenge, read the solutions, and see who's already involved. www.architecture2030.org A promoter of sustainable architecture, the U.S. Green Building Council website gives a thorough explanation of LEED standards for all building types. www.usgbc.org The city of Berkeley, California adopted the Residential Energy Conservation Ordinance to improve energy conservation and pricing for homeowners. Information on requirements, costs, savings, and inspections available on their website. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/sustainable/residents/ResSidebar/RECO.html Passivhaus is a building standard for energy-efficient residential buildings. Get information on consultations, products, and existing Passiv homes. www.passivhaus.org.uk High Performance Building, a film released by the Rocky Mountain Institute, portrays the financial and environmental benefits of sustainable building. bet.rmi.org Oberlin College’s Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies is a building designed to mesh with the natural environment. The school offers tours and education on high-performance eco-design. www.oberlin.edu/ajlc/ajlcHome.html The Global Wind Energy Council promotes wind energy development on an international scale. www.gwec.net The American Solar Energy Society promotes the importance of solar energy, energy efficiency, and other sustainable energy options. www.ases.org A study led by MIT, The Future of Geothermal Energy, outlines the energy potential lying under the earth's crust. geothermal.inel.gov/publications.shtml The U.N. Chronicle features A Low Carbon Energy Strategy for the 21st Century, an article by two leaders from the Solar Energy Industries Association. www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2007/issue2/0207p63.htm Solar Generation IV, a Greenpeace report, calculates that we can get solar electricity for over one billion people and create two million jobs in the sector by 2020. www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/solar-generation-iv Evaluation of Global Wind Power is a scholarly paper quantifying the potential of wind power gathered on a global scale. www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/global_winds.html An international network of engineers and scientists, the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation is developing a partnership between North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe to garner the solar and wind energies available in desert regions. www.trec-uk.org.uk Global Wind Energy Outlook 2006, a Greenpeace report, looks at the potential, environmental impact, and policy of wind power. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/globalwindenergyoutlook The World Energy Council works with lawmakers in developing energy plans for a sustainable world. www.worldenergy.org Swedish company Seabased AB explores the potential of ocean wave energy. www.seabased.com The UNDP’s World Energy Assessment discusses energy and development and looks at trends and potential in energy technology and policy. www.undp.org/energy/weaover2004.htm Plug In America is a public awareness and advocacy group fighting to get electric cars on the American market and save existing electric cars from being destroyed. www.PlugInAmerica.org G-Wiz is one of Britain’s earth-friendliest cars, zero-emissions and adorably compact. www.goingreen.co.uk Based primarily in the U.K., Modec’s zero-emissions commercial vehicles are now branching out to the US and continental Europe. www.modec.co.uk Tesla Motors has given the electric car a sportscar makeover. www.teslamotors.com The Bus Rapid Transit Policy Center helps cities around the world plan effective, climate-friendly mass transit systems. www.gobrt.org Vélib' has thousands of bicycles throughout Paris, which can be rented from hundreds of stations around the city. www.velib.paris.fr SkySails and Kiteship are helping shipping companies try out renewable energy by selling massive, parachute-like sails that move boats via wind power rather than oil. www.skysails.info, www.kiteship.com :: FOOD AND FORESTS Greenpeace's Cool Farming report explains the environmental damage caused by industrial farming and provides solutions to reducing agriculture's impact on climate change. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations details the meat industry's contribution to climate change. The Rainforest Action Network campaigns against America's oil addiction, environmental destruction, and climate injustice, publicizing information and ways to get involved. The Rodale Institute's New Farm, does research, outreach and training in regenerative agricultural practices. CarboFor is the Center for International Forestry Research's (CIFOR) carbon forestry website, connecting people to related projects and archiving hundreds of academic papers.

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Popular science portrays evolution as a free for all in which organisms kill each other off until there is only one left standing. In reality, natural selection creates a delicate balance in which organisms evolve to be in a state of harmony with each other. Organisms that get too greedy simply kill off their prey or hosts, and ultimately end up weeding themselves out of the evolutionary tree. Symbiosis, when organisms benefit one another, is an important part of evolution, but Dr. Frank Abernathy takes it a step further. He believes that the cell nucleus is actually the result of several different organisms joining together to form a single entity. While his theory hasn’t won the approval of the mainstream biological community, he has compiled some convincing evidence to argue his case. With a doctorate from Ohio State University, and several scientific publications that have received dozens of citations, he certainly has the academic clout to make controversial hypotheses. Surprisingly, his easily falsifiable theory hasn’t received the funding necessary to test it, a situation that I hope changes soon. Thanks for speaking with me Frank. I appreciate your interest in my views on this subject, Carter. Thanks for taking the time to interview me. You’re very welcome. Okay, I’d like to dive right in and start talking about your most ambitious research, which is about the evolution of the eukaryotic cell. For those who aren’t aware, there are two types of cells. The primitive prokaryotic cell is little more than a jellylike substance containing genetic material, wrapped in a cell membrane. Bacteria follow this model. The eukaryotic cell, on the other hand, contains a nucleus and several other complex structures inside of it, called organelles. So Frank, before we get into your theories, I’d like you to discuss why the evolution of the eukaryotic cell is so important. Literally tons of paper have been printed on the subject of the eukaryotic cell. The amount of data and information accumulated on its structure and function have jumped by staggering amounts. This is thanks in large part to a parallel growth in technology that allows cells to be studied virtually, on a nanoscale, in real time. To understand the structure and function of the eukaryotic cell is to understand ourselves. In the physical sense, that is what we are: a complex community of eukaryotic cells, all working together for the benefit of the whole. That whole being our living bodies. That’s an interesting way of putting it, thinking about our bodies as a community. Communal living is the norm, not the exception, in biological ecosystems. Look at termites, ants, bees, coral reefs, wolf packs, wetlands, even the entire ocean. By definition, an ecosystem is a collection of biological organisms all interacting with one another in a delicate balance. This maintains the ecosystem and enables it to flourish. When an ecosystem breaks down because of invasive species or environmental insult, a death spiral begins and extinction soon follows. Good point. Popular science spends a lot of time talking about how brutal nature is, and it certainly can be. But there is a great deal of cooperation happening as well. Now, the subject of your dissertation is closely related to something called endosymbiotic theory. This is the theory that some or all of the complex structures that exist inside of the eukaryotic cell came from the combination of two or more prokaryotic cells. It wasn’t long ago that this was considered a fringe idea, but mainstream biologists have opened up to the idea in at least one instance. The mitochondria, which generate the chemical energy for the modern cell, are now thought to be a separate organism that was absorbed into a larger cell. I’d like you to discuss why this has become mainstream science and why it might have occurred in the first place. The endosymbiotic theory dates as far back as the late nineteenth century when a French botanist, by the name of Andreas Schimperm noted that chloroplasts within a plant cell divide in a fashion similar to cyanobacteria. Since 1967, the endosymbiotic theory has been aggressively promoted by Dr. Lynn Margulis to include not only mitochondria and chloroplasts, but also organelles of locomotion like cilia and flagella. Dr. Margulis is primarily responsible for the mainstream acceptance of the endosymbiotic theory as it pertains to mitochondria and chloroplasts. To understand why endosymbiosis has occurred can be best illustrated by human interactions. Humans thrive best when they are cooperating with one another as opposed to destroying one another. Humans are social creatures. Most humans do not live by themselves. They form families, tribes, villages, cities, states, countries, and global networks. These are hierarchical structures of communal interaction. The same thing applies to many businesses. Those which are most successful do not utilize the “jack of all trades” business model. They cooperate and interact with other businesses that specialize in certain functions. Symbiosis comes in a variety of “business models.” There is predation, which is basically war. One side wins, the other side loses. There is parasitism or infection in which one side benefits at the other side’s expense. Think fascism, oligarchies, or monopolies. Note, however, that the most successful parasite is the one that does the least damage to its host. There is commensalism in which the host and its symbiont live together and the symbiont neither harms nor helps the host. Finally, there is mutualism, where both the host and the symbiont benefit from the relationship. Of all these “business models,” the one with the most synergy is mutualism. Think of where humans would be today without mutualistic activity involving division of labor. There would be no language, no villages, no farms, no art, no medicine, no inventions or technology of any consequence. Humans did not invent mutualistic synergy. Civilization is merely an extension of the driving force behind humankind’s own origins. In short, think of the eukaryotic cell as a confederation of semi-autonomous businesses, all working together for the common good. My focus, however, is on the eukaryotic nucleus which contains almost all of the genetic material of the cell. Think of the nucleus more like a federation or corporation. It formed from several business mergers that eliminated duplication of effort (downsizing). This is a great analogy. Despite all the advertising to the contrary, it’s clear to almost everybody that businesses are primarily self-serving entities. They act in their own self interest. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t last long. And yet we do see businesses forming alliances with one another and creating “symbiotic” or “synergistic” relationships. I suspect that the reasons for this go deeper than superficial analogy, and may actually have similar root causes. On a related note, I’d like to ask a more broad question about the way you think about evolution. I am drawn towards Geoffrey Miller’s work because of his emphasis on sexual selection, an aspect of evolutionary theory that seems like it could use more attention. He also uses a business analogy, comparing sexual selection to a good advertising campaign. But if discussions of sexual selection are rare, discussions of symbiosis seem almost nonexistent. It’s often discussed as though it is little more than a footnote in evolutionary theory, an interesting oddity that only distracts from the pillars of evolutionary theory: natural selection and random genetic drift. Your business analogies above demonstrate beautifully why symbiosis doesn’t conflict with the idea of the “selfish gene,” so why is it that discussions of symbiosis seem so rare? Outside the evolution of the eukaryotic cell, do you think that symbiosis plays a more important role in evolution than most scientists are willing to currently accept? Genetic drift or random mutations are generally considered to be followed by natural selection which sorts out bad mutations from beneficial ones. Most biologists tend to think of genetic drift in terms of single point mutations or small deletions or additions to the genome. Massive changes in the chromosomes are also known to occur but are almost always 100% lethal. However, in biology, as in horseshoes, almost always is not good enough, especially when dealing with geologic time scales. Symbiosis in all its forms is nature’s way of experimenting with the gene pool, i.e., natural selection. Those relationships that provide a selective advantage to the gene pool under a given environmental condition are those which are retained and passed along to subsequent generations. Most scientists would agree that symbiosis is not only very important, but absolutely crucial in the dynamics associated with natural selection. The controversy about symbiosis arises with regard to the inner workings of the cell nucleus, whether prokaryotic or eukaryotic. For example, prokaryotic nuclei are generally circular in structure and their genes are arranged in linear groups known as operons. These work together to bring about a certain desired result like the breakdown of a particular sugar. To accomplish this, several genes are responsible for producing enzymes that break the sugar down sequentially. The promoter, or “master switch,” of the operon transcribes all of the genes within the operon into another format, called RNA. This could be in response to the presence of the sugar in the cellular environment, for example. The RNA is used to generate the proteins themselves. Gene 1 is used to make enzyme 1 which begins the process of sugar breakdown. Attached to gene 1 is gene 2 which generates enzyme 2 that breaks the sugar down still further, and so on. It is a very compact, elegant system of genetic control. When the sugar is gone, the operon ceases to transcribe RNA, and the enzymes are eventually broken down and recycled for reuse in other proteins. The situation in eukaryotes is very different. There are no operons containing linear stretches of genes devoted to the breakdown of particular substances. Instead, the genes are broken up into segments called introns and exons. The introns represent some of the junk or selfish DNA you have referred to before. The exons are fragments of genes that have been disrupted by the introns. How did such a complex system of gene regulation ever come about? Why is it so different from the prokaryotic model? One possible answer is via endosymbiotic events. An intron is inserted into a contiguous gene via a virus using an attachment site as the insertion point. The final product is one intron flanked by two exons. In classical biology this expanded piece of DNA would be represented as a linear piece of DNA composed of a central region, the intron, flanked by linear exons. In my models, the intron is in fact a circular piece of DNA that is plugged into an attachment site within the original gene. It may even carry a foreign exon within it that modifies the functionality of the original gene. Insertion of foreign genes into prokaryotic DNA by viruses occurs all the time in bacteria. An explanation for how this might occur is shown in greater detail at the website: http://eukaryotes.info, figures 27, 28, 29, and 36. It is well known that retroviruses come and go within our nuclei on a regular basis. In fact, one such insertion may be responsible for the introduction of live birth from egg laying ancestors by reducing the immune response of the mother to the embryo. Numerous examples of endosymbiosis abound within the literature. What some biologists call infection, could be the beginning of endosymbiosis. In fact, amoebae can become infected with bacteria and if left to fend for themselves, most will die. However, a few may survive and in fact become dependent on the bacteria for survival. This seriously changes the way that I think about DNA. You are saying that our genetic code is full of DNA from viruses that have infected it, and that this is accepted mainstream science. That alone is very interesting to me. But what you’re saying is that these infections, called introns, are not linear. They are circular, like the DNA that we find in viruses and bacteria. You are also saying that many of these infections could have proven beneficial, similar to the random mutation that can occasionally prove beneficial. If this is true, it means symbiosis played a very important part in the evolution of the eukaryotic cell, the cell found in all multicellular lifeforms. You mentioned something that surprised me, which is that most scientists agree just how crucial symbiosis is to the process of natural selection, even if they don’t agree with your theory regarding symbiosis in the creation of the cell nucleus. I’d just like to point out how different this is from the popularization of evolution. When the word evolution is brought up, most people think of “survival of the fittest,” but you’re saying that one of the most important events in evolutionary history was the result of species with completely different genetic backgrounds working together. How and why would this occur? I believe I have already answered this question for you. However, I will give you another example. Why is inbreeding illegal in this country? The answer is that continued generation of closely related humans brings out hidden mutations that can have disastrous consequences. Generally speaking, the most successful organisms are those with the most diverse genomes. In short, mutts trump blue bloods. This is the very reason sex was “invented.” So diversity within the eukaryotic nucleus generates its own synergy with regard to evolutionary fitness. Good point. And this is another analogy that carries over quite well from a business perspective. “Diversity” of thought is definitely being promoted as beneficial for businesses that want to survive in today’s competitive market. I’m glad that you brought up the evolution of sex. What sex allows us to do is combine adaptations together that would otherwise have gone their separate ways. This is absolutely vital for the emergence of complex life. It strikes me that your theory bears a strong resemblance to sex, since you are talking about adaptations from different sources being combined together in one place: the cell nucleus. Is it possible that nuclear endosymbiosis has something to do with the origins of sex as well? I would take it one step further back. Endosymbiosis and ectosymbiosis may be responsible for the process of mitosis or cellular division. You might want to check out figures 30, 31, and 37 at the website to see how this might have occurred. Once mitosis was established, meiosis or the development of sex cells could have emerged later. I suppose bold claims like that are part of the reason why many in the scientific community see you as a threat. Still, I think that it is this kind of spirit that is vital to innovation in the scientific community. Intellectual rebellion is incredibly important, as long as it is tempered with a need to test theories against reality. There are two very important elements that make up good science. A scientific theory needs to be supported by empirical evidence, and it needs to be falsifiable. A theory that can’t be proven wrong is effectively useless as a predictive tool. So, what evidence have you accumulated to support this theory, and what kind of new evidence could potentially falsify the theory? Does it make any predictions which haven’t already been tested? Most of my evidence has been accumulated from the works of other investigators: another example of synergy. All reputable scientists do this. I have listed some recent references of other works on my blog at http://evolution4.wordpress.com. A far more extensive list of references can be found at my website at http://eukaryotes.info or in my dissertation which can be downloaded from my blog. In terms of my own research, a lot more work remains to be done. I have provided evidence to suggest that the eukaryotic chromosome is not a simple, continuous linear strand of DNA but is comprised of a hierarchical structure of circular elements that reveals how the chromosome evolved from complex endosymbiotic events involving circular DNA such as that found in most bacteria and viruses. These hierarchical circular elements can be easily visualized under the light microscope, the electron microscope and by scanning electron microscopy. Furthermore, when they are stained with a fluorescent dye, acridine orange, they glow green under UV light. This suggests they are loaded with DNA. Falsification is very simple and straightforward: Simply regenerate these circular elements from eukaryotic cells and perform in situ hybridizations to determine their composition. I believe they are composed of chromatin, which is a combination of DNA encased in protein and other biochemicals. These other biochemicals may include lipids and RNA as well as contractile proteins like actomyosin, all of which can be easily verified with present day technology. So the elephant in the room is simply this: Why hasn’t this been done? If the funding were available, I would be working on this in a heartbeat. Instead, I continue to search the literature for supporting documentation. You would be amazed to find the level of indifference, dismissal, or outright hostility that mainstream science has shown in regard to understanding something anyone can see for themselves under the microscope. If it’s true that scientists are simply refusing to test a falsifiable theory, that’s not encouraging to hear. No, it is not. Frankly, I have been appalled at the complete lack of interest by the scientific community regarding the concepts I have presented to you. Science is supposed to be about discovery, not covering up what fails to support cherry picked data validated by reams and reams of more cherry picked data. I sincerely hope that your theory is tested in the laboratory. Preferably before you die, as these things often seem to go. In any case, let me try to restate your argument. The idea here is that the genetic code of the eukaryotic cell is a hybrid of the genes from several different organisms, including viruses and bacteria. You have discovered circular objects under a microscope which display many of the characteristics of circular DNA, something which is found in bacteria and viruses. If you can verify that this is what those objects are, your theory will have some strong experimental evidence behind it. If not, it means that your theory would need to be scrapped or heavily modified. Is that correct? That seems fairly straightforward to me. You’ve developed a falsifiable theory that can be tested in a laboratory. That’s how science is supposed to work, at least from the perspective of a non-expert such as myself. In any case, your research about cell death is especially interesting to me. In many organisms, cell death is a highly organized process called apoptosis. This is when the cell seems to literally disassemble itself in a very controlled manner. In contrast, necrosis is when unexpected cell death occurs as a result of injury or something similar. What is it about apoptosis that supports your theory? Are you familiar with the old “saw,” “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?” This means that the development of the individual from conception to birth seems to emulate the evolutionary transitions that occurred from single cells up to complex multicellular organisms. In my opinion, apoptosis recapitulates phylogeny in reverse. The cell, or more specifically, the nucleus, is being dissembled back into its more primitive components. What I did with my research is capture moments in time during this disassembly, and throughout the cell cycle, by interrupting apoptosis. This revealed intermediate structural components containing nuclear DNA. Why would the cell go to such lengths to sequester and destroy DNA in such an energy-intensive and complicated manner? Again, the answer is simple: this DNA is genetically dangerous to nearby cells because it is lipid encapsulated and capable of fusing with these cells. It can behave much like a virus, reincorporating back into their nuclei using the same DNA attachment sites that united the original endosymbionts in the first place. So what you are saying is that when a cell undergoes “planned death,” its genetic code is carefully disassembled and picked apart piece by piece. You argue that this is done in order to prevent the DNA from being spread into the nuclei of other cells. This implies that it is easy for DNA to be spread from one cellular organism to another, which strongly supports your theory. What is the more conventional explanation for the existence of planned cell death? Why do you believe your explanation is more satisfactory? The conventional explanation for apoptosis is the same as mine: loose DNA is dangerous to other cells because of the possibility of incorporation into the genomes of other cells. There are a variety of mechanisms to explain how such DNA may become inadvertently incorporated. My explanation here is just one of them. Huh. In other words, mainstream biologists don’t dispute the idea that DNA can easily be spread from one cell to another. Interesting. Okay. You’ve been talking a lot about linear versus circular DNA. What is the difference, why is it important, and what does it imply about the origins of complex life? Linear DNA is very susceptible to exonucleases, enzymes which chew DNA up from the ends. In the case of linear viral DNA which enters a cell, these ends needs to be protected once the viral DNA is released from its capsule, allowing it to safely incorporate into the host DNA. The most common way to do this is to simply circularize the DNA, eliminating both ends. Most bacterial DNA is also circular. The question that remains is whether or not the eukaryotic chromosome is either a simple linear structure wrapped up on itself like a tightly wound rubber band, or if it is something more. Mainstream science assumes this to be a foregone conclusion: it is linear and nothing more. I respectfully disagree with this commonly held assertion. For a better understanding of the importance of circular DNA and its attachment sites, I suggest going to the blog and reviewing the models I have placed there. Even more models are available at the website and in my dissertation. I believe complex life has been assembled from a process I call hierarchical endosymbiosis. This process allows for a rapid buildup of genetic information using only a small number of integration events within a relatively short window of time (Cambrian explosion). Think of how computers have evolved. First there were transistors, (simple on/off electronic switches) then, integrated circuits, then complex chips, motherboards, and finally computer networks, including the web itself. With one simple integration step (plug in) you can change the memory, storage and processing power of a computer by an order of magnitude or more. In the nucleus, this plugging in phenomenon involves DNA attachment sites. Huge amounts of endosymbiotic DNA can be plugged into a simple nuclear DNA attachment site. Let me see if I am hearing you correctly. You’re saying that mainstream biologists believe the eukaryotic chromosome is just a series of instructions that are read from beginning to end. But you are claiming that it is more like a network with many potential beginning and end points. You are also claiming that there is a structure to this network, where there are “master” pieces of code calling out to various “subroutines?” Does this sound about right? Mainstream biologists understand that the eukaryotic chromosome contains master pieces of code calling out to subroutines, but their explanation for how all this DNA fits together physically is severely hobbled by an underlying dogma concerning the superstructure of the DNA itself. This dogma assumes that each chromosome contains only one continuous uninterrupted strand of DNA. All research must fit this procrustean bed to receive publication in reputable journals and to generate subsequent grant money, both of which are necessary for career maintenance and mortgage payments. This results in cherry picking or elimination of offending data altogether. Careers can be created or destroyed on this bed of dogma. Mountains of publications, all based on this wobbling house of cards, is used to further validate the dogma. Creationists have accused scientists of worshiping evolution as a religion. Sometimes the truth can be found in the least expected places. When the emperor has no clothes, somebody needs to say so. You speak poetically when you are morally outraged. I have to say that you have certainly persuaded me into thinking that you have a valid argument worthy of investigation by the mainstream scientific community. If your theory turns out to be a highly accurate description of the way the eukaryotic cell was created, what does this mean for all of us? Does it turn the current model of evolutionary theory on its head, or would that be overstating your argument? It is commonly accepted that complex life evolved very rapidly from simpler forms of life during a relatively short period of geologic time (Cambrian explosion). Traditional evolutionary biology tries to explain this in terms of simple “transistor-type” mutations like gene duplications followed by point mutations. If my theories are correct, the implications for science and medicine could be profound because it means a major mechanism for regulating basic chromatin structure has been hiding in plain sight. Mainstream science is also highly invested in the eukaryotic linear chromosome model. I will let you be the judge of whether my theories turn evolutionary theory on its head or not. However, their recalcitrance in reviewing my work or expanding on it speaks volumes about that very possibility.

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In the 20th century, the Austrian philosopher Friedrich Hayek attempted to defend the rationality of tradition by means of what he called the empiricist evolutionary model. Hayek wanted to provide a reason for respecting traditions that went beyond acceptance of them merely on account of their Burkean venerability. A tradition’s very oldness–its survival through the vicissitudes of centuries and adaptability to so many social and historical “environments”–was for him prima facie evidence that it was “fit” to survive, just as a species that has survived a variety of environmental challenges may be said to be “fit” in terms of the evolutionary struggle. Of course, Hayek was not arguing that a traditional belief is true simply because it has been believed for a long time–that would render the empiricist part of his model nonsense. But he was saying that the tradition is “suitable” for those who have practiced in it for a long time. Or, to use his exact words from “The Constitution of Liberty”: “Our habits and skills, our emotional attitudes, our tools, and our institutions–all are in this sense adaptations to past experience which have grown up by selective elimination of less suitable conduct” (emphasis added). The analogy here to Darwin’s theory of evolution is obvious in the words “adaptations,” “selective elimination” and “suitable.” In particular, this last term would appear to be the equivalent of the Darwinian notion of “the fittest”–or perhaps, considering Hayek’s careful phrasing, “the least unfit.” This interpretation of “suitable” is also supported by Hayek’s statement, again from “The Constitution of Liberty”: “Not all these non-rational factors [i.e., habits, skills, emotional attitudes, etc.] underlying our action are always conducive to success. Some may be retained long after they have outlived their usefulness” (emphasis added). It might appear that we have here found a way of justifying rationally certain traditions–those that are still “conducive to success” and maintain their “usefulness.” Furthermore, it is a solution that also seems to offer a rational criterion for the removal of those traditions that are neither. In short, it would appear to provide us with a procedure for picking and choosing between inherited traditions. But does it? Karl Popper once invoked an imaginary village in India where everyone believed that tigers were harmless; this belief soon died out, according to Popper, because those who acted on it were eventually eaten up by tigers. The beauty of Popper’s fable is that it permits Darwin’s theory of natural selection, at one swift stroke, to eliminate unfit individuals as well as to demonstrate the irrationality of the unsuitable tradition that led to their biological extinction in the first place. And this would appear to provide us with exactly the kind of decision-making procedure we are looking for: If an inherited tradition leads to the extinction of those who live by it, the tradition in question should be eliminated–before those who follow it are. The tradition that tigers are harmless would certainly prove less “conducive to success” than other competing traditions about tigers, such as the one that says they are dangerous. Thus, it would seem we have finally solved the problem of tradition–some can be shown to be rational, others irrational. In short, any tradition that leads to the biological elimination of the community that embodies it will obviously be judged irrational. Yet, although this gives a clear criterion by which to decide whether a community has fallen short of Hayek’s standard of suitability, success and usefulness–namely, its biological extinction–there is a catch. Clearly there are many imaginary cultural practices–killing all newborn children, or forbidding any sexual act that might issue in procreation, or ritual mass suicide–that if carried out consistently would yield communal extinction; but, for rather obvious reasons, one needs to seek far and wide to find historical communities that insisted on a policy of short-term autogenocide. This is the problem with trying to push the Darwinian evolutionary model too far: Its exclusive mechanism for “successful” adaptation is the sentence of death and extinction it passes on the animals and species that come before its Draconian bar of judgment. But only rarely, and then in trivial cases, can this same ruthlessly objective standard be applied to cultural evolution. The Easter Islanders developed habits and skills, and perhaps even institutions, that led to the total deforestation of their small island; but while most of us would agree that this was a piece of folly, and not too far from the folly of Popper’s Indian villagers, in fact this practice did not result in the biological elimination of Easter Islanders. To take the most extreme case, consider the American Shakers, whose community rejects any sex that might result in procreation. If ever there was a recipe for biological self-extermination, this is it; and yet a handful of Shakers still exist, by virtue of their ability to recruit new Shakers in each rising generation. Indeed, it is perfectly possible to imagine a future ecomania in which men and women pledge themselves not to pollute the planet with any more human beings, with the ultimate purpose of returning the Earth to its pristine, pre-Adamite stage; and it is also perfectly possible to imagine the same ecomania continuing for centuries without ever running out of new converts. If the empiricist evolutionary approach permits us to condemn only those traditions and institutions that end in biological elimination, it turns out to be far less useful than it first appeared. For if these alone are irrational, then all traditions that fail to end in biological elimination must be deemed rational. If complete communal extinction provides a decision-making procedure for distinguishing good traditions from bad, then virtually all known traditions would have to qualify as good. Nor can this dilemma be avoided by redefining the terms “useful” and “suitable” as employed by Hayek. Originally they appeared to hold out hope of an objective solution precisely because they could be defined entirely in terms of a culturally neutral value–namely, the survival of the community. To notice that a community had wiped itself out by honoring its customs is not a value judgment. But this is no longer true if we change these terms to mean “useful” or “suitable” for us, or “useful” or “suitable” to the culture under consideration, for then we are once more dealing with subjective value judgments, either ours or the culture’s, and are plunged right back into the quandary of ethical relativism. This is obviously true if we take “useful” to mean “useful to us,” because in that case utterly insane traditions that weaken our enemies would be judged rational because they serve our own purposes. On the other hand, if we mean useful to the society with the tradition, then we lose completely what little gain we thought we had made. Suppose Popper’s Indians had not been deluded about the nature of tigers. Suppose they all said, “Yes, of course tigers are dangerous. Any fool could tell you that. But, you see, we don’t care. Our tradition says, ‘Resist not the tiger when he comes. It is our highest duty, and we calmly accept the consequences of fulfilling it.’ ” In this scenario, the villagers are not dupes of a false declarative sentence: “Tigers are not dangerous.” Rather, they are noble heroes sacrificing themselves to the imperative, “Resist not the tiger.” When a person dies because he believed in an empirical falsehood, it makes sense to say that his holding of this empirical belief was not useful or conducive to Darwinian success, and hence not rational. But when he dies in obedience to an imperative that he holds to be his sacred duty, you can say nothing at all. When someone says to you, “Resist not the tiger,” he is not offering you a scientific proposition to be refuted by empirical evidence and logical argument; he is commanding you to behave in a certain way, and in this case, all you can do is refuse. Otherwise you would have to argue that Christian martyrs died simply because they did not clearly understand the physical effects of raging fires on the human anatomy. What all the theories of tradition we have examined have in common is that each looks upon a tradition as a set of declarative sentences passing on information that may be evaluated as true or false, and that a tradition is rationally justifiable only to the degree that it is the means of conveying such a truth. Thus, when Maimonides examined the dietary code in Leviticus and asked himself, “What true pieces of dietary information is this tradition passing on?,” his own particular answer was quite favorable to tradition, as he argued that the code contained much that was of genuine medical value; but suppose he had not found any true pieces of dietary information in Leviticus? By one of those paradoxes normal to the dialectical twists and turns of human thought, the defense of tradition offered by Maimonides would turn out to be the undoing of tradition. If tradition did badly what science did better, then those who were themselves capable of scientific knowledge no longer had any use for it. True, the ignorant masses might still require it, but not the intellectual elite–and thus, out of the logic of Maimonides’ defense came the Enlightenment, and the culture war that the West has been fighting ever since. But what if tradition is not reducible to a set of declarative sentences? What if all tradition took the form of “Resist not the tiger” rather than “Tigers are harmless”? The declarative-sentence paradigm suggests a tradition can be reduced to a set of formal beliefs that can be stated, catechism-like, as a proposition, such as “Tigers are not dangerous” or “Celibacy is better than procreation.” But once we have freed ourselves from the declarative illusion we can see that a tradition always emerges first in the form of commands, prohibitions and instructions, and that the formalization of this tradition into a set of declarative propositions comes at a secondary stage–the stage of reflection and thought. In the beginning, as Goethe’s Faust declares, was not the Word, but the Act. Or, to adopt the framework of Goethe’s contemporary, Hegel, phenomenologically, tradition emerges originally as an imperative behavioral code wired into our visceral systems long before it is reflected as an idea in our minds. The intellectualist interpretation of a tradition as a corpus of formal propositions whose truth or falsity may be argued lies at the heart of all efforts to find an objective or neutral way to judge among competing traditions. This is evident in the Enlightenment’s attack on tradition as outmoded superstition–an argument Hayek brilliantly demolishes. A tradition, he realizes, may well be justified by a community on nonsensical or irrational grounds; but this by itself need not make the tradition less useful to those who follow it. If a primitive tribe justifies its incest taboo with a myth about divine siblings whose sexual liaison produced a monstrously deformed cockroach, this does not make the tradition a bit less useful to the community. Hayek’s observation comes as an afterthought to his empiricist evolutionary model, and it is a great pity that he did not pursue it, and turned instead to the false promise of the evolutionary model. For implicit in this observation is the insight that every inherited tradition has come down to us at two distinct levels — first, as a behavioral phenomenon, as an embodied value hardwired into our neural circuitry and into our sweat glands; and second, as an articulated value that can be analyzed and discussed, attacked and defended, in words. In the case of the tradition against incest, at the primary level it exists in the form of the commandments, injunctions, prohibition and so on, to keep brothers and sisters, or parents and children, from having sexual intercourse. They work by programming the members of the community to automatically and instinctively avoid committing incest. They constitute the visceral code of the community that commands us to act in certain ways and forbids us to act in other ways. At the secondary level, there is what might be called (to use Marxist terminology) the ideological superstructure, i.e., the system of myths and statements and arguments that are used by the community to justify obedience to the commandments, injunctions and prohibitions. In the case of our islander, this secondary level is represented by the myth of the gigantic cockroach spawned by incest. This ideological superstructure may be used polemically and apologetically as well and is often most fully developed and exploited for this purpose, frequently ending up in immense intellectual constructions that are Summa contra Gentiles: everything that can be argued against those who challenge the truth of the ideological superstructure. In evaluating whether a “tradition” is useful or not, we must keep this distinction in mind. For when confronted with any particular tradition, we now have two different criteria to evaluate its usefulness–first, the usefulness of the tradition’s base, the visceral code out of which the social structure of the community is created; and second, the usefulness of the tradition’s ideological superstructure. But once we grasp this distinction, it immediately becomes apparent that there can be a conflict, perhaps violent, between the two manifestations of one tradition: the embodied and visceral version versus the articulated and ideal version. In our primitive island’s traditional taboo against incest, for example, the visceral form of the tradition might succeed in preventing inbreeding among the islanders by producing visceral aversion; yet its articulated form, namely the myth of the monstrously deformed cockroach, may work quite differently. Indeed, as the islanders become more sophisticated, the continued use of this myth may actually tend to make people more likely to violate the visceral code and to commit incest on the basis of the quite correct empirical belief that incestuous unions do not produce gigantic deformed cockroaches. This means that as a population becomes more “enlightened,” it is more likely to challenge the tradition on the basis of its transparently mythic or fabulous origin; this in turn threatens to undermine the population’s willingness to instill the visceral code into its children. If “everyone” knows that incestuous lovers do not spawn enormous insect children, then what is the point of teaching one’s children not to commit incest? But a tradition that has lost its ethical obviousness has thereby become vulnerable to challenge, and the question soon arises: Why this tradition rather than the tradition of foreigners? Indeed, that was the theme of the first cultural warriors, the Greek Sophists, who, wandering as homeless strangers, went from polis to polis undermining the traditional ethos everywhere they stopped–not by willful subversion, but merely by calling the traditional ethos into question. To cause people to have even the first shadow of a doubt about the rightness of their inherited tradition is to exercise a staggering power over them, and it explains the often violent reaction of the Greek city-states against those who were perceived, fairly or unfairly, to be subverting the traditional order through the mere use of words. Reason, logic, the endless quest for knowledge–these are all noble things. But no sensible person will agree to have them used against him to undermine his happiness and tranquility. Imagine your response if someone forced you to consider that your spouse might be cheating on you without your knowledge, or harangued you about how much you really know about what your teenage children do when you are not looking. Yes, we are willing to admit that there is much we cannot know about the people we love, and much that we have to take on blind faith, and much indeed about which a skeptic can raise questions–but must we hear it all? We grasp this at once when dealing with individuals but fail to see it when dealing with whole communities. Yet isn’t it permissible for a community to wish to guard its own cherished habits of the heart against the same endless skeptical interrogation, especially when the intent of the interrogators is to subvert the visceral code that embodies these habits of the heart? The visceral code is like the DNA of the community: It tells us what behavior must be passed on through the social emotions of shame, honor and pride. It demands that we behave; it molds us and makes us, just as our parents do, for their doing is always its doing. It is Hegel’s objective spirit, the collective mind, but understood in terms of automatic reactions hardwired into us, operating through adrenaline and rushes of blood to the face. It is what makes us feel who we are and react as we do–in short, it constitutes our being. We cannot ask whether the visceral code is useful to the community when it is in fact constitutive of the community: It is the foundation on which the community is built. It is a necessary precondition of achieving community at all, and hence it is improper to evaluate it in terms of its mere utility. It is not merely that it is useful to produce honest men and women. In order to obtain certain collective social goods, a society must first create human actors who are capable of achieving them. You must first produce courageous men if you wish to achieve the collective social good of defending your society; you must first produce prudent men if you wish to achieve the collective social good of keeping your society on a stable course; you must first produce men who are willing to control their impulses in order to create the collective social good of an orderly society. This, too, explains why communities have historically reacted so severely against those who challenged their habits of the heart. What was really at stake in such a challenge was not the community’s ideological superstructure but the ethical foundation on which it had been socially constructed–its inherited visceral code. Tradition, then, is the only possible mode for transmitting a community’s habits of the heart, and it does this by providing the recipe for making the kind of human beings who will viscerally feel and respond to the same habits of the heart as the community to which they belong. Yet these recipes, like those used for cooking, do not by any means demand to be rigidly or mechanically followed. To make pasta, for instance, you need the essential ingredients–Italian noodles and sauce–but otherwise you are free to experiment. You may vary the sauce as you wish, from tomato to cream, adding mushrooms or black olives or spinach; or you may mix the sauce with different types of noodles, like spaghetti or angel hair or vermicelli. But all in the end have the same essential nature and accomplish the same pragmatic purpose–a satisfying bowl of pasta. This allows us an interesting new way to appraise a tradition. We can look at it as if it were a recipe and say, “This is what you must do, if you are to create a certain type of community–and these are the options you have, once you have done this.” To see institutions and traditions as recipes is to grasp at once how pointless it is to debate their truth or falsity. Is Julia Child’s recipe for Bouillabaisse true or false? The question sounds absurd because it is. Here again, we seem to be caught in the quandary of cultural relativism. The recipe for creating different habits of the heart, like the recipes for creating different authentic dishes of various cultures, would appear to be ultimately a matter of taste. Indians like plenty of fiery spices; most American Southerners do not. How is it possible to devise a neutral method by which to judge which dish or which culture is objectively better? Let us grant that this is the case; no one is really in a position to judge fairly whether the cuisine of his own culture is better or worse than that of another. But there is something that everyone can judge for himself–whether he prefers the old recipe for making meatloaf (or Bombay curry or Bouillabaisse or Pad Thai) or the new one. Taking this to a higher ethical plane, we can ask ourselves as individuals whether we like ourselves the way we are today, or whether we liked ourselves better in the past. And we can do the same thing collectively. The members of a country club may prefer older customs to newer ones; a baseball franchise may no longer have the team spirit it once had; or a church may have suddenly found religion and be in the midst of a revival. More generally speaking, a community can judge for itself whether it prefers the habits of the heart by which it now operates to those by which it operated in the past. Both the individual and the communal mind can make comparisons between their before and their after. Experiencing both childhood and adulthood, a man can judge the relative merits of each stage from the inside, something no child, however precocious, can ever hope to do, just as a man who has experienced drunkenness may appreciate the value of sobriety and may even make a point of never having that experience again. An individual may try new things and like them so much that he decides never to go back again to the old ways. But so too may an entire culture. During the Meiji Restoration in 19th-century Japan, an entire society discarded or revamped many of its own traditions in order to preserve its independence and avoid falling prey to the rampant imperialism that had left China weak and mutilated. The Japanese, grasping that new traditions were imperative, “imported” them from the West, sending intelligent young Japanese to study and master these traditions “hands on” as they were practiced in Europe and America. The Japanese were able to gain an insider’s knowledge of the West in the only way such knowledge can be gained–by assimilating into their own visceral code elements they acquired from the West and evaluating the social world this adaptation produced within Japanese culture itself. This demonstrates the Janus-faced quality of tradition: In the culture that produced the tradition, it is old, while in the culture that adopts it, it is brand-new. In the first, it represents the wisdom of our ancestors; in the second, it represents the creative innovation of those who are currently living. Thus, a tradition can be a passive inheritance from the past that weighs heavily on the present generation or a vehicle for actively transforming the present generation in accordance with the pattern set by the borrowed tradition. A society may take what was close to becoming a moribund ethical institution and suddenly breathe new life into it–treating it not as a relic of the past but as a blueprint for the future. It is also possible for a tradition to shed its original ideological superstructure but continue to function as a perfectly valid visceral code within the same community, much as Victorian infidels continued to scrupulously honor the visceral code that had been programmed into them as children. Finally, the same visceral code may be justified by competing and even contradictory ideological superstructures: A Southern Baptist may justify his own exemplary conduct by invoking the name of Jesus, whereas a Buddhist may do so by invoking the name of the Enlightened One. Indeed, it has not infrequently happened that a tradition continued an underground existence as a visceral code while undergoing drastic remolding at the level of its ideological superstructure. But there is another possibility altogether: An individual or a community may entirely reject its own visceral code, root and branch, for the sake of what it has come to see as an ethically superior plane of existence. This “conversion” experience is the key to understanding the uniquely arresting phenomenon of a newly “revealed” or intuited code that is explicitly seen as a break with the past. A collective metastasis at the primary level of the visceral code is the most profound change that a society can undergo–far and away more earthshaking than a change in its ideological superstructure. When carried out on a grand scale, such changes constitute a genuine cultural revolution. After one, men and women not only think and argue differently; they feel and respond differently. They are now ashamed of what once made them proud and proud of what once shamed them. In certain cases, this is due to a revelation of a higher ethos, such as occurred to the Hebrews; in other cases, it may be due to the revival and reclaiming of an older visceral code that, though it has ceased to function within the community, is now made a conscious object of imitation, as in the Southern Baptist revival or the rebirth of pagan classicism during the Renaissance. The conversion experience is the key to grasping the nature of transformative customs and traditions. A convinced ethical relativist may hold that one ethical norm is no higher or lower than another, but he cannot deny that others have been sincerely convinced that the ethical norms they have consciously adopted are vastly superior to those of their own collectively recollected past. He may call it an illusion, but he must acknowledge the power of this illusion to generate profound and lasting behavioral differences in those groups under its spell. It is important to be clear about the experiential source of this sense of ethical superiority. It arises not from a feeling of being born superior to others, but from a feeling of having become superior to what we ourselves once were. In the Christian tradition, this experience is called being born again; in the Jewish tradition, it is identified with the story of the Exodus, the transformation of former slaves into the Chosen People. In both cases, the outcome of the transformative experience is the same: a firm determination to be lifted from a stage of ethical experience that has now come to be seen as lower, and an aspiration to a stage of ethical experience that is higher. A transformative custom takes us from a more natural (or more probable) state of being to a less natural (or more improbable) one. Thus, it is important for a community to signal the critical significance of the transformative custom it has adopted–indeed, to make it uniquely sacred–because it is a custom that departs so drastically from the path of instinctive nature. No one needs to be taught to strike back; it is the refusal to strike back that must be instilled by our ethical training. Furthermore, a transformative custom may also be understood as a barrier, a device to keep those who have reached a higher ethical stage from backsliding. Such a custom is by nature intolerant. It may permit us to change our manner of doing things in certain areas of life, but it prohibits us from changing the way we embody those essential values without which we would fall back into the old ways. We are determined not to return to our transcended past, and we establish our set of transformative customs and traditions to make sure that neither we nor our children, nor our children’s children, will do so. There is an important qualification here: We must retain a collective memory of what we were like before we had mastered the technique of transcending our lower nature. If we no longer know what it is that we have escaped from, we will be unable to appreciate the significance of the technique that permitted us to escape. Indeed, at the maximal point of societal forgetfulness, there is the danger that even the most critical transformative customs will no longer be grasped for what they are. Instead of being understood as techniques for the achievement of collective self-mastery, they are reduced to being mere folkways–or, to use the language of contemporary enlightened rationality, “residual personal prejudice.” There is a safe and certain way of passing on these transformative customs, and in the most compelling manner possible–through the ethical institution known as the family. Of course, the family must first be raised to the ethical plane where the parents’ first concern is to compel their biological offspring to abandon their original state of nature and take on a transformed identity as civilized adults. The ethical, as opposed to the merely biological, family is the site for the making of civilized human beings out of id-governed monsters. It turns man’s purely animalist collection of impulses and urges into a vehicle for passing on not merely accidental memes, but deliberately engineered transformative customs across generations. It is, in a sense, a metacustom–the transformative custom that is responsible for the existence of all other transformative customs. You must first be trained to pass on the ethical family itself before you can hope to transmit what the ethical family finds so valuable, namely, the civilizing process by which men and women obtain self-mastery. Seen from this perspective, marriage has nothing to do with biology: It is an elaborate social construction that has been erected against the anarchy of the human id, not merely to keep it from doing damage, but for the purpose of transforming the id nature into the highest ethical ideal–the father who raises his son to be a good father, so that his grandson will have a life no worse than his own, and hopefully better. And the mother who does the same. In even the shortest possible list of the attributes of a civilization, you are certain to discover the feature of transgenerational stability. A civilization must have a proven track record of cultural permanence, which is to say that it must be a multigenerational project. A civilization must be passed, with its fundaments pretty much intact, from one generation to the next; and this is especially true when we are dealing with civilizations whose civilizing process requires a stern renunciation of the id in all of its manifestations–ungovernable impulses, unruly desires, a lack of consideration or feeling for the well-being of others, sexual promiscuity, prodigal expenditures on passing fads, and so on. In short, the loftier the ethical ideal of a civilization is, the harder it must work to preserve this ideal against the return of the id. But how exactly is a civilization passed on from generation to generation? We can understand passing on an heirloom, like a set of fancy china, from one generation to another. But a civilization cannot be reduced merely to the physical props that are associated with it: the buildings, the transportation system, the machines and the tools, the gold and the treasure. What possible use would America’s complex superhighway system be to a generation no one had taken the trouble to teach how to drive? A society that wishes to reproduce itself must take care to pass on to the next generation the knowledge required to maintain itself at more or less the same level of civilization. It is not enough to pass on the good china; you must also pass on the family recipe for making the pot roast. Yet even that is not quite enough; you must also find a way to pass along the culinary skills needed to transform a recipe written in words into an actual plate of pot roast. Figuratively speaking, a civilization must pass on the china, the recipe and the cook. But even this is not quite enough. You must also make the cook realize that in addition to cooking, he must know how to replace himself, and, most critically, he must feel that he has a duty to replace himself. Not only must he teach his children to cook, but he must also teach them how to teach their children to cook. If a society wishes to find a way of ensuring that newly emergent and valuable techniques are passed on and preserved, its members must feel themselves under an ethical obligation to leave the best possible world not only for their children, but also for their grandchildren. The grandchild, far from being incidental, is decisive. Civilization persists when there is a widespread sense of an ethical obligation on the part of the present generation for the well-being of the third generation–their own grandchildren. A society where this feeling is not widespread may last as a civilization for some time–indeed, for one or two generations it might thrive spectacularly. But inevitably, a society acknowledging no transgenerational commitment to the future will decay and decline from within. Which leads to our main question: How is this task accomplished? How do you make parents feel such a deep and unshakeable ethical commitment to their grandchildren? I have suggested that a tradition is a recipe. We now need to refine this concept further. After all, there are techniques for making soapbox racers, paper airplanes and omelets, as well as for the proper way to brush one’s teeth; but clearly, these do not represent the core traditions that parents feel ethically bound to pass on to their grandchildren. This means that what we are looking for is, in effect, a recipe for producing a certain character and class of people. In ancient Greece, in addition to passing on techniques for making swords and pots, men had to pass on the recipe for producing sons who would grow up willing to fight to the death to defend their polis. A city-state that lost the recipe for producing such men also lost the recipe for constructing civic freedom and exposed the city-state to the most horrible fate that a free people can imagine: enslavement. This is something to keep in mind when we compare the theory of tradition being developed here with Hayek’s empiricist evolutionary theory. For Hayek, a tradition was viable if it was well adapted to the past circumstances of the society; in the view outlined here, a tradition is viable if it effectively keeps future generations from backsliding to a lower ethical or civilizational state. The track record of a tradition is irrelevant here; it may have been supremely useful in the past, but if its continuing embodiment in the rising generation begins to lower the society’s civilizational standards, the tradition must be discarded and replaced, and it makes no difference how many evolutionary challenges it may have successfully overcome in the past. Some Quick shots. Harris gets Hayek’s evolutionary model wrong. Hayek wasn’t Popper, and Hayek’s model is not a model of Darwinian selection over individuals. Second point. Hayek is explicit in emphasizing the priority and primacy of behaviorial ways of going on together over explicitly articulated rules and propositions — indeed, Hayek’s position is very similar to that of Wittgenstein on this matter. Which is perhaps not accident, in that it very likely Hayek derived this insight in some measure through the works of folks writing under the influence of Wittgenstein.

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Religion and Myth, by James Macdonald, , at sacred-texts.com We have seen in the preceding chapter that the king or divine ruler was endowed with supernatural powers, by means of which he was able to regulate rain and sunshine, the growth of crops and the capture of bird, beast, and fish. His power over nature was analogous to that which he exercised over his subjects. He had but to will in order to have his purpose accomplished, neither nature nor subject having a choice in the matter. But with strange contradiction of thought, while the course of nature was dependent upon and subject to the king's will, phenomena were often supposed to be not only independent of him, but inimical to his interests and dangerous to his life, as were also certain objects, should he touch or even see them. His will was supreme in regard to all conditions of wind and weather, sunshine and shadow; but his body occupied the anomalous position of at once influencing the forces of nature and being liable to take harm from the simplest elements. His divine organism was so finely balanced that a movement of head or hand might disturb the equilibrium of the universe, and if in an evil moment he gave hidden forces a wrong impulse, it might entail such wholesale destruction as the falling of the sky or the hurling the world away into limitless space. Even such a simple act as drinking a glass of wine in the presence of another was so fraught with danger that the spectator had to be put to death. One case is on record in which the king's son, a boy of twelve, saw his father drink accidentally. He was seized, finely arrayed, and killed. After that his body was quartered and sent about with a proclamation that he had seen the king drink. * No more was needed. Of this class of divine rulers is the Mikado of Japan, a descendant of Izangi, who gave birth to the god of fire. After her death, her spouse, who was her own brother, purified himself by bathing in a stream of running water. As he threw his garments on the bankthe gods seem to have been familiar with the modern tailor's art in those daysfresh deities were born from each article. From his left eye emerged the goddess of the Sun, who was the ancestress of all the divine generations of rulers. The following account of the Mikado was written about two hundred years ago: "Even to this day princes descended of this family, more particularly those who sit on the throne, are looked upon as persons most holy in themselves, and as popes by birth. And in order to preserve those advantageous notions in the minds of their subjects they are obliged to take uncommon care of their sacred persons, and to do such things which, examined according to the customs of other nations, would be thought ridiculous and impertinent. He thinks that it would be very prejudicial to his dignity and holiness to touch the ground with his feet; for this reason, when he intends to go anywhere he must be carried thither on men's shoulders. Much less will they suffer that he should expose his sacred person to the open air, and the sun is not thought worthy to shine on his head. There is such a holiness ascribed to all the parts of his body that he dares to cut off neither his hair, nor his beard, nor his nails. However, lest he should grow too dirty, they may clean him in the night when he is asleep, because, they say, that which is taken from his body at that time hath been stolen from him, and that such a theft does not prejudice his holiness or his dignity. In ancient times he was obliged to sit on the throne for some hours every morning with the imperial crown on his head, but to sit altogether like a statue, without stirring either hands or feet, nor, indeed, any part of his body, because by this means it was thought that he could preserve peace and tranquillity in his empire, for if, unfortunately, he turned himself on one side or other, or if he looked a good while towards any part of his dominions, it was apprehended that war, famine, fire, or some great misfortune was near at hand to desolate the country. But it having been afterwards discovered that the imperial crown was the palladium which by its mobility could preserve peace in the empire, it was thought expedient to deliver his imperial person, consecrated only to idleness and pleasures, from this burthensome duty, and therefore the crown is at present placed on the throne for some hours every morning. His victuals must be dressed every time in new pots, and served at table in new dishes, both very clean and neat, but made only of common clay, that without any considerable expense they may be laid aside, or broken, after they have served once. They are generally broken for fear they should come into the hands of laymen; for they believe religiously that if a layman should presume to eat his food out of these sacred dishes, it would swell, and inflame his mouth and throat." So much for the Mikado's habits of life. But this guarding of kings is not confined to an advanced cult. Among primitive peoples we find priestly persons and divine kings guarded with equal jealousy and care. At Shark Point, West Africa, the king lives alone in a wood. He may never leave his house. He may not touch a woman. On no account must he quit his royal chair, even to sleep, for in that case the wind would die down and all navigation would be stopped. * The supreme ruler at Congo is such another. Regarded as a god on earth, no subject would, on any consideration, taste the new crop till an offering of it is made to him. Then he leaves his residence to visit other parts of his territory, all married persons are under obligation to observe stringent laws of continence, any violation of which would prove immediately fatal to Chitome. [paragraph continues] Were he to die a natural death, the world would be annihilated. * Illustrations might be multiplied, but whether in Africa, Japan, or the South Sea Islands, the order and regularity of nature is bound up with the life of the ruler. It is evident he must be regarded by his people as at once a source of untold blessing and inexpressible danger to society. The care of his person must be their first consideration in their home and foreign policy, for any accident, through oversight or lack of vigilance, might prove fatal to the State. If he gives them rain, sunshine, genial warmth, successful hunting and fishing,, he can also withhold these blessings and reverse the order of nature. When the working of visible phenomena is so closely bound up with his person that hurting his toe might set up such a tremor as would overthrow the foundations of the earth, the care bestowed on his safe keeping must be infinite. For their own safety his subjects must surround him with restrictions and safeguards. There must be set and accurate rules for the regulation of his conduct both public and private. So it happens that his life is valuable only in so far as he discharges the functions for which he exists. When he fails to order the course of nature so as to benefit his people, his deposition is not only a duty but a necessity. The homage and worship he received is turned into contempt and hatred, for he is not only useless, he is now positively hurtful. Disgraced as a ruler, he is disgraced as a god, and then put to an ignominious death. During his life, or at least his reign, he lives hedged in by such restrictions and limitations that he ceases to be a free agent, even when his people prostrate themselves before him, and offer to him the most costly gifts and sacrifices, perhaps their sons or daughters. Of the divine King of Loango it is said that the greater his divinity the more restrictions or taboos he must observe. These regulate all his actions, his walking and his sitting, his eating and drinking, his sleeping and waking. * To the same restrictions the heir is subjected from infancy, only that the number of observances during childhood are comparatively few, but increasing in number, till on his reaching manhood he is lost in the swaddling-clothes of taboos. The kings of ancient Egypt were, and in fact all rulers now worshipped as divine are, subject to the same life of immobility and inaction. King Egbo, West Africa, when he went abroad was concealed in an ark as became a divine and supernatural being. This was carried on the shoulders of men who were set apart for the sacred office, and were themselves sacred persons. The sacred bearers still remain, but when Egbo, who has left the palace to the actual ruler, and now lives in a sacred grove that none may enter or explore, goes abroad, the ark contains but a dummy which is followed by the reigning monarch walking on foot. The king prefers the advantages of substantial power to the honours of divinity, and so does homage to the ghost of his own divinity, rather than enter the sacred box himself, to be the toy of party politicians. When the office of ruler grew to be at once so burdensome and so useless there could be but one result. Men of action closed up the god in a box and went on foot. Contenting themselves with the substance of power, they left the honour and semblance to some nerveless aspirant to the priesthood who was satisfied with homage and honour in his sacred retreat, while his rival ruled the kingdom. This in course of time would lead to a separation between the offices of ruler and high priest, and so we gradually reach a farther stage in the development of human thought and the evolution of deity as that presented itself to primitive man. So burdensome did the office of king become, in the days when kings were divine, that we find in West Africa, when a king dies, a family council secretly held to elect his successor. The hapless victim is seized, bound hand and foot, and then thrown into the fetish-house till he consents to accept the kingly honours thus forced upon him. The Gallas of the East elect their king once in eight years. They are selected from five families who are royal, and through whom the succession to the throne is carefully kept up. They have a custom called Rab which compels the four families out of office to destroy all their children; those reigning for the time being allowed to rear theirs. * It is doubtless from such examples being common, that facts such as those recorded in the Book of Exodus regarding the drowning of infants became possible as a political precaution. Powerful kings like those of ancient Egypt, or of Dahomey and Ashantee in modern times, may succeed in combining a vigorous policy with sacred functions and the idea of a man-god, but the tendency is towards degeneration and extinction. When a man ceases to move from his royal chair, to see any of his subjects except those whose interests it is to tell him only what suits their own purpose; when a movement of hand or head is dangerous to the stability of the world, and that he must give all needed blessings while carefully wrapped up in the swaddling-bands of taboo, his final disappearance cannot be long delayed. His memory lasts, but it becomes a shadow merging into ancestor worship, or kept in a closed ark in the fetish-house. There was another, and perhaps a more powerful, reason among primitive men why those who were men of action should decline the honours of divinity, and that was the practice of killing the god. * Ancient mythology has made us familiar with the idea of the death of the gods, and if divine and spiritual deities were subject to decrepitude, decay, and death, how much more the human gods of primitive man? It was natural that men in faraway times should bestow the greatest care on their divinities, and surround them with taboos and restrictions calculated to keep them out of harm's way. But no care could make human gods immortal, and the worshippers had to take account of the stern fact and meet it as best they might. If the course of nature depended on the god, what might not old age and imbecility bring upon the nation? Should his powers decay and his perceptions become dimmed, he might in a second precipitate calamities which would prove disastrous to himself and his subjects. The world itself might be thrown out of place, and projected no one knew where, for in those days the powers of divine persons were not restricted to "projecting" bits of flimsy French paper in the form of letters with indifferent spelling. There was only one way open by which the danger could be met, and that was by putting the god to death while still in the full possession of his faculties or on the first appearance of outward symptoms of decay, as a grey hair or hollow tooth, and thus secure the entrance of his soul or divinity into his successor. * Should he die a natural death, even in his prime, and before the dangers of decay appeared, his soul might be stolen, or stray away into winter and night to wander for ever. If the world were to collapse on the King of Congo dying a natural death, such a contingency could only be averted by dispatching him to the land of shadows by violent means. So it was that when a king fell ill his heir and successor entered his house with a rope and club, and either strangled or clubbed him to death. "The King of Quiteva, in Eastern Africa, ranked with deity," and this continued till one of the kings lost a tooth, and feeling no disposition to follow the practice of his predecessors by quitting the upper air on the appearance of the first bodily defect, published to his people that he had lost a front tooth, in order that "when they might behold they might yet be able to recognise him." The historian continues: "He declared at the same time that he was resolved on living and reigning as long as he could, esteeming his existence requisite for the welfare of his subjects. He at the same time loudly condemned the practice of his predecessors, whom he taxed with imprudence, nay, even with madness, for condemning themselves to death for casual accidents to their persons; and abrogating this mortal law, he ordained that all his successors, if sane, should follow the precedent he gave, and the new law established by him." * This man, whose name is not given, was as bold a reformer as was Ergamenes of Meroe. There the kings were worshipped as gods, but whenever the priests sent a message that the king must die, he voluntarily submitted to be put to death. When the summons came to Ergamenes he replied to it by putting the priests themselves to the sword, thus reversing the order, and putting an end to the practice once for all. In Unyoro the king is killed by his own wives when seriously ill. Nor is the custom of killing the divine king confined to Africa. The King of Calicut could only rule twelve years, after which he must publicly commit suicide according to an approved method; a method only a little less suggestive of the shambles than the Harakiri of the Japanese. The first modification of the Calicut law of succession was made towards the end of the seventeenth century, when at the end of the twelve years a tent was pitched, and the king had a great feast lasting ten or twelve days, at the end of which any one might kill him and gain the crown. * To do so he must cut his way, sword in hand, through the king's bodyguard to reach him in his tent. The desperate attempt was at times made but never with success. They were bold men who ventured on drastic reforms in far-away days; bolder still were those who ventured to curb the power of the priests after the offices of ruler and high-priest cane to be separated, as not a few European monarchs discovered to their cost when kept standing, barefooted and bareheaded, waiting the pleasure of an arrogant ecclesiastic. But limitations were not put to the power of the priesthood without a long period of transition, during which many expedients were adopted to preserve time-honoured usage, and adjust that to the inevitable, as represented by a truculent ruler who wished to enjoy the upper air as long as nature permitted him to do so, and who acquired awkward habits of answering the arguments of philosophers with sword-cut or gallows. To only one of such expedients can we refer, that of temporary kings or substitutes. Where kings were put to death at the end of fixed periods or on the appearance of the first signs of decay, rulers would anxiously endeavour to discover a means of evading the letter of the law while giving such obedience to its spirit as would satisfy their subjects and worshippers. Some boldly set the law at defiance by refusing to submit to its requirements. Others sought out substitutes, and introduced to men's minds the idea of one taking, in a grave crisis, the place of another, and being regarded as the person he represented; his own individuality being lost in the act of self-surrender and substitution. He became the king, the very man-god whom people worshipped, in his office and act. The real king in fact died, and in resuming the government it was a new king who ascended the throne to reign for another stated period. At first a relative of the king would act as substitute, but this could not continue long without the sense of justice inherent in man revolting against such a barbarous practice, and a slave or condemned criminal would be substituted for a brother or son. This substitute, whether son or slave, was for a time clothed with kingly authority and lived in regal state, while the king retired into private life. Even the royal harem might be invaded by the temporary king, a fact, when we consider the extraordinary jealousy with which they were guarded, which shows clearly that only for the most weighty reasons could such a thing be permitted. It could only be in order that the temporary king should be invested with full regal authority without restriction or limitation. At the end of the time allowed, the temporary king was put to deathkilled as a godthe king resuming office. The custom is in some places softened down still more, and the substitute is not actually put to death, a mock execution being sufficient. This latter custom is observed in Cambodia, where the temporary king receives the revenues during his three days of office, as is also done by the same functionary in Siam, only the latter seizes ships entering harbour, and holds them till redeemed. At the end of his term of office he goes to a field and draws nine furrows, where seed is sown by old women. When the ninth furrow is finished, the spectators rush to pick up the seed just sown to mix with their own, and so secure a plentiful crop. This temporary king is known as "Lord of the Heavenly Host." * These customs, and especially the killing of the king or his substitute, introduce us to the earliest form of human sacrifice, a system which developed to such gigantic proportions as men's conception of the supernatural advanced from the ideas of human divinities to personal spiritual existences, whether as the spirit of corn or vegetation generally, the powers of nature or the souls of departed ancestors. To the development of this form of religion and worship we shall now turn. 21:* J. G. Frazer, Golden Bough. 21: Chamberlain; Things Japanese. 21: Kaempfer, "History of Japan," in Pinkerton's Voyages and Travels. 23:* J. G. Frazer, Golden Bough. 24:* J. G. Frazer, quoting Labat. 27:* Frazer, Golden Bough. 28:* J. G. Frazer, Golden Bough. 28: Dos Santos. 29:* Dos Santos. 30:* Hamilton, quoted by J. G. Frazer. 32:* J. G. Frazer, quoting Pallegoix.

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The P-40 Warhawk and the A6M Zero The P-40 Warhawk and A6M Zero were two prominent U.S. and Japanese fighters at the beginning of the Second World War. Both had achieved admirable records. Being two of the most recognizable and widely used aircraft of the war, their paths crossed many times. Yet their performance and career tracks were very different. The Zero concept started in May of 1937. A few years before the Type 96 fighter or A5M (code named Claude by the Allies) had been introduced. It was very successful against the aircraft it met in the air war over China in the 1930's, but the Japanese Imperial Navy wanted a new high performance fighter to supplant the opened-cockpit, fixed landing gear A5M, which was already outpaced by more advanced western aircraft. The Horikoshi team designers were called upon to create a modern fighter with excellent speed, range, armament, visibility, and most important maneuverability that at least matched that of the Type 96. Amazingly, the team managed to pull it off; making a machine that matched and in some cases exceeded the Navy's requirements. Their creation was the Type 00 or Zero fighter (first code named Ben, then Ray, and finally Zeke by the Allies). It attained a speed of 331 mph; the later A6M5 reached 350. It had a climb to 9,840 feet in 3 minutes 30 seconds, though its dive speed was limited to 350 mph. It had an impressive range of 1,200 miles. The armament consisted of two 7.7mm machineguns firing through the propeller and two 20mm cannons in the wings. The new fighter's maneuverability was unmatched by any other mass produced fighter. Delighted with the Zero's performance, the Imperial Navy ordered it into series production. On the 31 July 1940 the Imperial Japanese Navy officially adopted the A6M. Across the Pacific Ocean the P-40's birth was playing out much differently. Its forerunner, the Curtiss P-36 Hawk, was the United State's front line fighter. Obsolescent P-26 Peashooters and Brewster Buffaloes still served overseas on the most distant airbases. The USAAC had fallen behind its European rivals; its aircraft was decisively inferior. The Air Corps set out to find a fighter capable of matching European standards. In 1937 a competition for the best fighter plane was announced to the major aircraft companies. Boeing, Seversky, Bell, Lockheed, and Curtiss all entered their designs for the trials. Lockheed submitted the XP-38 and Bell the XP-39. The XP-38 was revolutionary in design. Twin engines and turbo superchargers gave it superb performance at high altitude and tricycle landing gear gave it a futuristic look. The XP-39 was equally unconventional. Its turbo-supercharged engine was placed behind the pilot in order to accommodate a 37mm cannon in the propeller hub. It also featured a tricycle landing gear, plus a car-like door to enter and exit the cockpit. Its overall performance with the supercharged engine was very good. Curtiss, on the other hand, was unwilling to risk millions on a completely new design. They opted instead to re-engine the existing P-36. The liquid-cooled Allison V-12 (V-1710) was chosen to beef up the plane's performance. The in-line engine reduced air drag and increased speed. The speed of the P-40 varied from model to model. Initially it was around 350 mph; with the addition of pilot armor and self-sealing fuel tanks it slumped to 345 in the C model. The E had a more powerful engine and could reach 360 mph. And the N model, which was the last production model, approached 380 mph. The P-40's dive speed exceeded 480 mph. The P-40B could climb to 15,000 feet in 5.1 minutes. The later E reached 20,000 feet in 11.5 minutes. Its range was roughly 850 miles and armament was two .50 caliber machine guns in the nose and four .30 caliber guns in the wings. The D variant introduced the standard armament of six .50's, three in each wing. A common misconception is that the P-40 had limited maneuverability. Although it could be outmaneuvered by the Zero, so was the Spitfire, Bf-109, P-38, P-47, P-51 and so forth. In actuality the P-40 was more agile than many contemporary fighters, including both the Bf-109 and P-51 Mustang. Most historians believe the Army made a big mistake when they choose the P-40 over the P-38, but at the time it seemed the best way to go. The U.S. Army was fiercely conservative and new and unorthodox designs were frowned upon. The P-38 seemed too unconventional, and it doubled the requirement for engines. Also, it did not fit the Army Air Corps concept of a standard fighter. Most Army officials assumed that the bomber would always get through and saw only a limited requirement for a high-altitude interceptor. They opted for low-altitude performance and durability in the ground support role. This is also why they stripped the P-39 of its supercharger, seriously reducing its speed and altitude performance. Also, Lockheed did not have the facilities to produce the P-38 in numbers. (It was a complex aircraft, never intended for mass production.) Curtiss only needed minor revision to their factory to produce the P-40. Lastly, the prototype XP-38 crashed while landing after a cross-country demonstration flight insisted upon by the Army, destroying any hope for the Lockheed entry. Curtiss won the competition. The Army placed the largest order for aircraft up to that time, in a hurry to replace aging Hawks and Peashooters. The overall performance of the A6M Zero and the P-40 Warhawk were as different as night and day. While the P-40 employed speed and survivability, the Zero relied on its tight turn-radius and swift climb to succeed in combat. The A6M's nimbleness was legendary; in low-speed dogfights it almost guaranteed success. Its superb climb rate gave it a big advantage over the Allied fighters it met at the beginning of the war. The Zeke's armament of two 7.7mm machineguns and two 20mm cannons was adequate but not outstanding. Although the Japanese 20mm cannon lacked range and accuracy, they hit hard at close range. The Type 00 also had excellent all-around vision. Along with these advantages came flaws that proved fatal for many Japanese pilots later in the war. The Zero's speed in level flight was below that of the fastest Western fighters. Early models could only achieve 331 mph, while the A6M5 (the most common model) reached roughly 350 mph. Japanese pilots were trained to engage enemies in slow speed dogfights. Above 275 mph the Zero's excellent handling diminished, making tight high speed turns nearly impossible. The Zero's maximum safe dive speed was 350 mph. Above that speed the fighter lost the ability to roll and the skin on the wings would begin to wrinkle. It the pilot pushed harder the Zero might shed its wings. The Zeke's roll rate at any speed was slower then all U.S. fighters of WW II. A plane's roll rate is important because all acrobatic maneuvers with the exception of the loop start with a roll. If a P-40 latched onto the tail of a Zeke and the Zeke banked to turn away, a quick reacting pilot could roll his Warhawk inside his target. For a brief period the unfortunate Zero would be under his guns and fly right through his line of fire. The A6M also lacked armor protection for the pilot and self-sealing fuel tanks. This omission cost many pilots dearly. Bullets could easily penetrate the thin aluminum skin of the cockpit. With no protection for the fuel tanks, the Zeke flamed rather easily. As a dogfighter the Zero was unparalleled, and its great range gave it tactical flexibility. It was the world's first great long-range escort fighter. Yet as an all-around fighter its flaws came back to haunt it. Once its adversaries became aware of its drawbacks and limitations, the myth of the Zero's invincibility was shot to ribbons, along with many a plane. The P-40's attributes were near opposites to that of the Zero's. The fastest model P-40 could outrun the fastest model Zeke by at least 30 mph and no model Zero could outrun its contemporary P-40 rival. The P-40's dive speed was also better. The normal dive limit speed for a P-40 was 480 mph and sometimes exceeded 500 mph. This proved especially useful using the hit and run tactics pioneered during the war. The structural integrity of the P-40's airframe could stand over 9 G's, far better then the frail Zeke. The Curtiss fighter also had pilot armor and self-sealing fuel tanks, standard for all U.S. fighters. The question of whose armament was better is debatable. The Zero's 7.7mm (.303') machine guns had good range and accuracy, but there were just two of them and they were not as powerful as the P-40's .50 caliber machine guns. The two 20mm cannons were powerful yet inaccurate. They had a limited range and a slow rate of fire. The P-40's six .50s or two .50s and four .30s packed more punch than the Zero's 7.7s, were accurate, and had exceptional reach, yet weren't as powerful as the Zero's cannons. Against another WW II era fighter I would favor the P-40's armament; against a bomber I would prefer the Zero's armament. Another good point about the P-40 was its amazing ability to absorb punishment and still continue to fight, be it from machine guns and cannons, wear-and-tear, hostile weather, or rough landings. Clive Caldwell, Australia's top-scoring ace with 28 1/2 victories and the leading P-40 ace with 20 1/2 of these victories demonstrated this rather dramatically in North Africa. While flying top cover for supply planes inbound for Tobruk, two Bf-109's led by the 114-victory ace Werner Schroer ambushed him. The German planes punched 108 machine gun bullets and five 20mm shells into the hapless fighter, damaging its instrument panel, controls, tail, wings, and wounding Caldwell in the back, shoulder and leg. Instead of crashing to the ground, the Tomahawk managed to stay airborne. And instead of attempting to escape, the Sydney-born Caldwell turned into his attackers and returned fire. He shot down Schroer's wingman, unnerving Schroer to the point that he ran for home. The Australian ace made it home. Although early in the war the Zero was thought of as invincible, the P-40 was more worthy of this title. Many stories have been told and retold by pilots grateful for their plane's solid construction. One unique account was that of Lt. Alexi Khobistoff of the Red Air Force, who perfected an unusual method of destroying enemy aircraft when his plane's guns froze from ice build-up. With his sights set on a Heinkel 111, the distracted Khobistoff struggled to clear his guns when all of a sudden the prop of his plane tore through the bomber's wing. He managed to stay airborne while his target careened into the ground. He repeated this act a second time, but on this day it was intentional, cutting the rudder off of yet another German bomber. The third time and his fifth kill happened when a 109 mortally wounded his plane. Rather then go out quietly, the tenacious Khobistoff dove his plane into the nearest enemy fighter he saw, chewing its tail to bits. He bailed out and spent several weeks in the hospital, never to repeat his unorthodox tactic. The Warhawk was not without flaws, however. For one thing its climb speed was inferior to the A6M and many other types of World War II fighters. In fact a number of P-40s captured at Java were going to be used to defend the Japanese home islands until it was discovered that it could barely out climb the Val dive bomber. The P-40's rearward vision was also limited, unlike the all-around vision enjoyed by Zero pilots. Its turn-radius was inferior to the Zeke's, but so were most other fighters. In a turning dogfight the P-40 could not compare to the Zero. It also suffered from bad stall characteristics. Because of this many planes and pilots were lost in training. The range of a P-40 was around 850 miles, well under the range of the Zero. The service ceiling of the P-40 was comparatively low compared to the Zero and practically all German fighters. The P-40's most crippling handicap was the deterioration of its performance at high altitude, making it ineffective as a high altitude bomber escort. The higher a P-40 went the more it's performance dropped, much like the Zero's maneuverability decreased as its speed increased. Above 20,000 feet, handling and speed slumped; at 30,000 feet the P-40 could barely function as a fighter. The P-40's best bet was to stay around 15,000 feet. When pilots were taught to avoid these problems the P-40's shortcomings could be overcome with relative ease. The Japanese Zero, on the other hand, could not combat enemy planes using its fine points if the enemy refused to slow down and turn with it. Yet in 1940 when the Zero was introduced, though technology dictated that the antiquated tactics of dog fighting were obsolescent, the world's fighter training schools still practiced it. This was the main reason for its success early in the war. Before the A5M Claude was introduced, Chinese pilots, flying mostly Russian-built Polikarpov I-15 biplane and I-16 monoplane fighters enjoyed success against the Japanese bombers attacking their cities. After the Claude was introduced control of the skies over China passed to the invaders. Once the Zero debuted the Chinese had no chance of regaining air superiority without outside help. Chinese pilots even refused to engage the sleek, ultra-modern Zeroes with their out-of-date, fixed landing gear, open cockpit relics. The Type 00 did extremely well in China, downing 99 enemy planes with no losses of their own (although the aircraft they flew against were woefully obsolescent). Chinese citizens and soldiers weren't the only witnesses to the A6M's deadly efficiency. Generalissimo Chaing Kai Shek, the commander-in-chief of the Chinese Military, invited military advisors from the United States and Europe to help modernize China's defenses. These advisors took notice of the Zero fighter and warned their own countries of its existence, though these warnings were largely ignored. No one could believe that such an aircraft could come from a country known for shoddy products. Claire Lee Chennault was one such advisor. This former colonel had retired from the U.S. Army Air Corp. because his theories on tactics were so at odds with the fiercely conservative Air Corp. brass. He was asked to help modernize the Chinese Air Force, and quickly became friends with Chaing Kai Shek and his lovely wife. The retired colonel wrote a report about the deadly Zero and sent it to the U.S. government. It was promptly filed away. This was a mistake. If the threat had been taken seriously, and if American pilots had been trained to deal with such a fighter, the Japanese would likely have sustained much heavier losses in the early air war. Meanwhile, the P-40 was being mass produced and sent to fighter squadrons across the continental U.S. and to overseas bases in the Hawiian Islands, the Philippines, and other places. In March of 1940 Congress approved Lend-Lease, letting American arms manufacturers sell to the Allies. Curtiss would have several buyers before the war ended. These included England, the USSR, China, Australia, Brazil, and others. France would have been one of the first buyers, but Curtiss could not fill the order before the country surrendered to Germany. Great Britain, desperately needing planes after losses sustained during the Battle of Britain, took over the French order. The first P-40s they received had no pilot armor or self-sealing fuel tanks. They were deemed unsafe and used as trainers and second-line fighters. Curtiss took this criticism to heart and incorporated these necessities into all B and later models. These P-40s were known as Tomahawks to the RAF and were mostly used as fighter-bombers in North Africa. The P-40 first saw combat in the skies above the North African desert. Squadrons such as No. 112, who painted ferocious shark mouths on the front air intake of their P-40's and inspired other squadrons to do likewise, flew Tomahawks. They strafing and bombed German tanks, trucks troops, and regularly mixed it up with bombers and the famed Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighters. The Warhawk held its own against its German enemies and was considered by both the British and Germans to be superior to the Hawker Hurricane. In fact, in an effort to reduce losses for No. 33 squadron, obsolescent Hurricanes were replaced with P-40s. North Africa was the first place the Hawks and Eagles met, but it was not their last confrontation. On the Russian front Soviet P-40s faced the Luftwaffe's 109s and Focke Wulf 190s with considerable success. In Italy the 325 Fighter Group, known as the "Checker-Tailed Clan" because of the yellow and black checkerboards painted on their tails, scored two impressive victories over German 109s. On 1 July 1943, 22 P-40s made a fighter sweep over southern Italy. Forty Bf-109s surprised the checker-tails, engaging them at moderate altitude where the P-40 performed best. After an intense dogfight the Germans lost half their force while only one P-40 failed to come back. A similar event took place on the 30th of the same month in which 20 P-40s were bounced by thirty-five 109s. The Germans limped home after losing 21 of their own while the checker-tails came through with only one loss. The Germans lost 135 aircraft (ninety-six of which were 109s) to the pilots of the checkered-tail P-40s while shooting down only seventeen of the 325th. Back in North Africa, the most successful engagement by Tomahawks was what has come to be known as the Palm Sunday Massacre. Just before sundown on Palm Sunday, 18 April 1943, P-40s on anti-transport patrol spotted over 60 Ju-52s escorted by 21 fighters off of Cape Bon, making their way to Sicily. Elements of the 57th and 324th as well as the British 92 Squadron intercepted. 11 Spitfires covered 46 P-40Fs as they pounced on the Axis formations, ripping them to shreds. The carnage ended with 59 Ju-52s and 16 fighters crashing into the sea or Tunisian soil for the loss of only 6 P-40s. While the P-40's debut was not as spectacular as the A6M's it was very favorable, and just a preview to the P-40's later success. On 7 December 1941 the bell rang and the Zeke charged out of its corner swinging. Numerous Zeros from six carriers escorted Kate and Val bombers to their target at Pearl Harbor Hawaii, triggering a war that led to Imperial Japan's eventual downfall. The attack was nothing short of devastating, as the torpedo planes scored hit after hit on the ships moored along battleship row. Val dive-bombers and Type 00 fighters smashed the airfields at Hickam and Wheeler. The resulting destruction was near total. The airstrips and hangers were shattered P-40s and other aircraft were turned into flaming wreckage. Zeros and Vals raced through the black smoke billowing from fires as shocked pilots and ground crew raced for cover. Some managed to get to anti-aircraft guns and return fire, but with little result. Bellows Field was also attacked with the same cataclysmic results. Most of the 180 P-40 fighters on Oahu were destroyed on the ground; the three airfields lay in shambles. A few American fighters got off the ground. Two P-40s piloted by George Welch (a friend of Chuck Hawks' father) and Kenneth Taylor managed to get airborne and score some of the first American victories of the war. By a stroke of luck their planes had been reassigned to a remote field in an effort to disperse forces in the event of an air strike. After witnessing the first minutes of the attack they phoned the ground crews to arm and fuel their aircraft. The two pilots jumped into a car and raced to their aircraft. They were strafed by a dive-bomber on the way but escaped unharmed. Upon reaching the field they found their planes intact and ready to go. Welch and Taylor took off and quickly engaged the Japanese. Before the attack was over they scored 7 victories between them, including a few Zeros, while taking only minor damage, although Taylor sustained an injury to his right arm. Soon after the attack the Japanese began a steamroller offensive against the Allies across the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, and the rest of the Western Pacific. The A6M led the way; its stunning agility and offensive power decimated all opposition. Indeed the rapid advance across the Pacific was due in most part to the Zero's exceptional dog fighting capabilities. U.S. pilots flying P-40s, P-39s, F4F Wildcats, F2A Buffaloes and P-26 Peashooters found themselves at a disadvantage fighting a numerically superior force of Japanese fighters using antiquated dog fighting tactics. Every time the Americans took a stand they were beaten. The Zero possessed almost mythical agility and seemed to be invincible; the Allied forces in the Western Pacific quickly fell. The British fared no better than the Americans did. The RAF squadrons stationed in Malaya were flying the American Brewster Buffalo; a short barrel shaped fighter that was outmoded before it reached the front. Aware of its lack of performance the British had banished the fighter to Burma, away from combat with the superior German Bf-109. The general impression was that the Japanese had nothing but outdated biplanes that would not be a match for the Brewster fighter. When the British Buffaloes came in contact with the A6M they were sliced to ribbons. To reduce their losses the RAF decided to replace the outmatched Buffalo with the more formidable Hawker Hurricane, famed for its decisive role in the Battle of Britain. Unfortunately, its pilots also found that fighting a Zeke on its terms was practically hara-kiri. Finally, the British threw their best at the Japanese, the fabled Supermarine Spitfire. To the Allies dismay, this fighter also could not compare with the incredibly nimble Zero. In only two engagements, Zeros downed 17 of 27 while losing 2 of their own. It seemed the A6M was an unstoppable juggernaut. It soon gained the reputation of being invincible. Everywhere it was encountered, the Zero vanquished its enemies. Everywhere with the exception of China, that is. Patrolling the skies over China were a band of American mercenaries known as the AVG (American Volunteer Group). Flying P-40s adorned with fearsome shark's mouths they shattered the myth of Japanese invincibility and almost single-handedly saved China. Amazingly, this ragtag group of renegades, or so their Japanese opponents called them, fought using only fifty or so planes at a time and downed several times that many. They became known to the grateful Chinese populous as "Fei Hu" or Flying Tigers. The keys to their success was understanding their enemy, the tactics they employed, Col. Chennault's uncanny ability to predict the enemy's next move, and an aircraft that excelled in their method of fighting. Much has been written about the AVG, so this article will only briefly summarize the accomplishments of the famed unit. The AVG was made up of three squadrons, The Adams & Eves, The Panda Bears, and The Hell's Angels. They began combat operations on 20 December 1941 and officially disbanded on 4 July 1942. For seven months this ragtag band of Army, Navy, and Marine pilots were the only effective defense in the skies over China. Once organized, the men of the AVG recorded an unprecedented 70 to 1 kill ratio, 296 (although some sources say 286) enemy aircraft confirmed and an additional 153 probables for a loss of only 12 planes and 3 pilots in air combat. An even more impressive feat considering that the American mercenaries had virtually no combat experience while the Japanese had been fighting in China for years. The tactics of The Flying Tigers were the key to its astounding record. The early warning net (a primitive yet effective network of spotters and ratio operators set up to report enemy aircraft) would report the position, direction, and estimated altitude of incoming Japanese aircraft. The Flying Tigers would climb above the enemies' altitude on an intercepting course. On sighting the Japanese they would dive on them at high speed and slash through their formation, guns blazing. After the attack the Tigers would use the speed from the dive to exit the combat zone and climb for another pass. It was essentially a drive-by shooting. Saburo Sakai, Japan's leading ace to survive WW II, recounted an incident over Port Moresby, New Guinea where a P-40 piloted by Les Jackson used this tactic with deadly efficiency. This is Sakai's account of that encounter. "We passed Moresby and the bursting flak fell behind. I sighed with relief. Too soon! Nearly a mile above us, a single P-40 fighter dove with incredible speed. He came down so fast I could not move a muscle; one second he was above us, the next the lone plane plummeted like lightning into the bombers. Six hundred yards in front of me, I watched the fighter- he was going to ram! How that plane ever got through the few yards' clearance between the third and fourth bombers of the left echelon, I shall never know. It seemed impossible, but it happened. With all guns blazing, the P-40 ripped through the bomber formation and poured a river of lead into Miyazaki's plane. Instantly the Zero burst into flames. With tremendous speed the P-40 disappeared far below." A few volunteers were displeased with this tactic and resigned. This method of fighting did not go over well with the Chinese and British flyers in the area, either. Initially, British pilots seen diving away from combat would be court-martialed; Chinese pilots seen doing the same would be shot. However, as the Flying Tigers' success mounted other units adopted their tactics. With the exception of the AVG the Allies were losing ground everywhere in the Pacific in the days immediately following Pearl Harbor. Yet over time a few units managed to hold their own against the advancing Japanese. One such group was the Australian 75th squadron stationed in Port Moresby. This group faced long odds, much like the AVG. With only a handful of planes and a trickle of resources, they were the only serious aerial defense against Japanese attacks coming from Rabaul and Lae. The men of the 75th had a great responsibility; they had to stop the Japanese or leave Australia open to invasion. The Australian pilots displayed an immense amount of courage against daunting odds. It was not uncommon for only one plane to challenge twenty or more Japanese. After 44 grueling days of combat the 75th destroyed 35 planes with another 15 probables and roughly 50 damaged. Their loss was 11 pilots and 16 P-40s lost to combat and 6 to accidents. Though theirs were not an outright victory, the brave souls of the 75th saved Port Moresby and held off the enemy until more squadrons could be formed. After six-months of dominance over the Allies, holes were being punched in the Zeke's aura of invulnerability. Not only did the Zero (as well as the K143 "Oscar" and other Japanese fighters) suffer defeat time and again at the hands of the 23rd Fighter Group (the successor to the AVG, who ended the war with 594 confirmed victories), two major carrier battles hit the Zero and the Imperial Japanese Navy particularly hard. At the battles of Coral Sea and Midway five of Japan's precious carriers were lost with an even more valuable asset, their pilots. Much time, money, and resources were spent turning cadets into some of the most skilled flyers in the world. At Coral Sea and especially at Midway, many of these young men were lost and with them the proficiency they possessed. As the war progressed Japan (like Germany) found it increasingly difficult to train new pilots, and found it impossible to hone their skills to pre-war levels. The Zero suffered another heavy blow when the Allies captured a Zero nearly intact. On 4 June 1942 an A6M2 flown by Flight Petty Officer 1st Class Tadayoshi Koga from the carrier Ryujo took part in a raid on Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutians Islands. Koga's aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire, forcing him to crash land on Akutan Island. The plane was captured by the U.S. and shipped to the States. There a number of pilots tested the Zeke's performance and engaged in mock dogfights with American aircraft. The secrets of Japan's miracle fighter were quickly discovered. The information collected was forwarded to pilots on the front. The sun was setting on the Zero's reign. Unfortunately, in the summer of 1944 a Curtiss SB2C Helldiver taxied into Koga's Zero, chopping it up with its giant four-blade propeller. A crippling blow was struck when it became widely understood that the Zero could be defeated in maneuvering combat at speeds in excess of 250 mph. Worse still for the Zero pilots, new more powerful aircraft like the P-47 Thunderbolt, F4U Corsair, and F6F Hellcat were being introduced by the U.S. However, the Zero would remain a dangerous opponent until the end of the war, whenever Allied flyers tried to dogfight with it. While the Zero was losing control of the skies in the Pacific Theater, the P-40 was in its heyday. Across China the P-40s now dominated the skies. This was also true in the South Pacific. No one demonstrated this better than the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF). In 1941, with the possibility of a Japanese attack looming, New Zealand began updating its meager air force. Eighteen P-40 K and M models were diverted from the Middle East to create No. 14 squadron in April of 1942. In later months the 15th, 16th, and 17th squadrons were formed with further deliveries of P-40s. New Zealand airmen stationed in Britain and North Africa were recalled to their homeland for its defense. Many were veterans of the Battle of Britain. One of the first combat actions of the RNZAF P-40s was the destruction of a Japanese floatplane while escorting a Hudson. Another was participating in an Allied attack on three Japanese destroyers that had steamed into an Allied minefield. Their first clash with Japanese fighters resulted in the downing of 4 Japanese planes; 2 of their own were forced to make forced landings at Russell Island airstrip. Not a bad start. Later the Japanese sent a large fighter sweep to crush the Allied airbases. Fourteen Squadron joined an Allied force that intercepted the Japanese force. They lost 1, but they claimed 6 of the 25 Japanese planes shot down that day. The New Zealanders performed fighter sweeps, interceptions, escort, reconnaissance, and bombing missions in their P-40s, often alongside U.S. Army and Marine air units. So it went until 1944 when new F4U Corsairs replaced the P-40s. But by this time Japanese air power was all but wiped from the sky, so no RNZAF Corsairs saw air to air combat. The destruction inflicted upon the Japanese by the RNZAF P-40s was 99 confirmed kills (the majority of which were Zeros) and 14 probables. The New Zealanders lost 20 P-40s. The P-40 had to give up center stage to new, higher performance fighters. Lockheed's P-38 Lighting was the first of these, rushed into production when the need for new fighters became critical. When the P-38 was introduced in early 1942 it proved to be less of a match for the Zero than the Warhawk. U.S. pilots were still attempting to outmaneuver the Zeke. When U.S. pilots took Claire Chennault's teachings to heart and used the Lightning's speed to overcome the Zero. Then the P-38 became a frightening adversary. The twin-engine Lighting had a much greater range than the P-40, and when the Allies took the offensive it was the P-38 that carried the war to the enemy. The P-47 Thunderbolt, the heaviest and most powerful Allied fighter, replaced the P-40 as a fighter-bomber. North American's thoroughbred P-51 Mustang, used primarily as a long-range escort for large four-engine B-17s, B-24s, and B-29s striking deep into Germany and Japan, spelled doom for the P-40 as well as the A6M, eventually supplanting P-40s even in the 23rd Fighter Group. One similarity between the Zero and the P-40 was that the companies that created them didn't keep them up-to-date to compete with newer types. With each new variant Supermarine and Messerschmitt kept their crowning achievements, the Spitfire and Bf-109, competitive with newer birds. Curtiss and Mitsubishi, on the other hand, made numerous minor changes without significantly improving their fighters. For Mitsubishi the emphasis was primarily on simplifying production for larger quantities as Japanese losses mounted. The J2M Raiden, known to the Allies as Jack and slated to replace the Zero, had fallen behind schedule due to development problems. Improvements to the Zero to strengthen the airframe and increase the dive speed were also a priority. Later model Zekes attained dive speeds of 400 mph, still not enough to catch or escape from American fighters. Curtiss was taking steps in the opposite direction. Even though the P-40 was the fighter to prove that speed could overcome maneuverability, weight saving became a priority with the primary objective of making the Hawk more agile. Armor plating and ammunition were reduced, and on some variants of the N model two machineguns and the starter were sacrificed. The stripping of parts to save small amounts of weight became so ridiculous that some aviators and ground crews nicknamed these P-40s "Gypsy Rose Lee," after the famous stripper of the era. More often than not they would replace the missing parts. The final version of both fighters was the best attempt at bringing them up to par with modern types. But essentially it was too little too late. Whether these efforts were successful remains questionable because neither saw action. The A6M8c or Zero 64 replaced the Nakajima NK1C Sakae 12 engine with the more powerful Mitsubishi MK8K Kinsei 62. With considerably more power on tap, features to protect the pilot such as armor plating and bulletproof windshields were added while still retaining the Zero's trademark nimbleness. The two 7.7mm machineguns were replaced with the heavier 12.7mm (.50 caliber) guns. Though it was 25 mph slower than the Hellcat the Japanese were confident that the Zero 64 was the equal of Grumman's F6F. As for the P-40, its power plant was also replaced. It was given an Allison V-1710-121 with 1,425 hp. Other modifications were aimed at reducing drag and included a four-bladed propeller, smaller chin scoop, clipped wingtips, and a bubble canopy like that of the P-47 and P-51. These alterations gave the XP-40Q a top speed of 422 mph at 20,000 feet. By that time, given the success of the newer P-47 and P-51, the AAF deemed the heavily revised P-40Q unnecessary and it was not put into production. In the wide spectrum of World War II fighters the P-40 Warhawk and A6M Type 00 were at opposite ends. One was an American aircraft, one Japanese. One sported an in-line engine, the other a radial. One emphasizes speed and strength, the other agility. Perhaps the most dramatic difference between the two is how history remembers them. Today the Zero is thought of as one of the great fighters of the Second World War, despite its flaws and its ineffectiveness when those flaws were exploited. The P-40 is denounced as being one of the worst fighters of the war even though it achieved a 70 to 1 kill ratio with the AVG, was used by the most successful U.S. squadron of WW II (the 23rd FG), was essential in the defense of China, Australia, North Africa, New Zealand, and the South-West Pacific, and proved to be a better fighter then the Zero time and again. Hopefully further research (and perhaps this article) will help to vindicate the Warhawk and destroy the myth of the frail Zero's superiority. In the wide spectrum of World War II fighters the P-40 Warhawk and A6M Type 00 were at opposite ends. One was an American aircraft, one Japanese. One sported an in-line engine, the other a radial. One emphasizes speed and strength, the other agility. Perhaps the most dramatic difference between the two is how history remembers them. Today the Zero is thought of as one of the great fighters of the Second World War, despite its flaws and its ineffectiveness when those flaws were exploited. The P-40 is denounced as being one of the worst fighters of the war even though it achieved a 70 to 1 kill ratio with the AVG, was used by the most successful U.S. squadron of WW II (the 23rd FG), was essential in the defense of China, Australia, North Africa, New Zealand, and the South-West Pacific, and proved to be a better fighter then the Zero time and again. Hopefully further research (and perhaps this article) will help to vindicate the Warhawk and destroy the myth of the frail Zero's superiority. Copyright 2002 by Patrick Masell. All rights reserved.

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Horse Boarding Stables Santa Fe |FULL CARE HORSE BOARDING: ||OPTIONAL HORSE BOARDING SERVICES: Santa Fe (pronounced [ˈsænə fej] by natives, [ˌsænə ˈfej] or [ˌsæntə ˈfej] by others) (Spanish, "Holy Faith"; full form: La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís, English: Royal City of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi) is the capital of New Mexico, a state of the United States of America. Santa Fe is the largest city and county seat of Santa Fe County. It had a population of 62,543 at the 2000 census. As of the 2005 census estimate the population was 70,631, making it New Mexico's third-largest city. It is the principal city of the Santa Fe, New Mexico Metropolitan Statistical Area which encompasses all of Santa Fe County. The elevation of Santa Fe is nearly 7,000 feet (2,132 meters) above sea level compared with approximately 5,352 ft for Albuquerque, New Mexico. 1.1 Santa Fe under Spain and Mexico 1.2 Santa Fe and the United States 4 Santa Fe style and “The City Different” 5 The Arts and Culture 5.2 Artists and art galleries 5.3 Music and opera 5.5 Writers and other art forms 7 Architectural highlights 9 Sister Cities 10.3 Local transit 12 Further reading 13 External links 13.1 Arts and cultural orgaizations 13.3 History and current affairs 13.4 Newspapers and publications The city of Santa Fe San Miguel Chapel in Santa Fe is the oldest church structure in the US. The adobe walls were constructed around A.D. 1610 Palace of the Governors, 1609-10 Santa Fe, 1846-1847 Santa Fe under Spain and Mexico Santa Fe was the capital of Nuevo México, a province of New Spain explored by Coronado and established in 1598. The city was founded by Don Pedro de Peralta, New Mexico's third governor. Peralta gave the city its full name, "La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís", or "The Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi". A settlement on the site that would become Santa Fe was first established by Juan Martinez de Montoya in 1607. The town was formally founded and made a capital in 1610, making it the oldest capital city and the second oldest surviving city founded by the European colonists in what land was later to become part of the United States, behind St. Augustine, Florida (1565). (Jamestown, Virginia was also settled in 1607). Except for the years 1680-1692, when, as a result of the Pueblo Revolt, the native Pueblo people drove the Spaniards out of the area known as New Mexico, later to be "reconquered" by Don Diego de Vargas, Santa Fe remained Spain's provincial seat until the outbreak of the Mexican War of Independence in 1810. In 1824 the city's status as the capital of the Mexican territory of Santa Fe de Nuevo México was formalized in the 1824 Constitution. Santa Fe and the United States In 1841 a small military and trading expedition set out from Austin, Texas with the aim of gaining control over the Santa Fe Trail. Known as the Santa Fe Expedition the force was poorly prepared and was easily repelled by the Mexican army. In 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico, and General Kearny led a troop of US Cavalry into the city to claim it and the whole New Mexico Territory for the United States. By 1848 it officially gained New Mexico through The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Colonel Alexander William Doniphan under the command of Kearny recovered ammunition from Sante Fe labeled "Spain 1776" showing both the quality of communication and military support New Mexico received under Mexican rule. (Garrard, Lewis H., Wah-to-yah and the Taos Trail, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman Oklahoma, 1955, originally published in 1850) In 1851, Jean Baptiste Lamy, arrived in Santa Fe and began construction of Saint Francis Cathedral. For a few days in March 1863, the Confederate flag of General Henry Sibley flew over Santa Fe, until he was defeated by Union troops. Santa Fe was originally envisioned as an important stop on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad. But as the tracks progressed into New Mexico, the civil engineers decided that it was more practical to go through Lamy, a town in Santa Fe County to the south of Santa Fe. The result was a gradual economic decline. The first aeroplane to fly over Santa Fe was piloted by Rose Dugan, carrying Vera von Blumenthal as passenger. Together they started the development of the Pueblo Indian pottery industry, a major contribution to the founding of the annual Santa Fe Indian Market. In 1912 New Mexico became the country's 47th state, with Santa Fe as its capital. Santa Fe is located at 35°40′2″N, 105°57′52″W (35.667231, -105.964575)GR1. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 96.9 km² (37.4 mi²). 96.7 km² (37.3 mi²) of it is land and 0.2 km² (0.1 mi²) of it (0.21%) is water. Santa Fe is located nearly 7,000 ft. above sea level, making it highest located State Capital of all 50. These are State Capitals whose altitude is 4,000 ft or above: Santa Fe, New Mexico - 6,989 ft Cheyenne, Wyoming - 6,067 ft Denver, Colorado - 5,260 ft Carson City, Nevada - 4,730 ft Salt Lake City, Utah - 4,266 ft Helena, Montana - 4,090 ft The average temperature in Santa Fe ranges from a low of 14°F (-10°C) to a high of 40°F (4°C) in winter, low of 55°F (13°C) to a high of 86°F (30°C) in summer. Santa Fe receives 2-3 inches (50-75 mm) of rain per month in summer and about 5 inches (13 cm) of snow per month in winter. Santa Fe style and “The City Different” An Adobe Pueblo Revival style building near the Plaza in Santa FeThe Spanish laid out the city according to the “Laws of the Indies”, town planning rules and ordinances which had been established in 1573 by King Phillip II. The fundamental principle was that the town be laid out around a central plaza. On its north side the Palace of the Governors was located while, on the East, was the church which later became the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi. An important style implemented in planning the city was the radiating grid of streets centering from the central Plaza. Many were narrow and included small alley-ways, but each gradually merged into the more casual byways of the agricultural perimeter areas. As the city grew throughout the 19th century, the building styles evolved too, so that by Statehood in 1912, the eclectic nature of the buildings caused it to look like “Anywhere USA” (as Hammett notes). The city government realized that the economic decline, which had started more than twenty years before with the railway moving west and the Federal government closing down Fort Marcy, might be reversed by the promotion of tourism. To achieve that goal, the city created the idea of imposing a unified building style – the Spanish Pueblo Revival look, which was based on work done restoring the Palace of the Governors. The sources for this style came from the many defining features of local architecture: vigas and canales from many old adobe homes, churches built many years before and found in the Pueblos, and the earth-toned, adobe-colored look of the exteriors. After 1912 this style became official: all buildings were to be built using these elements. By 1930 there was a broadening to include the “Territorial”, a style of the pre-statehood period which included the addition of portals and white-painted window and door pediments. The City had become “Different”. However, as Hammett notes, “in the rush to pueblofy” Santa Fe, the city lost a great deal of its architectural history and eclecticism”. Among the architects most closely associated with this “new” style is John Gaw Meem. By an ordinance passed in 1958, new and rebuilt buildings, especially those in designated historic districts, must exhibit a Spanish Territorial or Pueblo style of architecture, with flat roofs and other features suggestive of the area's traditional adobe construction. However, many contemporary houses in the city are built from lumber, concrete blocks, and other common building materials, but with stucco surfaces (sometimes referred to as "fauxdobe", pronounced as one word) reflecting the historic style. In 2005/2006 a consultant group from Portland, Oregon has been preparing a “Santa Fe Downtown Vision Plan” to examine the long-range needs for the “downtown” area, roughly bounded by the Paseo de Peralta on the north, south and east sides and by Guadalupe Street on the west. In consultation with members of community groups, who are encouraged to provide feedback, the consultants will make recommendations on whether to proceed with the present policy of focusing on the Territorial and Pueblo styles. The Arts and Culture Modern naturalistic sculpture typical of Santa Fe The city is well-known as a center for many arts and all reflect the multi-cultural character of the city. There are many outdoor sculptures, including many statues of Saint Francis, and several other holy people, such as Kateri Tekakwitha. Given that Saint Francis was known for his love of animals it is not surprising that there are great numbers of representations of crows, bulls, elephants, livestock and other beasts, all over town. The styles run the whole spectrum from Baroque to Post-modern. Artists and art galleries Canyon Road, east of the Plaza, has the highest concentration of art galleries in the city, and is a major destination for tourists and locals. Santa Fe's art market is the third largest in the United States, after New York and Los Angeles, and the Canyon Road galleries showcase a wide array of contemporary Southwestern, indigenous American, and experimental art, in addition to older Russian, Taos Masters, and Native American pieces. The town and the surrounding areas have a high concentration of artists. They have come over the decades to capture on canvas and in other media the natural beauty of the landscape, the flora and the fauna. One of the most well-known New Mexico-based artists was Georgia O'Keeffe, who lived for a time in Santa Fe but primarily in Abiquiu, a small village 35 miles away. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe is named after her, and it is devoted to exhibitions of her work and associated artists or related themes. As of March 2006, it will hold about one thousand of her works in all media. Music and opera Music and opera are well represented in Santa Fe with the annual Santa Fe Opera productions, which take place between late June and late August each year, and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival which is also held at the same time, mostly in the recently-refurbished movie theatre, the Lensic Theater, now a major performing arts venue. Santa Fe has lots of world-class museums. Many are located around the Plaza downtown: Georgia O'Keeffe Museum The Museum of New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts - collections of Southwestern Arts. Institute of American Indian Arts Museum - Native American arts with political aspects. And in the Museum Hill district: Museum of International Folk Art - various kinds of artistic stuff for every-day use, from jewerlies to toys. Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Laboratory of Anthropology - exhibits Native American arts and photographs Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian - Native American potteries Museum of Spanish Colonial Art - arts during Spanish-colonial era. Writers and other art forms Performance artists and authors followed the influx of specialists in the visual arts. Famous writers like Cormac McCarthy, Roger Zelazny, George R. R. Martin and Jack Schaefer have been residents. The New Mexico Style are an American Basketball Association franchise founded in 2005. After State government, tourism is a major aspect of the Santa Fe economy, with visitors attracted year-round by the climate and related outdoor activities (such as skiing in years of adequate snowfall; hiking in other seasons) plus cultural activities of the city and the region. Most tourist activity takes place in the historic downtown, especially on and around the Plaza, a one-block square adjacent to the Palace of the Governors, the original seat of New Mexico's territorial government since the time of Spanish colonization. Other areas include “Museum Hill”, the site of the major art museums of the city, and the Canyon Road arts area with its galleries. Some visitors find Santa Fe particularly attractive around the second week of September when the aspens in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains turn yellow and the skies are clear and blue. This is also the time of the annual Fiestas de Santa Fe, celebrating the "reconquering" of Santa Fe by Don Diego De Vargas, a highlight of which is the burning Zozobra, a fifty-foot puppet also called "Old Man Gloom". Within easy striking distance for day-trips is the town of Taos, about 70 miles North and the historic Bandelier National Monument about 30 miles away. Santa Fe's ski area, Ski Santa Fe, is about 16 miles north of the city. Smokers should be aware that the City Council recently passed a strict anti-smoking ordinance that bans smoking in all businesses and public places in the city. Bars are no longer allowed to set aside a smoking area. Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, 1869New Mexico State Capitol Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi Palace of the Governors San Miguel Mission Santuario de Guadalupe As of the censusGR2 of 2000, there were 62,203 people, 27,569 households, and 14,969 families living in the city. The population density was 643.4/km² (1,666.1/mi²). There were 30,533 housing units at an average density of 315.8/km² (817.8/mi²). The racial makeup of the city was 76.30% White, 0.66% African American, 2.21% Native American, 1.27% Asian, 0.08% Pacific Islander, 15.29% from other races, and 4.20% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 47.82% of the population. There were 27,569 households out of which 24.1% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 37.6% were married couples living together, 12.1% had a female householder with no husband present, and 45.7% were non-families. 36.4% of all households were made up of individuals and 10.2% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.20 and the average family size was 2.90. In the city the population was spread out with 20.3% under the age of 18, 8.9% from 18 to 24, 29.0% from 25 to 44, 28.0% from 45 to 64, and 13.9% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 40 years. For every 100 females there were 91.7 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 89.0 males. The median income for a household in the city was $40,392, and the median income for a family was $49,705. Males had a median income of $32,373 versus $27,431 for females. The per capita income for the city was $25,454. About 9.5% of families and 12.3% of the population were below the poverty line, including 17.2% of those under age 18 and 9.2% of those age 65 or over. The minimum wage in the city of Sante Fe is $9.50 per hour, which makes it the highest in the nation. There are plans to increase this wage to $10.50 per hour in 2008. Santa Fe has six sister cities, as designated by Sister Cities International, Inc. (SCI): Santa Fe, Spain Santa Fe is served by Santa Fe Municipal Airport. However, due to the very limited air service, most people choose to fly into the Albuquerque International Sunport, about an hour's drive south of Santa Fe. Santa Fe is located on I-25. In addition, U.S. Route 84 and U.S. Route 285 pass through the city along St. Francis Drive. Santa Fe Trails operates a number of bus routes within the city. The public schools in Santa Fe are operated by Santa Fe Public Schools. The city has two private liberal arts colleges: St. John's College, U.S. and the College of Santa Fe and a community college, Santa Fe Community College. The city has two private college preparatory high schools, St. Michael's High School and Santa Fe Preparatory School. Acuna, Rodolfo, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, Pearson Education, 1999 Hammett, Kingsley, Santa Fe: A Walk Through Time, Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 2004 [ISBN 1-58685-102-0] Larson, Jonathan, "Santa Fe", RENT, 1996 Wilson, Chris, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997. Find more information on Santa Fe, New Mexico by searching Wikipedia's sister projects: Dictionary definitions from Wiktionary Textbooks from Wikibooks Quotations from Wikiquote Source texts from Wikisource Images and media from Commons News stories from Wikinews Arts and cultural orgaizations High Mayhem Experimental Arts Collaborative Santa Fe Museum Directory Georgia O'Keeffe Museum official site Santa Fe Opera official site Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival official site Lensic Performing Arts Center official site Santa Fe Pro Musica official website City of Santa Fe official site Santa Fe Convention & Visitors Bureau official tourism site Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce History and current affairs "Early Cities of the Americas": the history of Santa Fe Santa Living Wage Network Somos Un Pueblo Unido Newspapers and publications Santa Fe New Mexican daily newspaper on line Santa Fe Reporter weekly newspaper on line Maps and aerial photos Coordinates: 35.667231° -105.964575° Street map from Google Maps, or Yahoo! Maps, or Windows Live Local Satellite image from Google Maps, Windows Live Local, WikiMapia Topographic map from TopoZone Aerial image or topographic map from TerraServer-USA Santa Fe, New Mexico Agua Fria | La Cienega | Tesuque Santa Fe County State of New Mexico Regions Central New Mexico | Eastern New Mexico | Llano Estacado | Northern New Mexico | Sangre de Cristo Mountains | Southwestern New Mexico Cities Albuquerque | Las Cruces | Rio Rancho | Roswell | Santa Fe Towns Alamogordo | Artesia | Belen | Carlsbad | Clovis | Deming | Española | Farmington | Gallup | Grants | Hobbs | Las Vegas | Lovington | Los Alamos | Los Lunas | Portales | Raton | Ruidoso | Silver City | Socorro | Taos | Truth or Consequences | Tucumcari Counties Bernalillo | Catron | Chaves | Cibola | Colfax | Curry | De Baca | Doña Ana | Eddy | Grant | Guadalupe | Harding | Hidalgo | Lea | Lincoln | Los Alamos | Luna | McKinley | Mora | Otero | Quay | Rio Arriba | Roosevelt | San Juan | San Miguel | Sandoval | Santa Fe | Sierra | Socorro | Taos | Torrance | Union | Valencia Colleges Central New Mexico Community College | College of Santa Fe | College of the Southwest | Eastern New Mexico University | New Mexico Highlands University | New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology | New Mexico Military Institute | New Mexico State University | St. John's College, Santa Fe | University of New Mexico | Western New Mexico University

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Even talking about research on geoengineering stirs controversy. Creating an effective mechanism for such discussions will be an essential prerequisite to any scientific work. Nobody likes geoengineering. But whether your basic response is revulsion or resignation, the idea is getting increasing attention, and we need to develop a better way of talking about it. The most prominent scheme, known as solar radiation management (SRM), would aim to reduce global warming by spraying aerosols into the stratosphere or whitening clouds, thereby reflecting more sunlight back into space. Even strong advocates of geoengineering research acknowledge the many risks involved. The physical risks include possible shifts in global precipitation patterns and increased droughts and floods in the world’s most vulnerable regions. The political risks include the possibility that geoengineering technologies will provide a welcome excuse to avoid difficult measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And many see geoengineering as yet another expression of the same technocratic mindset that underlies modern industrialism and global warming itself. Moreover, the mere prospect of geoengineering is a profound indictment of decades of failed efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. No wonder that discussing it has long been taboo. And yet reasonable people disagree about what to do about it. With regard to geoengineering research, some say it shouldn’t be conducted at all. Others argue that research should be limited to computer modeling and laboratory studies. Some insist that small-scale deployment is necessary to develop technologies that could be used in a climate emergency, such as melting Arctic permafrost. With regard to policy, some advocate self-regulation by scientists, others favor oversight by national governments, and others call for international treaties. Reasonable people also disagree about the relevance of competing ethical frameworks. Should we embrace utilitarian cost/benefit analysis? Some analysts suggest that geoengineering would be far cheaper and more effective than reducing carbon-based energy production. Or should we emphasize basic moral principles? Some argue for cultivating a more humble relationship with nature or taking responsibility for past greenhouse gas emissions. Others say our first responsibility is to prevent catastrophic climate change by any means necessary. Or should we let “the people” decide, and if so, which people and through what mechanisms? This vexing jumble of technical uncertainties and political disagreements is not going away any time soon. As climate change impacts become more pronounced, public pressure to adopt quick and easy remedies will grow. Indeed, government agencies in the United States and abroad have already funded geoengineering research, including modeling projects, climate strategy projects, and some climate research with applicability to geoengineering. Privately funded research is in full swing, and entrepreneurs have filed patent claims on prospective geoengineering technologies. In the coming years, poor countries with rising sea levels and growing demand for carbon-based energy may deem geoengineering an attractive option. Rich countries with powerful fossil fuel lobbies may well agree. This situation raises a series of pressing questions for scientific governance. What kinds of geoengineering research should governments fund, if any? Who should oversee such research? What criteria should they apply? And how can we encourage international cooperation and understanding? Many commentators focus on the immediate need for substantive standards, but this is only half the challenge: Such standards must emerge from trusted institutions and a transparent process. We believe that in the United States a standing government advisory body would provide a critical focal point for policy formation around geoengineering research. Such a body has been proposed by a task force of the Bipartisan Policy Center and others. What such a body should look like and how it should be established remain open questions. This article proposes design characteristics, membership, and key functions of a geoengineering advisory body for promoting societal discussion and governance of geoengineering research. Nongovernmental initiatives and the UK SPICE experiment The oversight of geoengineering research has been addressed by several recent nongovernmental initiatives. In March 2010, the Climate Response Fund organized a meeting with over 150 experts from diverse fields in Asilomar, California, to develop norms and guidelines for geoengineering research. In the same month, the Royal Society, the Environmental Defense Fund, and The World Academy of Sciences founded the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative (SRMGI), which has organized deliberative meetings in the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Senegal, Ethiopia, China, and South Africa. Nongovernmental organizations have also produced thoughtful reports on the topic (see the recommended reading). These efforts have brought analytical clarity and public attention to key issues, but they have not been integrated into governmental policymaking. The most ambitious effort by a national government to confront the challenges of funding and governing geoengineering research has been in the United Kingdom, and the results are instructive. In 2010, three UK research councils funded the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) project, which included a small outdoor geoengineering study. The plan was to model a SRM deployment by spraying 150 liters of water from a balloon into the atmosphere through a 1-kilometer hose. Although the SPICE project sailed through university research oversight procedures, UK funding bodies required a “stage gate”: an extra review by an independent panel of scientists, social scientists, and a member of a civil society organization. As part of this process, the panel worked with SPICE scientists to bring the work into accordance with norms for “responsible innovation.” Social scientific research on public dialogue and engagement attempted to assess societal views on the experiment and geoengineering more generally. The experiment carried no significant physical risks, and yet it provoked a flood of criticism by civil society actors and significant debate in the United Kingdom and abroad. Political controversy over SPICE hinged on a number of issues. First, a coalition of international environmental groups and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) claimed that the experiment circumvented international policy discussions that were ongoing. Second, the choice to investigate a deployment gadget, and not the physics of underlying natural systems, led many to see this as the wrong experiment at the wrong time. Third, after the project was approved, it was discovered that an investigator and others involved in the project had submitted a patent application on the experimental mechanism. This raised concerns that profit motives might be driving the research and that commercial interests might control the development and use of a potentially world-changing technology. As debate sharpened, UK funders postponed the project on the recommendation of the stage-gate panel in September 2011. Eight months later, the principal investigator pulled the plug on the balloon experiment, while continuing other aspects of the project. SPICE has so far turned out to be less a physical experiment than an experiment in governance. The way the balloon experiment was born, debated, and died illuminated key questions concerning the control of research and the substantive standards that should apply to it. The stage gate had a messy, ad hoc character that scientists saw as a difficult moving target. On the other hand, it opened an important space for public dialogue, norm formation, and social learning. Many in the United Kingdom and elsewhere agree that a trusted oversight framework should be established before further outdoor geoengineering research. But how can this be achieved in a way that is acceptable to stakeholders and the public? New institutions are necessary for creating a platform for oversight and learning in an evolving field, and for providing practical advice as public funders, such as the National Science Foundation, contemplate geoengineering research programs. The development of a national advisory committee is a promising idea in this context, and there are useful models. The U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics, established by George W. Bush, is one instructive precedent. Many liberal bioethicists criticized the council for its conservative orientation, often neglecting its important procedural innovations. Whereas most government bioethics councils in the United States have focused on providing specific policy recommendations, the President’s Council explicitly sought to foster public deliberation. The council’s charter gave it a diverse set of tasks: “advise the President,” “undertake fundamental inquiry,” “explore specific ethical and policy questions,” and “provide a forum for a national discussion.” In its work on stem cells, for example, the council did not insist on consensus but laid out different positions on the moral status of embryos and how that could affect stem cell research and policy. President Bush’s stem cell policy didn’t satisfy many scientists, but his council promoted public discussion of moral disagreements that arguably laid the groundwork for compromise down the road. Necessary characteristics of a geoengineering advisory committee The overarching goal of an advisory body on geoengineering should be to recommend principles, policies, and practices that help make research more safe, ethical, and publicly legitimate. But the procedures of such a body will be just as important as the content of its recommendations, and both will receive intense public scrutiny. An advisory committee on geoengineering will be more effective and legitimate to the extent that it is independent, transparent, deliberative, publicly engaged, and broadly framed. We discuss each of these qualities in turn. • Independent. The authority of expert advice depends on the public perception that it has not been unduly influenced by professional, economic, or political interests, including the interests of researchers, public officials, or the sponsoring agency itself. An advisory body that is seen as merely echoing the views of its sponsors would have little public credibility. In particular, an institution charged with monitoring and assessing research on geoengineering must not become, or be seen as becoming, an advocate for the deployment of geoengineering technologies. This requires including people with no direct involvement in geoengineering research. Of course, expert advisory bodies cannot remain entirely insulated from the controversial issues they address, and it would be impractical to exclude everyone with a perceived interest in either promoting or opposing geoengineering research or deployment. Many of those most knowledgeable about geoengineering also have personal, professional, or political stakes in the issue. Committee independence should be understood, therefore, not with respect to individual committee members but rather as an institutional feature of the committee as a whole. An advisory body is independent when diverse perspectives and interests balance each other out, so that no particular view is able to dominate the others. This approach is echoed in the advisory committee guidelines of the National Academy of Sciences, which allow a fairly high degree of potential bias among committee members, as long as they are not entirely committed to a certain position. The best way to ensure independence is by appointing a balance of perspectives representing diverse disciplinary, experiential, geographic, and political orientations. • Transparent. One way to help establish the independence and legitimacy of advisory committees is to make their proceedings publicly accessible and transparent. As Jane Long and Dane Scott have argued in these pages, sunshine is a good disinfectant for lurking vested interests. Further, citizens are more likely to trust advisory processes that remain open to public scrutiny. To be sure, transparency alone is never enough: Providing public access to information on geoengineering research will do nothing unless those who are concerned and affected actually have the means to make use of such information. Additionally, in some cases, excessive transparency requirements may make it difficult for committee members to openly discuss controversial issues. Generally speaking, however, secrecy breeds distrust, and advisory committee procedures should be as transparent as possible. • Deliberative. The authority of expert advice depends not primarily on the credentials of advisory committee members but on the reasons and arguments with which they defend their views. Indeed, given that advisory committees have no decisionmaking power, whatever authority they have rests primarily on their persuasive capacity. Advisory bodies are thus deliberative in a double sense; ideally, the members deliberate among themselves, and they inform and promote deliberation among policymakers and the general public. Although advisory committee members may have strong views on matters of either fact or value, they should remain open to alternative views and seek consensus. Of course, when it comes to controversial issues such as geoengineering, characterized by both moral disagreement and scientific uncertainty, a reasonably diverse advisory body is unlikely to reach consensus on many issues. Moreover, excessive pressure to reach consensus may result in the suppression of minority views. It is important, therefore, that advisory committees balance the deliberative goal of consensus against the political need to represent diverse perspectives. This can be done in part by preparing reports that outline a range of policy options, accompanied by the best reasons for each option, rather than insisting on a single consensus recommendation. Similarly, an advisory committee on geoengineering should take care to clearly and publicly explain the technical and political uncertainties associated with different possible courses of action. The President’s Council on Bioethics pursued its deliberative mandate through a variety of means: It solicited extensive public input, included majority and minority perspectives in its reports, outlined a range of policy options on various issues, and produced publications intended for a broad audience. • Publicly engaged. Most advisory committees address themselves primarily to policymakers, but controversial public issues such as geoengineering require a different approach. Geoengineering, especially solar radiation management, involves a wide range of moral disagreements and scientific uncertainties, and it potentially affects people around the world. In addition, the relevant technical, political, and environmental conditions are in considerable flux. Given this context, efforts to restrict the participants in decisionmaking to a narrow group of elites are bound to fail. SPICE was a case in point. Potential avenues for public engagement include holding public hearings at diverse locations, publishing accessible reports and educational materials, and fostering contacts with mass media outlets. An advisory committee cannot be expected to generate societal consensus on a complex issue such as geoengineering, but it may be able to promote well-informed debate and compromise. • Broadly framed. Technologies for SRM raise numerous safety concerns, especially with regard to the potential impact on global precipitation patterns, which could have disastrous consequences for vulnerable populations. Such concerns also apply to research that could lead to deployment, as well as research occurring on a scale large enough to qualify as deployment. Although commentators often call for balancing the efficacy of geoengineering technologies against risks to public safety, it would be a mistake to limit public discussion to questions of safety and efficacy. Much of the public concern about geoengineering rests on more fundamental questions about global inequality and the human relationship to nature. If global warming is the result of humans treating nature as a mere resource to be manipulated at will, does geoengineering represent more of the same? Will it offer a way for rich countries to avoid their historical responsibility for the problem? An expert advisory body cannot provide definitive answers to such questions, but it can facilitate constructive public engagement with them. III. Who should sit on a national advisory committee? Given the many controversies involved, the membership of an advisory committee on geoengineering is likely to receive considerable public scrutiny. Membership balance will be crucial for both scientific and political reasons. Scientifically, addressing complex issues such as geoengineering depends on multiple disciplines. Researchers with different disciplinary training and commitments can address different aspects of the issue and identify each other’s blind spots. Politically, including diverse perspectives promises to enhance legitimacy, insofar as it reassures outsiders that no single perspective or interest has dominance. Of course, exactly which perspectives to include often becomes controversial. Indeed, interest groups have occasionally filed legal suit to be represented on federal advisory committees, which under the U.S. Federal Advisory Committee Act must be “fairly balanced” in terms of the points of view represented and the functions performed. A geoengineering advisory body should include members representing a few key categories: • Experts from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. As noted previously, a geoengineering advisory body should include members with diverse views and interests, including both proponents and critics of geoengineering research. And even if we set aside the interests of individual researchers, every scientific subfield has biases associated with its particular theories and methods. Therefore, illuminating all sides of a complex issue such as geoengineering requires balanced participation across a range of scientific subfields. Moreover, governance discussions draw on not only the technical possibilities and effects of research and possible deployment, but also social and moral questions regarding the purpose and effects of experiments and the motives and goals of researchers. What norms are most likely to produce cooperation and effective compliance within the United States and across the globe? Will geoengineering undermine public support for climate mitigation and adaptation efforts? Addressing such questions depends in part on the social sciences and humanities. • Experienced-based experts. Not all expertise involves disciplinary credentials. Experts associated with environmental groups, business interests, or community organizations, for example, may have valuable knowledge that rests primarily on practical experience. Such experts are essential for effectively addressing the complex political challenges associated with geoengineering research. • Representatives of potentially affected communities. Many government advisory committees include representatives of constituencies with a potential stake in the issue before the committee. Such representatives may be experts of one kind or another, but their expected contribution to committee deliberation rests in part on their familiarity with a potentially affected constituency. The potential impact of geoengineering on global precipitation patterns is likely to affect different populations in very different ways. A geoengineering advisory body should thus include people with knowledge and experience of diverse regions around the globe. Although the members of a U.S. government advisory committee are likely to reside in the United States, at least some members should have personal familiarity with other parts of the world, especially the poor countries most vulnerable to climate change. • Representatives of diverse political viewpoints. The standard view of expert advisory committees as insulated from politics makes it difficult to explicitly consider the political views of committee members. Most people would rather insist that committee members leave their politics at the door, and of course committee members should not be partisan advocates. Geoengineering is not currently a partisan issue, and it would be valuable for an advisory body to maintain a nonpartisan status. But with regard to controversial issues such as geoengineering, the political views of committee members are bound to receive public scrutiny. Therefore, rather than avoiding consideration of the committee members’ political views, it makes sense to seek a balance of political orientations. An advisory committee is likely to enjoy greater public legitimacy to the extent that it includes members with diverse political orientations. Specific member recommendations • Researchers currently involved in geoengineering projects • Other climate scientists • Ecologists and environmental scientists Social scientists and humanists • Environmental and regulatory law experts • International legal scholars • Political scientists, international relations scholars, and policy analysts • Science and technology studies scholars • Science policy experts • Philosophy and ethics scholars Academic research administrators with expertise in emerging technologies Business and military leaders • Environmental NGOs with climate change focus • Environmental justice and equity organizations Former government officials with experience in diplomacy and administration What should a national advisory committee do? Such a national advisory committee would not regulate directly but provide detailed advice to the Executive Branch and government agencies on an oversight framework before the conception and funding of geoengineering research. Guidelines could be implemented either as a voluntary code or through formal regulations. Granger Morgan, Robert Nordhaus, and Paul Gottlieb, –in the previous issue of this journal, –outlined a set of policies that should be in place before the development of an SRM research agenda. Here we build on their suggestions and also outline longer-term functions. • Scope of application. Part of the challenge of producing a clear and credible governance framework is determining the scope of application; that is, defining what kinds of experiments are even subject to review as a geoengineering experiment. The Royal Society defines geoengineering as “the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change.” But this does not sufficiently clarify the issue. Does this definition apply to the activities’ effects, intentions, or both? Also, does it include research on familiar measures intended to affect climate, such as painting roofs white or reforestation? • Experiment categories for triaging oversight. As others have frequently argued, a pressing governance priority should be to demarcate a first-tier category of research that poses little or no concern, perhaps including computer modeling, laboratory experiments, and/or very small outdoor experiments that pose no significant risks and require no government oversight. An advisory committee would be well positioned to make such recommendations and also to articulate a tier of clearly prohibited research, such as for outdoor SRM research of a given size. The process of setting these tiers of concern and developing a corresponding oversight approach should be informed by public outreach and engagement activities. • Values. There will be a temptation to divorce these line-drawing activities from the explicit definition of values, principles, and priorities that necessarily underwrite them. But one of the most important functions of the advisory committee should be to promote public deliberation and debate about values and goals. A good place to start is the Oxford Principles, a code of ethics for geoengineering governance developed in 2011 by a team of Oxford academics. Another is the list of principles developed by the Bipartisan Policy Center task force. Drawing on environmental ethics, bioethics, and existing international law, this discussion of values should encourage open-ended deliberation. • Intellectual property. As part of a framework for research oversight, the advisory committee should develop recommendations on intellectual property and research transparency. Intellectual property and financial interests can shape the conduct and direction of research. As the SPICE experience shows, it can also undermine public trust. Accordingly, as part of an oversight framework, an advisory committee should develop a range of possible options for the disclosure and management of financial and other conflicts of interest, as well as for how intellectual property rights arising from federally funded research might best be allocated. • Transparency. An advisory committee should recommend requirements for public notification and transparency regarding research proposals, funding, procedures, data, publications, or all of the above. Such requirements should specify when and how the public should be notified and whether they pertain to privately funded research. The committee should also include annual or biannual reports on the science and politics of geoengineering, assessing both publicly and privately funded research activities around the world. • International communication and coordination. A final crucial activity of a national advisory committee will be to engage with the international community of political and scientific actors, many of whom have already done serious thinking about governance. Because some geoengineering technologies such as SRM would involve large-scale transboundary effects, related research activities necessarily have international implications. International coordination is especially important in light of the possibility that a single country could undertake SRM unilaterally. Many nations have already begun, or are likely to begin, programs of research, raising challenges of trust and cooperation. A national advisory committee will be well positioned to facilitate connections, build norms, and promote cooperation across national borders. It should tap into existing international networks of nongovernment actors who have laid important groundwork, such as the SRMGI initiative mentioned previously. There are a number of plausible options for establishing a government advisory body on geoengineering. Whether and how the U.S. Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) applies to these options will be important for understanding the regulatory restraints on the composition and activities of such a body. Choices for such a body, therefore, range from more to less formally regulated. Creating a new committee to provide direct advice to federal officials on geoengineering research would bring the greatest degree of transparency, publicity, and formal legitimacy. It would also be subject to FACA, which applies to “any committee, board, commission, council, conference, panel, task force, or other similar group,” which is established by statute, the president, or one or more agencies, and which is “utilized…in the interest of obtaining advice or recommendations for the President or one or more agencies or officers of the Federal Government” [5 U.S.C. Appendix § 3(2)]. As noted previously, FACA requires that advisory committee membership be fairly balanced. It also requires that committees meet only when convened by a designated officer of the federal government, and it includes various transparency requirements to facilitate public participation in the advisory committee process. Alternatively, an existing FACA committee could be charged with providing advice on geoengineering research. Candidates for using existing committees include the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Subcommittee on Global Change Research. A less formal alternative would be to create a subcommittee or workgroup of an existing FACA committee. FACA committees can have advisory subcommittees and workgroups that are not subject to all the same formal procedural requirements as their parent committees. The activities of subcommittees are generally covered by the charter of the parent committee, and some agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control, require that they adhere to the notice and open meeting provisions of FACA. If a subcommittee makes recommendations directly to a federal officer or agency, or if its recommendations will be adopted by the parent committee without further deliberations, then the subcommittee’s meetings must be conducted in accordance with all openness requirements. “Workgroups” can meet to gather information, conduct research, draft recommendations, and analyze relevant matters. They are not empowered to make any decisions, and recommendations must be funneled back through, and decided on by, a parent advisory committee or subcommittee. The most flexible choice would be to seek independent input through established advice brokers such as the Bipartisan Policy Center or the National Academy of Sciences. Committees not actually managed or controlled by the federal government are not governed by FACA, which allows greater leeway in membership and procedures. We think such an option is sensible and workable so long as the design elements discussed above are given due attention. Geoengineering research is not normal science. The research is characterized by high stakes and scientific and political uncertainty. It raises many red flags, especially in light of the checkered history of efforts to apply technological fixes to complex problems. And it animates larger issues at the heart of climate change politics, engineering ethics, and the problem of democratic governance in a technically complex society. For these reasons, a technocratic approach to defining acceptable research will not fly, even more so if it is done in an ad hoc or opaque way. For one thing, the SPICE project indicates that this will not work. SPICE is an early indication of how moving forward is not just about funding science but governing it. And governing is not simply about finding the appropriate norms for conducting research, though this is critical, but also about developing trusted institutions. Given the need for public visibility and accountability, we think a governmental advisory body is an appropriate vehicle. In the short term, a national advisory committee, if designed according to the preceding considerations, could help create an effective and legitimate oversight framework. More important, over the long term, it could help establish a trusted architecture for making sound public decisions about this controversial issue. Mark B. Brown, “Fairly Balanced: The Politics of Representation on Government Advisory Committees,” Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2008): 547–560. Daniel Cressey, “Cancelled Project Spurs Debate over Geoengineering Patents,” Nature 485 (May 24, 2012): 429. Jane C. S. Long et al., Geoengineering: A National Strategic Plan for Research on the Potential Effectiveness, Feasibility, and Consequences of Climate Remediation Technologies, report of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Task Force on Climate Remediation Research (Washington, DC, 2011); available at . Jane C. S. Long and Dane Scott, “Vested Interests and Geoengineering Research,” Issues in Science and Technology (Spring 2013): 45–52. M. Granger Morgan, Robert R. Nordhaus, and Paul Gottlieb, “Needed: Research Guidelines for Solar Radiation Management,” Issues in Science and Technology (Spring 2013): 37–44. Edward A. Parson and David W. Keith, “End the Deadlock on Governance of Geoengineering Research,” Science 339 (15 March 2013):1278–1279. Solar Radiation Management Initiative (SRMGI), Solar Radiation Management: The Governance of Research (2011); available at http://www.srmgi.org/report/. David E. Winickoff (Winickoff@berkeley.edu) is associate professor of bioethics and society in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Mark B. Brown (email@example.com) is associate professor in the Department of Government at California State University, Sacramento.

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Bed Bug Registry Database Ohio, Usa Map We cannot vouch for the truthfulness of any report on this site. If you feel a location has been reported in error, or want to dispute a report, please contact us. Ohio i /ɵˈhaɪ.oʊ/ is a Midwestern state of the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S., it is the 7th-most populous with nearly 11.5 million residents. The capital of Ohio is Columbus. Ohio, whose name was derived from the Seneca word ohi:yo’, meaning "large creek," was formed from the Northwest Territory and was admitted to the Union as the 17th state (and the first under the Northwest Ordinance) on March 1, 1803. Ohio is known as the "Buckeye State" for its prevalence of Ohio Buckeye trees, and, as such, Ohioans are also known as "Buckeyes." The government of Ohio is composed of the executive branch, led by the Governor; the legislative branch, which comprises the Ohio General Assembly; and the judicial branch, which is led by the Supreme Court. Currently, Ohio occupies 18 seats in the United States House of Representatives. Ohio is known for its status as both a swing state and a bellwether in national elections. The population density of Ohio ranks ninth among all U.S. states. Nonetheless, Ohio currently has a negative net population migration, and an increasing rate of unemployment. Ohio's geographic location has proven to be an asset for economic growth and expansion. Because Ohio links the Northeast to the Midwest, much cargo and business traffic passes through its borders along its well-developed highways. Ohio has the nation's 10th largest highway network, and is within a one-day drive of 50% of North America's population and 70% of North America's manufacturing capacity. To the north, Lake Erie gives Ohio 312 miles (502 km) of coastline, which allows for numerous seaports. Ohio's southern border is defined by the Ohio River (with the border being at the 1793 low-water mark on the north side of the river), and much of the northern border is defined by Lake Erie. Ohio's neighbors are Pennsylvania to the east, Michigan to the northwest, Ontario Canada, to the north, Indiana to the west, Kentucky on the south, and West Virginia on the southeast. Ohio's borders were defined by metes and bounds in the Enabling Act of 1802 as follows: Note that Ohio is bounded by the Ohio River, but nearly all of the river itself belongs to Kentucky and West Virginia. In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court held that, based on the wording of the cessation of territory by Virginia (which, at that time included what is now Kentucky and West Virginia), the boundary between Ohio and Kentucky (and by implication, West Virginia) is the northern low-water mark of the river as it existed in 1792. Ohio has only that portion of the river between the river's 1792 low-water mark and the present high-water mark. The border with Michigan has also changed, as a result of the Toledo War, to angle slightly northeast to the north shore of the mouth of the Maumee River. Much of Ohio features glaciated plains, with an exceptionally flat area in the northwest being known as the Great Black Swamp. This glaciated region in the northwest and central state is bordered to the east and southeast first by a belt known as the glaciated Allegheny Plateau, and then by another belt known as the unglaciated Allegheny Plateau. Most of Ohio is of low relief, but the unglaciated Allegheny Plateau features rugged hills and forests. The rugged southeastern quadrant of Ohio, stretching in an outward bow-like arc along the Ohio River from the West Virginia Panhandle to the outskirts of Cincinnati, forms a distinct socio-economic unit. Geologically similar to parts of West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania, this area's coal mining legacy, dependence on small pockets of old manufacturing establishments, and distinctive regional dialect set this section off from the rest of the state and, unfortunately, create a limited opportunity to participate in the generally high economic standards of Ohio. In 1965 the United States Congress passed the Appalachian Regional Development Act, at attempt to "address the persistent poverty and growing economic despair of the Appalachian Region." This act defines 29 Ohio counties as part of Appalachia. While 1/3 of Ohio's land mass is part of the federally defined Appalachian region, only 12.8% of Ohioans live there (1.476 million people.) Significant rivers within the state include the Cuyahoga River, Great Miami River, Maumee River, Muskingum River, and Scioto River. The rivers in the northern part of the state drain into the northern Atlantic Ocean via Lake Erie and the St. Lawrence River, and the rivers in the southern part of the state drain into the Gulf of Mexico via the Ohio and then the Mississippi. The worst weather disaster in Ohio history occurred along the Great Miami River in 1913. Known as the Great Dayton Flood, the entire Miami River[disambiguation needed] watershed flooded, including the downtown business district of Dayton. As a result, the Miami Conservancy District was created as the first major flood plain engineering project in Ohio and the United States. Grand Lake St. Marys in the west central part of the state was constructed as a supply of water for canals in the canal-building era of 1820–1850. For many years this body of water, over 20 square miles (52 km²), was the largest artificial lake in the world. It should be noted that Ohio's canal-building projects were not the economic fiasco that similar efforts were in other states. Some cities, such as Dayton, owe their industrial emergence to location on canals, and as late as 1910 interior canals carried much of the bulk freight of the state. The climate of Ohio is a humid continental climate (Koppen climate classification Dfa) throughout most of the state except in the extreme southern counties of Ohio's Bluegrass region section which are located on the northern periphery of the humid subtropical climate and Upland South region of the United States. Summers are typically hot and humid throughout the State, while winters generally range from cool to cold. Precipitation in Ohio is moderate year-round. Severe weather is not uncommon in the state, although there are typically fewer tornadoes in Ohio than in states located in the so-called Tornado Alley. Severe lake effect snowstorms are also not uncommon on the southeast shore of Lake Erie, which is located in an area designated as the Snowbelt. Although predominantly not in a subtropical climate, some warmer-climate flora and fauna does reach well into Ohio. For instance, a number of trees with more southern ranges, such as the blackjack oak, Quercus marilandica, are found at their northernmost in Ohio just north of the Ohio River. Also evidencing this climatic transition from a subtropical to continental climate, several plants such as the Southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora), Albizia julibrissin (mimosa), Crape Myrtle, and even the occasional Needle Palm are hardy landscape materials regularly used as street, yard, and garden plantings in the Bluegrass region of Ohio; but these same plants will simply not thrive in much of the rest of the State. This interesting change may be observed while traveling through Ohio on Interstate 75 from Cincinnati to Toledo; the observant traveler of this diverse state may even catch a glimpse of Cincinnati's common wall lizard, one of the few examples of permanent "subtropical" fauna in Ohio. The highest recorded temperature was 113 °F (45 °C), near Gallipolis on July 21, 1934. The lowest recorded temperature was -39 °F (-39 °C), at Milligan on February 10, 1899. Although few have registered as noticeable to the average citizen, More than 30 earthquakes occurred in Ohio between 2002 and 2007, and more than 200 quakes with a magnitude of 2.0 or higher have occurred since 1776. The most substantial known earthquake in Ohio history was the Anna (Shelby County) earthquake, which occurred on March 9, 1937. It was centered in western Ohio, and had a magnitude of 5.4, and was of intensity VIII. Other significant earthquakes in Ohio include: one of magnitude 4.8 near Lima on September 19, 1884; one of magnitude 4.2 near Portsmouth on May 17, 1901; and one of 5.0 in LeRoy Township in Lake County on January 31, 1986, which continued to trigger 13 aftershocks of magnitude 0.5 to 2.4 for two months. The most recent earthquake in Ohio of any appreciable magnitude occurred on January 8, 2008, at 8:34:46 PM local time. It had a magnitude of 3.1, and its epicenter was under Lake Erie, northeast of Cleveland, approximately 9.7 km (6 mi) west of Mentor-on-the-Lake. The Ohio Seismic Network (OhioSeis), a group of seismograph stations at several colleges, universities, and other institutions, and coordinated by the Division of Geological Survey of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, maintains an extensive catalog of Ohio earthquakes from 1776 to the present day, as well as earthquakes located in other states whose effects were felt in Ohio. Columbus (home of The Ohio State University, Franklin University, Capital University, and Ohio Dominican University) is the capital of Ohio, near the geographic center of the state. Other Ohio cities functioning as centers of United States metropolitan areas include: Note: The Cincinnati metropolitan area extends into Kentucky and Indiana, and the Youngstown metropolitan area extends into Pennsylvania. Ohio cities that function as centers of United States micropolitan areas include: Archeological evidence suggests that the Ohio Valley was inhabited by nomadic people as early as 13,000 BC. These early nomads disappeared from Ohio by 1,000 BC, "but their material culture provided a base for those who followed them". Between 1,000 and 800 BC, the sedentary Adena culture emerged. As Ohio historian George W. Knepper notes, this sophisticated culture was "so named because evidences of their culture were excavated in 1902 on the grounds of Adena, Thomas Worthington's estate located near Chillicothe". The Adena were able to establish "semi-permanent" villages because they domesticated plants, which included squash, sunflowers, and perhaps corn. Cultivation of these in addition to hunting and gathering supported more settled, complex villages. The most spectacular remnant of the Adena culture is the Great Serpent Mound, located in Adams County, Ohio. Around 100 BC, the Adena were joined in Ohio Country by the Hopewell people, who were named for the farm owned by Captain M. C. Hopewell, where evidence of their unique culture was discovered. Like the Adena, the Hopewell people participated in a mound-building culture. Their complex, large and technologically sophisticated earthworks can be found in modern-day Marietta, Newark, and Circleville. The Hopewell, however, disappeared from the Ohio Valley in about 600 AD. Little is known about the people who replaced them. Researchers have identified two additional, distinct prehistoric cultures: the Fort Ancient people and the Whittlesey Focus people. Both cultures apparently disappeared in the 17th century, perhaps decimated by infectious diseases spread in epidemics from early European contact. The Native Americans had no immunity to common European diseases. Some scholars believe that the Fort Ancient people "were ancestors of the historic Shawnee people, or that, at the very least, the historic Shawnees absorbed remnants of these older peoples." American Indians in the Ohio Valley were greatly affected by the aggressive tactics of the Iroquois Confederation, based in central and western New York. After the so-called Beaver Wars in the mid-1600s, the Iroquois claimed much of the Ohio country as hunting and, more importantly, beaver-trapping ground. After the devastation of epidemics and war in the mid-1600s, which largely emptied the Ohio country of indigenous people by the mid-to-late seventeenth century, the land gradually became repopulated by the mostly Algonquian-speaking descendants of its ancient inhabitants, that is, descendants of the Adena, Hopewell, and Mississippian cultures. Many of these Ohio-country nations were multi-ethnic (sometimes multi-linguistic) societies born out of the earlier devastation brought about by disease, war, and subsequent social instability. They subsisted on agriculture (corn, sunflowers, beans, etc.) supplemented by seasonal hunts. By the 18th century, they were part of a larger global economy brought about by European entry into the fur trade. The indigenous nations to inhabit Ohio in the historical period included the Miamis (a large confederation); Wyandots (made up of refugees, especially from the fractured Huron confederacy); Delawares (pushed west from their historic homeland in New Jersey); Shawnees (also pushed west, although they may have been descended from the Fort Ancient people of Ohio); Ottawas (more commonly associated with the upper Great Lakes region); Mingos (like the Wyandot, a group recently formed of refugees from Iroquois); and Eries (gradually absorbed into the new, multi-ethnic "republics," namely the Wyandot). Ohio country was also the site of Indian massacres, such as the Yellow Creek Massacre, Gnadenhutten and Pontiac's Rebellion school massacre. During the 18th century, the French set up a system of trading posts to control the fur trade in the region. In 1754, France and Great Britain fought a war that was known in North America as the French and Indian War and in Europe as the Seven Years War. As a result of the Treaty of Paris, the French ceded control of Ohio and the remainder of the Old Northwest to Great Britain. Pontiac's Rebellion in the 1760s, however, posed a challenge to British military control. This came to an end with the colonists' victory in the American Revolution. In the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Britain ceded all claims to Ohio country to the United States. The United States created the Northwest Territory under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Slavery was not permitted in the new territory. Settlement began with the founding of Marietta by the Ohio Company of Associates, which had been formed by a group of American Revolutionary War veterans. Following the Ohio Company, the Miami Company (also referred to as the "Symmes Purchase") claimed the southwestern section, and the Connecticut Land Company surveyed and settled the Connecticut Western Reserve in present-day Northeast Ohio. The old Northwest Territory originally included areas previously known as Ohio Country and Illinois Country. As Ohio prepared for statehood, the Indiana Territory was created, reducing the Northwest Territory to approximately the size of present-day Ohio plus the eastern half of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan and the eastern tip of the Upper Peninsula. Under the Northwest Ordinance, areas of the territory could be defined and admitted as states once their population reached 60,000. Although Ohio's population numbered only 45,000 in December 1801, Congress determined that the population was growing rapidly and Ohio could begin the path to statehood. The assumption was that it would exceed 60,000 residents by the time it was admitted as a state. On February 19, 1803, President Jefferson signed an act of Congress that approved Ohio's boundaries and constitution. However, Congress had never passed a resolution formally admitting Ohio as the 17th state. The current custom of Congress declaring an official date of statehood did not begin until 1812, with Louisiana's admission as the 18th state. Although no formal resolution of admission was required, when the oversight was discovered in 1953, Ohio congressman George H. Bender introduced a bill in Congress to admit Ohio to the Union retroactive to March 1, 1803. At a special session at the old state capital in Chillicothe, the Ohio state legislature approved a new petition for statehood that was delivered to Washington, D.C. on horseback. On August 7, 1953 (the year of Ohio's 150th anniversary), President Eisenhower signed an act that officially declared March 1, 1803 the date of Ohio's admittance into the Union. Although many Native Americans had migrated west to evade American encroachment, others remained settled in the state, sometimes assimilating in part. In 1830 under President Jackson, the US government forced Indian Removal of most tribes to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. In 1835, Ohio fought with Michigan in the Toledo War, a mostly bloodless boundary war over the Toledo Strip. Congress intervened, making Michigan's admittance as a state conditional on ending the conflict. In exchange for giving up its claim to the Toledo Strip, Michigan was given the western two-thirds of the Upper Peninsula, in addition to the eastern third that was already considered part of the state. Ohio's central position and its population gave it an important place during the Civil War. The Ohio River was a vital artery for troop and supply movements, as were Ohio's railroads. Ohio contributed more soldiers per-capita than any other state in the Union. In 1862, the state's morale was badly shaken in the aftermath of the battle of Shiloh, a costly victory in which Ohio forces suffered 2,000 casualties. Later that year, when Confederate troops under the leadership of Stonewall Jackson threatened Washington, D.C., Ohio governor David Tod still could recruit 5,000 volunteers to provide three months of service. Ohio historian Andrew R. L. Cayton writes that almost 35,000 Ohioans died in the conflict, "and some thirty thousand carried battle scars with them for the rest of their lives." By the end of the Civil War, the Union's top three generals–Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip Sheridan–were all from Ohio. In 1912 a Constitutional Convention was held with Charles B. Galbreath as secretary. The result reflected the concerns of the Progressive Era. It introduced the initiative and the referendum. In addition, it allowed the General Assembly to put questions on the ballot for the people to ratify laws and constitutional amendments originating in the Legislature. Under the Jeffersonian principle that laws should be reviewed once a generation, the constitution provided for a recurring question to appear on Ohio's general election ballots every 20 years. The question asks whether a new convention is required. Although the question has appeared in 1932, 1952, 1972, and 1992, it has never been approved. Instead constitutional amendments have been proposed by petition to the legislature hundreds of times and adopted in a majority of cases. Eight U.S. presidents hailed from Ohio at the time of their elections, giving rise to its nickname "Mother of Presidents", a sobriquet it shares with Virginia (also termed "Modern Mother of Presidents," in contrast to Virginia's status as the origin of presidents earlier in American history). Seven presidents were born in Ohio, making it second to Virginia's eight. Virginia-born William Henry Harrison lived most of his life in Ohio and is also buried there. Harrison conducted his political career while living on the family compound, founded by his father-in-law, John Cleves Symmes, in North Bend, Ohio. The seven presidents born in Ohio were Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Benjamin Harrison (grandson of William Henry Harrison), William McKinley, William Howard Taft and Warren G. Harding. From just over 45,000 residents in 1800, Ohio's population grew at rates of over 10% per decade until the census of 1970, which recorded just over 10.65 million Ohioans. Growth then slowed for the next three decades, and approximately 11.35 million people resided in Ohio in 2000. As of July 1, 2008, the state's population was estimated at 11,485,910 by the United States Census Bureau. Ohio's population growth lags that of the entire United States, and Caucasians are found in a greater density than the United States average. As of 2000[update], Ohio's center of population is located in Morrow County, in the county seat of Mount Gilead. This is approximately 6,346 feet south and west of Ohio's population center in 1990. As of 2007[update], 6.5% of Ohio's population is under 5 years of age, compared to a national rate of 6.9%. Also, 13.4% of Ohio's population is over 65 years of age, compared to a United States rate of 12.6%. Females comprise 51.3% of Ohio's population, compared to a national rate of 50.8%. As of 2007, 3.6% of Ohio's total population is estimated to be foreign-born, compared to an estimated 12.5% of the United States population. Ohio's five largest ancestry groups, as of 2007, are: The state's racial makeup in 2006 was: According to a Pew Forum poll, as of 2008, 76% of Ohioans identified as Christian. Specifically, 26% of Ohio's population identified as Evangelical Protestant, 22% identified as Mainline Protestant, and 21% identified as Roman Catholic. In addition, 17% of the population is unaffiliated with any religious body. There are also small minorities of Jehovah's Witnesses (1%), Jews (1%), Muslims (1%), Hindus (<0.5%), Buddhists (<0.5%), Mormons (<0.5%), and practitioners of other faiths (1-1.5%). According to the same data, a majority of Ohioans, 55%, feel that religion is "very important," while 30% say that it is "somewhat important," and 15% responded that religion is "not too important/not important at all." Also, 36% of Ohioans indicate that they attend religious services at least once weekly, while 35% attend these services occasionally, and 27% seldom or never participate in these services. In 2009, Ohio was ranked #4 in the country for best business climate by Site Selection magazine, based on a business-activity database. The state has also won three consecutive Governor's Cup awards from the magazine, based on business growth and developments. As of 2007[update], Ohio's gross domestic product (GDP) was $466 billion. This ranks Ohio's economy as the seventh-largest of all fifty states and the District of Columbia. The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council ranked the state #10 for best business-friendly tax systems in their Business Tax Index 2009, including a top corporate tax and capital gains rate that were both ranked #6 at 1.9%. Ohio was ranked #11 by the council for best friendly-policy states according to their Small Business Survival Index 2009. The Directorship's Boardroom Guide ranked the state #13 overall for best business climate, including #7 for best ligitation climate. Forbes ranked the state #8 for best regulatory environment in 2009. Ohio has 5 of the top 115 colleges in the nation, according to U.S. News and World Report's 2010 rankings, and was ranked #8 by the same magazine in 2008 for best high schools. However, as of January 2010, Ohio's unemployment rate stood at 10.8. Ohio's per capita income stands at $34,874. Moody's is predicting a 1.3% increase in personal income in 2009 for Ohio, compared to the 2007 rate of 4.7%. As of 2007[update], Ohio's median household income is $46,645, and 13.1% of the population is below the poverty line, slightly above the national rate of 13%. Ohio's employment base is expected to grow 5% from 2006 to 2016, a net gain of 290,700 jobs. The manufacturing and financial activities sectors each compose 18.3% of Ohio's GDP, making them Ohio's largest industries by percentage of GDP. Ohio has the largest bioscience sector in the Midwest, and is a national leader in the "green" economy. Ohio is the largest producer in the country of plastics, rubber, fabricated metals, electrical equipment, and appliances. 5,212,000 Ohioans are currently employed by wage or salary. By employment, Ohio's largest sector is trade/transportation/utilities, which employs 1,010,000 Ohioans, or 19.4% of Ohio's workforce, while the health care and education sector employs 825,000 Ohioans (15.8%). Government employs 787,000 Ohioans (15.1%), manufacturing employs 669,000 Ohioans (12.9%), and professional and technical services employs 638,000 Ohioans (12.2%). Ohio's manufacturing sector is the third-largest of all fifty United States states in terms of gross domestic product. Fifty-nine of the United States' top 1,000 publicly traded companies (by revenue in 2008) are headquartered in Ohio, including Procter & Gamble, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, NCR Corporation, AK Steel, Timken, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Wendy's. Ohio is also one of 41 states with its own lottery, the Ohio Lottery. The Ohio Lottery has contributed over $15.5 billion to public education in its 34-year history. Ohio also is home to 228 miles (367 km) of the Historic National Road, now U.S. Route 40. Ohio has a highly developed network of roads and interstate highways. Major east-west through routes include the Ohio Turnpike (I-80/I-90) in the north, I-76 through Akron to Pennsylvania, I-70 through Columbus and Dayton, and the Appalachian Highway (Ohio 32) running from West Virginia to Cincinnati. Major north-south routes include I-75 in the west through Toledo, Dayton, and Cincinnati, I-71 through the middle of the state from Cleveland through Columbus and Cincinnati into Kentucky, and I-77 in the eastern part of the state from Cleveland through Akron, Canton, New Philadelphia and Marietta down into West Virginia. Interstate 75 between Cincinnati and Dayton is one of the heaviest traveled sections of interstate in Ohio. Ohio has 5 international airports, 4 commercial and 2 military. The 5 international includes Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, which is a major hub for Continental Airlines, Port Columbus International Airport, and Dayton International Airport, Ohio's third largest airport. Akron Fulton International Airport handles cargo and for private use. Rickenbacker International Airport is one of military which is also home to the 7th largest fed ex building in America. The other military airport is Wright Patterson Air Force Base which is one of the largest Air Force bases in the United States. Other major airports are located in Toledo and Akron. Cincinnati's Airport is in Kentucky therefore not listed above The state government of Ohio consists of the executive, judicial, and legislative branches. The executive branch is headed by the Governor of Ohio. The current governor is Ted Strickland,, a Democrat elected in 2006. A lieutenant governor succeeds the governor in the event of any removal from office, and performs any duties assigned by the governor. The current lieutenant governor is Lee Fisher, who also directs the Ohio Department of Development. The other elected constitutional offices in the executive branch are the secretary of state (Jennifer L. Brunner), auditor (Mary Taylor), treasurer (Kevin Boyce), and attorney general (Richard Cordray). There are three levels of the Ohio state judiciary. The lowest level is the court of common pleas: each county maintains its own constitutionally-mandated court of common pleas, which maintain jurisdiction over "all justiciable matters." The intermediate-level court system is the district court system. Twelve courts of appeals exist, each retaining jurisdiction over appeals from common pleas, municipal, and county courts in a set geographical area. A case heard in this system is decided by a three-judge panel, and each judge is elected. The highest-ranking court, the Ohio Supreme Court, is Ohio's "court of last resort." A seven-justice panel composes the court, which, by its own discretion, hears appeals from the courts of appeals, and retains original jurisdiction over limited matters. The Ohio General Assembly is a bicameral legislature consisting of the Senate and House of Representatives. The Senate is composed of 33 districts, each of which is represented by one senator. Each senator represents approximately 330,000 constituents. The House of Representatives is composed of 99 members. Ohio, nicknamed the "Mother of Presidents," has sent seven of its native sons (Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, and Warren G. Harding) to the White House. All seven were Republicans. Virginia native William Henry Harrison, a Whig, resided in Ohio. Historian R. Douglas Hurt asserts that not since Virginia 'had a state made such a mark on national political affairs.' The Economist notes that "This slice of the mid-west contains a bit of everything American — part north-eastern and part southern, part urban and part rural, part hardscrabble poverty and part booming suburb," As of 2008[update], Ohio's voter demographic leans towards the Democratic Party. An estimated 2,408,178 Ohioans are registered to vote as Democrats, while 1,471,465 Ohioans are registered to vote as Republicans. These are changes from 2004 of 72% and 32%, respectively, and Democrats have registered over 1,000,000 new Ohioans since 2004. Unaffiliated voters have an attrition of 15% since 2004, losing an estimated 718,000 of their kind. The total now rests at 4,057,518 Ohioans. In total, there are 7,937,161 Ohioans registered to vote. In the United States presidential election of 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama of Illinois won 51.50% of Ohio's popular vote, 4.59% more than his nearest rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona. However, Obama won only 22 of Ohio's 88 counties. Following the 2000 census, Ohio lost one congressional district in the United States House of Representatives, which leaves Ohio with 20 districts, and consequently, 20 representatives. The state is expected to lose two more seats following the 2010 Census. The 2008 elections, Democrats gained three seats in Ohio's delegation to the House of Representatives. This leaves eight Republican-controlled seats in the Ohio delegation. Ohio's U.S. Senators in the 111th Congress are Republican George Voinovich and Democrat Sherrod Brown. Marcia Kaptur (D-9) is the dean, or most senior member, of the Ohio delegation to the United States House of Representatives. Ohio's system of public education is outlined in Article VI of the state constitution, and in Title XXXIII of the Ohio Revised Code. Substantively, Ohio's system is similar to those found in other states. At the State level, the Ohio Department of Education, which is overseen by the Ohio State Board of Education, governs primary and secondary educational institutions. At the municipal level, there are approximately 700 school districts statewide. The Ohio Board of Regents coordinates and assists with Ohio's institutions of higher education which have recently been reorganized into the University System of Ohio under Governor Strickland. The system averages an annual enrollment of over 400,000 students, making it one of the five largest state university systems in the U.S. Ohio is home to some of the nation's highest-ranking public libraries. The 2008 study by Thomas J. Hennen Jr. ranked Ohio as number one in a state-by-state comparison. For 2008, 31 of Ohio's library systems were all ranked in the top ten for American cities of their population category. The Ohio Public Library Information Network (OPLIN) is an organization that provides Ohio residents with internet access to their 251 public libraries. OPLIN also provides Ohioans with free home access to high-quality, subscription research databases. Ohio also offers the OhioLINK program, allowing Ohio's libraries (particularly those from colleges and universities) access to materials in other libraries. The program is largely successful in allowing researchers access to books and other media that might not otherwise be available. Ohio is home to major professional sports teams in baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and soccer. The state's major professional sporting teams include: Cincinnati Reds (Major League Baseball), Cleveland Indians (Major League Baseball), Cincinnati Bengals (National Football League), Cleveland Browns (National Football League), Cleveland Cavaliers (National Basketball Association), Columbus Blue Jackets (National Hockey League), and the Columbus Crew (Major League Soccer). Baseball's first fully professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869, were organized in Ohio. On a smaller scale, Ohio hosts minor league baseball, arena football, indoor football, mid-level hockey, and lower division soccer. The minor league baseball teams include: Akron Aeros (affiliated with the Cleveland Indians), Chillicothe Paints (independent), Columbus Clippers (affiliated with the Cleveland Indians), Dayton Dragons (affiliated with the Cincinnati Reds), Lake County Captains (affiliated with the Cleveland Indians), Mahoning Valley Scrappers (affiliated with the Cleveland Indians), and Toledo Mud Hens (affiliated with the Detroit Tigers). Ohio's minor professional football teams include: Canton Legends (American Indoor Football Association), Cincinnati Marshals (National Indoor Football League), Cincinnati Sizzle (National Women's Football Association), Cleveland Fusion (National Women's Football Association), Cleveland Gladiators (Arena Football League), Columbus Comets (National Women's Football Association), Columbus Destroyers (Arena Football League), Mahoning Valley Thunder (af2), Marion Mayhem (Continental Indoor Football League), and Miami Valley Silverbacks (Continental Indoor Football League). Ohio's alternative professional hockey teams include: Cincinnati Cyclones (ECHL), Dayton Bombers (ECHL), Lake Erie Monsters (American Hockey League), Mahoning Valley Phantoms (North American Hockey League), Toledo Walleye (ECHL), and Youngstown Steelhounds (Central Hockey League). In lower division professional soccer, Ohio accommodates the Cincinnati Kings and Cleveland City Stars, both of the United Soccer League and the Dayton Dutch Lions of the USL Premier Development League. Ohio is also home to the Akron Racers, a minor professional softball club, of National Pro Fastpitch. Former major league teams: Ohio has eight NCAA Division I-A college football teams, divided among three different conferences. It has also experienced considerable success in the secondary and tertiary tiers of college football divisions. In Division I-A, representing the Big Ten, the Ohio State Buckeyes football team ranks 5th among all-time winningest programs, with seven national championships and seven Heisman Trophy winners. Their rivals are the Michigan Wolverines. They typically play each other in their last game of the regular season. The Buckeyes have won the last four matchups. Ohio has six teams represented in the MAC conference: the University of Akron, Bowling Green, Kent State, Miami University, Ohio University and the University of Toledo. The MAC Conference headquarters are based in Cleveland. The University of Cincinnati Bearcats represent Ohio in the Big East Conference. Division I-AA Youngstown State is a perennial power in the Missouri Valley Football Conference, having won four FBS National Championships under (now OSU Head Coach) Jim Tressel. Division III Mount Union College boasts a record-setting ten National Championships and also hold the record for 110 consecutive game winning streak from 1994 until 2005. They have won two of the last three D-III National Championship games. Ohio's state symbols:

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The start of World War II in Europe is generally taken to be 1 September 1939. On this day Germany invaded Poland. We could also argue that the war started in1937 when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, or 1936, the start of the Spanish Civil War. In Asia, the War started with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 or their invasion of China in 1937. It is an interesting irony that both the USA and the USSR took the attitude that the war started in 1941. The War ended on both continents in 1945, except in Spain where the anti-Fascist forces struggled on until 1960 even though they had been abandoned by the allies, and in Greece where UK/US allied with the fascists to defeat the Partisans. The world population in the 1940s was around 2.5 billion. If the 1:500 ratio applied then also, there would have been 5 million potential transsexuals, but only a small few were offered the opportunity. Even the discredited 1:10,000 ratio would give 250,0000. Of course the trans and intersex persons whom we know of add up to a much smaller number. Transgender surgery and cross-sex hormones were just becoming available at the end of the 1930s, but would remain unavailable to most of those who would want them for several decades more. Not surprisingly, for many in this generation, drag performance or occasional cross-dressing remained a final stage, rather than a stop on the journey to womanhood or manhood. The few who are known to history are listed below. A significantly shorter version of this was originally published in September 2009, the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Poland. Days and months have come and gone, and now it is the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII. This list also includes sexologists and doctors who worked with trans and intersex persons. Part 1: UK, France & Germany Part 2: other countries Part 3: USA Sexologist Havelock Ellis dies 8 July 1939. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis dies in London, 23 September 1939, the same day as Albert Moll. Anthony Storr, after only average marks at school, gains a wartime courtesy degree at Cambridge and qualifies as a doctor at Westminster Hospital. His asthma precludes his having to do military service. Charles Armstrong is a consultant physician at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle. He specialises in intersex patients. Harold Gillies, the surgeon who will later do two, and only two, pioneering sex changes, organises plastic surgery units and trains other doctors to help injured British soldiers. He has developed ‘flap surgery’ where a flap of skin is moved to another part of the body to help healing. Lennox Broster, operated on hundreds of intersex patients, especially those with adreno-genital syndrome, at Charing Cross Hospital, in the 1930s and 1940s. On 2 August 1943 he is featured in an article in The News of the World, which attracts the attention of many persons whom we would now call transsexuals. Norman Haire had been diagnosed as diabetic and nephritic. In 1940, shortly after war broke out, he returns to Australia. He pleads health reasons, but is accused of cowardice. He opens an expensive practice in Sydney, but also lectures for the Workers' Educational Association and the New Education Fellowship, and speaks on the wireless. He takes up acting, and is well reviewed for his performance in Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma. Using the name Wykeham Terris, he writes a series of articles for the weekly magazine, Woman, a pioneering series discussing sex-education, pregnancy and childbirth issues, gynaecological disorders and venereal disease. In 1944 he appears in a debate on the Australian Broadcasting Commission's 'Nation's Forum of the Air' arguing that population should be limited. Afterwards he is strongly denounced in the House of Representatives. John Randell, who later will be the major doctor in the gender clinic at Charing Cross Hospital, qualifies as a doctor at the Welsh National School of Medicine in 1941. From 1942-6 he is a Surgeon Lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR). Diethylstilbestrol (DES) is first synthesised at Oxford University in 1938 by Leon Golberg. It is not patented as it had been developed using public funds. Because it was not patented, it is cheap to synthesize from coal tar, and is produced by over 300 pharmaceutical companies. It acted in the body like a natural estrogen. It is hailed by leading researchers and gynecologists as a wonder drug with a host of potential uses. Golberg’s boss, Edward Charles Dodds will be knighted for this scientific achievement. Soon after, researchers in the United States begin giving the synthetic hormone to women with problem pregnancies. The massive experiment will eventually involve an estimated 10 million pregnant women worldwide. In the 1970s it will be established that DES can malform a fetus, including feminization of a male fetus, and studies will associate it with increased occurrence of transsexuality. Transgender surgery by 1945 Mark Weston, champion female shot-putter and javelin thrower, is post-op, legally male and married to a woman. Harry Weston, Mark's younger sibling, is operated on in September 1939. He becomes depressed and commits suicide in 1943. Michael Dillon, now living as male, working as a garage hand, is the first female-born person to take the new experimental testosterone. In 1942 he has a mastectomy and has his birth certificate changed. He will later have a series of experimental operations from Harold Gillies from 1945 to render him physically male. Bill Allen, after a mysterious stay in hospital in 1935, claimed that he is now a man, and is working as a bus conductor. In 1949 he will murder a neighbour and become the last trans person to be hanged in the UK. Robert Allen, works in the women’s auxiliary and as an assistant in the movies, successfully petitions the British government to amend his birth certificate in 1944. Future transgender surgery The future Ewan Forbes, graduates in medicine from the University of Aberdeen in 1944. The future Georgina Somerset trains in dentistry. In 1944 he joins the Royal Navy as a dentist, which he is able to do without a physical examination. The future Betty Cowell, marries in 1941 and becomes a father. He becomes a Spitfire pilot with the Royal Air Force, and flies several times over Germany. He is shot down over the Rhine. The future Angela Morley, is in demand as an alto-saxophonist as older musicians have been conscripted. He starts writing arrangements. He is principal saxophonist with the Oscar Rabin Band and the Geraldo Orchestra from 1944. The future Jan Morris is an intelligence officer with the 9th Queen's Royal Lancers in Palestine and Italy while still in his teens. The future Judy Cousins, is a Major in the British Indian Army. The future Susan Huxford, meets his wife in 1939. He joins the Royal Corps of Signals as soon as he is 18, and spends the war in India as a staff officer. Poppy Cooper, the future Le Carrousel star, is working as a bus conductor in Preston. No surgery - but already living full time by 1945 Wynsley Michael Swan, had married a woman in 1927, is in retirement. Jane Heap runs a Gurdieff group in London from 1935. Micky Jacob, novelist, works for the Ministry of Information during the war, and then serves with ENSA in North Africa and catches malaria. Michael Johnson, baker, is arrested in 1942 when it is noticed that the name on his ID card had been changed from Muriel to Michael. Lil, who lives as female, and Maisie, who dresses for the stage, are a gay couple who live in Hackney, London, and perform as a drag duo at various East End venues, particularly the Royal Oak, Hackney, during and after the war. After a conviction in 1943, Pamela Bird goes full-time and works as a bus conductress, a barmaid and as a cook. She has a good voice and sings as a crooner with more than one band where she attracts male admirers. Victor Barker, having been in the courts and the papers several times during the 1930s,works as a switchboard operator in a hospital outside London during the war. Will go full-time later Ron Storme tours in popular all-male drag reviews during the war. The future Roberta Kelly is assigned to GHQ in Whitehall to be a draughtsman, where he sits next to Winston Churchill during an air-raid. Stella Minge is in the merchant navy. Part time trans persons Arthur Corbett, transvestite and future husband of April Ashley, rises to the rank of captain, and is awarded the Croix de Guerre. The future April Ashley is at school in Liverpool. Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke, a deception officer in MI6, is arrested, en femme, in Madrid in October 1941. His superiors understood the wearing of disguise, but why was he wearing a brassiere? Frederick Ashton, ballet choreographer and pantomime dame, is artistic director for the Vic-Wells Ballet, later known as the Royal Ballet. Toupie Lowther, tennis and fencing champion, model for Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness, has retired to a village in Sussex where she usually dresses in a man's suit but was known as Miss Lowther. John Radcliffe Hall intended to retire to Florence, but war intervened. With physical problems, Hall retires with Una Troubridge to Devon Hall dies in London of stomach cancer in October 1943. Delbert Hill comes to England in 1942 as an entertainer in the US Air Force Special Services. He performs as "Dirty Gertie from Bizerti". He keeps performing during air-raids, and with this reputation is invited to a Royal Command Performance, 4 July 1944. In 1945, he is re-assigned as a latrine orderly, and runs away. He disguises as Donna Delbert, "America's Outstanding Lady Magician and the Only Lady Fire Eater in the World". He will be arrested as a deserter in 1949. The peak years of Bobbie Kimber, female ventriloquist, who will out himself as a man in 1952. Arthur Lucan as Old Mother Riley is named as second only to George Formby as Britain's top film star in 1941. Old Mother Riley makes 9 successful films during the war years. The future Danny La Rue, although Irish, is in the Royal Navy where he does drag shows. Douglas Byng, having done the first drag show on television in 1938, is billed during the war as ‘Bawdy but British’. Vesta Tilley, the great Music Hall male impersonator has been retired since 1920. Hetty King, also a Music Hall male impersonator keeps working into the 1960s. Terry Gardner, who had been doing drag since his teens in the 1930s, is a cook in the officers' mess sailing between England and Gibralter. He is also a performer both at Chatham Barracks and in concert parties in Gibraltar. In 1944 he is in the army drag show: We Were in the Forces. The future Yvonne Sinclair, who will organize the TV/TS Group in London, is still a child and has been cross-dressing since the age of three. The future Mrs Shufflewick is called up to the RAF and becomes part of the RAF Gang Show. He tours North Africa, Italy and Cyprus putting on shows for the forces, usually cast as the leading lady. Shelley Summers does drag while with HM forces in Burma until 1947 (for which he gets sergeant's stripes) Jimmy Slater, who did forces drag shows in WWI and was then in Splinters, the ex-soldiers' impersonation revue, is still doing the same as a solo act. Eric Gilbert Oakley, who will do a drag act as Linda in the 1960s, and write Man Into Woman, a faux-biography, and Sex Change and dress deviation, is in the army. Gluck finishes one long-term affair and moves to Sussex with another, and is still a male-dresser. Irving Berlins' This is the Army, plays the London Palladium for four nights in 1944. Men in Frocks, Forces Showboat, We were in the Forces evolve from army entertainment units into companies touring the UK. - Lennox Ross Broster, Clifford Allen, H.W.C. Vines, Jocelyn Patterson, Alan W. Greenwood, G.F. Marrian, G.C. Butler;. The Adrenal Cortex and Intersexuality. London: Champman & Hall. 1938. - Alexander Panagioti Cawadias. Hermaphroditos. The Human Intersex, London: Heinemann 1943. - Siegmund Heinrich Foulkes. "The idea of a change of sex in women", International Journal of Psychoanalysis n°24, pp.53-6: 4. 1943. - Michael Dillon, Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, London: Heinemann, 1946. FranceTransgender surgery by 1945 Violette Morris, masculine woman and poly-athlete had top surgery in 1929, and is assassinated by the Resistance in 1944. Willy de Bruijn, Belgian champion cyclist, came to Paris in 1937 for surgery. Henri Acces had surgery to become male in 1934 (Meyerowitz p31) Future transgender surgery The future Ovida Delect is part of the Communist Résistance to the German invasion until arrested. The future Marie Schwidenhammer, working with the Résistance in 1940, helps several hundred prisoners-of-war escape the camp at Luneville. Then from late 1940 to 1943 he organises the production of a scouring powder, which employed a few dozen young people who would otherwise have been conscripted for compulsory labour in Germany. In 1943 he is arrested and sentenced to death by the Gestapo. Michel-Marie Poulain, is a non-commissioned officer in the Army. No surgery - but already living full time by 1945 Mathilde de Morny, Monsieur de Marquis, la Marquise de Belboeuf, commits suicide at age 82 in Paris, 1944. Madeleine Pelletier, doctor and transvestite, arrested on abortion charge, dies neglected in prison, 1939. Claude Cahun spends the war in Jersey, involved with the Resistance and as a propagandist. In 1944 arrested and sentenced to death. Health never recovers from time in jail. Will die in 1954. Anton Prinner, Hungarian artist in Paris, hides and is not noticed by the occupying Germans. Part-time trans persons Guilda works with the Ballets de Monte Carlo during the war. Afterwards he will become an international drag artist and move to Montréal. Luis Fernando, Spanish Infante, had squandered the wealth of his wife, Marie Constance Charlotte Say. She dies in ruin in a small apartment in German-occupied Paris in 1943. Luís Fernando then enters a nursing home, also in Paris, where he dies two years later, aged 56. Felix Felixovich Yusupov, lapsed transvestite and killer of Rasputin, is living in Paris. Clementine Delait, bearded café owner, sometimes male dresser, dies in 1939. Show biz and literature Marcel Oudjman, future owner of Madame Arthur and Le Carrousel, has arrived in Paris from Algeria, and is working as a bartender. Club Le Monocle closed. Frede Baule's Chez Frede manages to stay open during the German occupation. Jean Genet, convicted thief, in prison in 1942 writes Notre Dame des Fleurs (Our Lady of the Flowers) about a transgender prostitute, and after release into German-occupied Paris, manages to get it published. - Agnès Masson, Le travestissement. Essai de psycho-pathologie sexuelle. Éditions Hippocrate, 1935. - J. Fortineau, R. Vercier, C. Durand et L. Vidart, "Idées de transformation sexuelle et travestissement chez deux délirants chroniques", Annales médico-psychologiques 97, n°1, pp.51-3. 1939. - Etienne Wolff, Les changements de sexe, Paris: Gallimard, 1946. Sexologist Albert Moll dies 23 September 1939, the same day as Sigmund Freud. Endocrinologist Eugen Steinach who had experimented with transplanting sex glands, and pioneered vasectomies, and is Director of the Biological Institute of the Viennese Academy of Sciences, dies in 1944. Kurt Warnekros, gynaecologist and obstetrician, director of the women’s clinic in Dresden, who had transplanted ovaries and a uterus into pioneer transsexual, Lili Elvenes (Elbe) in 1930, keeps treating Jewish patients until 1944, but also does forced sterilizations. His clinic is destroyed in the February 1945 air raids and firestorm on Dresden. Testosterone was first isolated from a bull in 1935. Karoly G. David, Ernst Laqueur, and colleagues isolated crystalline testosterone from testicles and published the results. Within a few months, groups led by Johann Butenandt and G. Hanisch (funded by Schering Corp. in Berlin), and Leopold Ruzicka and A. Wettstein of Ciba, independently of each other, developed synthetic methods of preparing testosterone. The production of synthetic testosterone from the success of Butenandt and Ruzicka earns them the 1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Concentration Camps & POW Camps In February 1942 an SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer in full uniform, with silver ribbons and decorations, together with an elegant young lady are arrested in a box at the Hamburg opera, following a denunciation, in that the lady was a young man of 19, a soldier in the Waffen-SS and home on leave in Hamburg. His father owns a major nightclub on the Reeperbahn. They are taken directly to Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria, and locked in separate individual cells. They remain in solitary confinement until the camp is liberated in April 1945. The future Ovida Delect is in Neuengamme Concentration Camp. The future Marie Schwidenhammer,is interned at Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp (in Alsace which had been incorporated into the Reich). There he is subjected to experimental hormonal treatment. The future Betty Cowell, is in Stalag Luft 1, near Lubeck, from where he is liberated by the Soviet army in 1945. In Auschwitz Concentration Camp, a 13-year boy is involuntarily surgically changed into a girl. After the war, he will be changed back as much as doctors are able to. In Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Danish endocrinologist Carl Værnet does involuntary Steinach operations attempting to turn gay men straight, but without success. At least two contract infections from the insanitary conditions and die. Later Allied authorities turn a blind eye as Værnet escapes to Argentina. Erwin Gohrbandt, of the Charité Universitätsmedizin in Berlin who did genital surgery on Dörchen Richter, Toni Ebel and Lili Elvened (Elbe), has become a general in the Luftwaffe. He also participates in hypothermia experiments at Dachau Concentration Camp and writes up the results in a major medical journal. In February 1945, he is awarded the Ritterkreuz des Kriegsverdienstkeuzes on Hitler's personal authority. Many gay and transgender "men" in the Nazi concentration camps are not released when the camps are liberated in 1945. They are transferred to regular prisons to complete their sentences. Transgender surgery by 1945 All idea of surgery had stopped in 1933 with the destruction of Hirschfeld's Institute. Those who were post-op did not stay in Germany. Dörchen Richter and Lili Elvenes (Elbe) were dead. Carla van Crist had returned to the US, Toni Ebel had fled to Czechoslovakia, and Karl Baer was allowed to emigrate to Palestine. However it was later reported that Hinrich B, of Hannover had all her male parts removed in 1943 with the permission of the Nazis (Meyerowitz p48, p298n110). Future transgender surgery The future Jeanette Schmid is drafted into the Wehrmacht at age 17. He is in Italy until invalided home with typhoid fever. Like many Sudeten Germans, he flees from Czechoslovakia in 1945, in his case to Munich, where he starts a career as a female-impersonator. The future Kerstin Thieme is conscripted into the German army and becomes a prisoner of war in Italy. No surgery - but already living full time by 1945 This was dangerous as transvestity was taken as proof of homosexuality. Gerda von Zobeltitz somehow survived but we don't know how. We don't know what happened to Josefine Meißauer nor any of the others who obtained a police permit to be their real gender. Florence Winter (male name unknown) who had been living as a man in Berlin, returned to Chicago (Meyerowitz p29) Will go full-time later The future Charlotte von Mahlsdorf is the son of the local Nazi leader, and in 1942 has to join the Hitler Youth. When his parents split in 1944, the father pulls a gun on his son, who then kills him with a rolling pin while he sleeps. After several weeks in a psychiatric institution, he is sentenced to four years in a juvenile prison, but is released with the fall of the Nazi regime. Dora, now Heinrich Ratjen, high-jumper in the 1936 Olympics, is re-registered as a man, and returns to Hamburg. - H.F.. Voss. Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Transvestitismus. MD thesis, University of Hamburg. 1938. - Hans Bürger-Prinz & H. Weigel, "Über den Transvestismus bei Männern", Monatschrift für Kriminalbiologie, n°31, pp.125-43. 1940. - H.H. Huelke. "Ein Transvestit (Der Fall Hinrich B.)". Kriminalistik, 3, 1949.

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Neutron-induced reactions play an important role in a wide range of applications including nuclear power reactors, accelerator-driven systems (ADS), fusion technology, medical diagnostics and therapy, production of radio-elements, dosimetry concerning dose effects and radiation damage and upsets in electronic devices, as well as basic science research. The data used in transport codes are embodied in evaluated data libraries, which are based on measurements and reaction models. As a matter of fact, the quality of the evaluated data depends on the accuracy of the measured data. Today there is still a large demand of data in neutron-induced reactions above, say, 14 MeV. In many cases (n,fission), (n,n'γ), (n,xn) and (n,Light Charged Particles) reaction cross sections are unknown or known with a very limited accuracy. The neutron energy range between 1 and 40 MeV is particularly well suited for the applications previously mentioned as well as for fundamental research. NFS (Neutrons For Science) will be a very powerful tool dedicated to theses studies. NFS will deliver a well-collimated neutron beam in a long experimental area in order to perform measurements at neutron energies up to 40 MeV. In addition, neutron, proton and deuteron induced reaction cross-sections could be measured by means of activation technique. - Description of the facility The NFS facility is composed of two main areas, a converter cave and a time-of-flight (TOF) area. The converter cave contains the ion beam line, the converter to produce neutrons and the irradiation station for the study of ion-induced reactions. The TOF area is an experimental area of 6 m width and 30 m long allowing high-resolution energy measurements. The two rooms are separated by a 3 m thick concrete wall pierced of a hole to define the neutron beam in the TOF hall. This part is called the collimator, its design defines the neutron beam spatial extension and the neutron background in the TOF hall. A neutron beam dump is installed in the back of the TOF area in order to minimize the background induced by the neutron beam. The two rooms of NFS as well as the accelerator are undergrounded at a depth of -9.5 m. The facility is equipped of a pneumatic system, to transfer samples from the converter room, where they are irradiated, to the OF area to be analyzed. In addition to neutrons induced reactions, ion induced reaction will also be studied at NFS. An irradiation station takes place in the converter room allowing the irradiation of samples by light ions delivered by the LINAG. The samples are then transferred to the TOF thank the pneumatic transfer system. Figure 1: Scheme of the converter and TOF areas. The beam line is in the converter room. It drives the beam from the LHE (ligne haute énergie) to the converter or to the irradiation station. It is composed of a magnet, a converter chamber, a diagnostic chamber, a profile monitor, an ion beam dump and a faraday cup. Two production modes will be used with the pulsed proton and deuteron beams delivered by the LINAG. First, the deuteron break-up reaction on a thick converter made of carbon or beryllium generates neutrons with a continuous energy distribution. At 0°, the spectrum extends up to 40 MeV with an average value of approximately 14 MeV as shown in Fig. 2. The beam is stopped in the converter and the full power is deposited in. The rotating converter has been design in order to sustain the maximum authorized power of 2000W. Second, the 7Li(p,n)7Be reaction on a thin lithium converter (1 to 3 mm thick) produces nearly mono-energetic neutrons as shown; the neutron spectrum at 0° consists of a mono-energetic peak due to the 7Li(p,n) process and a continuum which is attributed to the break-up process. A thin converter has been designed allowing the use of lithium or beryllium converter. After crossing the lithium converter, the protons are swept out of the neutron beam by a bending magnet placed downstream of the target. Since the primary beam frequency of the LINAG (88 MHz) is not adapted to the measurements by time-of-flight technique, a fast beam chopper will be used to reduce the frequency by a factor 100 to 10000. The maximum intensity will be then limited to 50 µA. Figure 2: Neutron yield at 0° for reaction induced by deuteron on thick target Figure 3: Neutron yield at 0° produced by Li(p,n) reaction at 30 MeV on thin converter The rotating converter The converter design must take into account the maximum power deposition and the handling procedure after activation. A rotating converter is required to sustain the maximum power of 2 kW (40 MeV x 50 µA). It will be composed of a disk of 170 mm in diameter and 8 mm thick rotating at a speed of 2000 tr/min. Thermal calculations show that the maximum temperature will not exceed 700°C well below the melting point. After irradiation the converter being highly activated, especially due to the production of 7Be, it will be moved automatically into a lead shielding to be manipulated and replaced. The thin converter The production of mono-energetic neutrons requires the use of a thin (1 to 2 mm) converter of lithium or of beryllium. The low melting point of lithium (180°C) makes the cooling by radiation inefficient, thus a rotating wheel is not suitable. A fixed converter cooled by water has been studied by GANIL’s design office. Thermal calculations show that it will sustain a power of 30 µA deposited by a proton beam crossing a 2 mm thick lithium converter. The set-up is composed of 2 converters screwed on a copper plate cooled by water (see Figure 4). The converters can be remotely removed out of the beam line if the rotating converter will be used instead. Figure 4: 3D drawings (up) and photo (down) of the thin converter set-up The collimator is placed in the thick concrete wall separating the converter and the TOF rooms. The role of the collimation system is to define a well-collimated neutron beam and, therefore, its design is of special importance to the beam characteristics. The collimator will be composed of several materials arranged in ring fashion . The inner part, a cylinder of iron pierced in its centre by a conical channel to define the beam, will scatter away high-energy neutrons. The outer part (in concrete and borated polyethylene) will then absorb them. Its design was studied with simulations realized with the MCNPX code. Several sets of inner cylinders with different inside channel are envisaged in order to adjust the neutron beam size to the physic request. The neutron beam-dump The neutron beam is “stopped” at the end of the TOF room in a beam dump whose design has been optimized in order to reduce the neutron backscattering to the TOF room and the gamma production. The beam dump is a hole of 4 m long and 1x1m2 of section centred on the beam axis in the concrete wall. A borated polyethylene sheet (15 cm thick) in the bottom of the hole reduces the backscattering of neutrons. A tube at the entrance of the hole (composed of borated polyethylene in the inner part and concrete in the outer part) with a diameter greater than the beam spot allows catching the neutrons and the photons. The sample transfer system Cross-section measurements by activation technique will also be possible at NFS. The samples will be irradiated in the convertor room and their activity measured in the TOF area with a gamma spectroscopy set-up. A pneumatic system will ensure the movement of the samples between the two rooms, the time transfer will be of approximately 1 s. For neutron-induced reactions the sample will be placed in front of the converter. The very intense available flux will permit to measure small cross-sections or to use small amount of material. For ion-induced reactions (mainly protons and deuterons), the sample will be placed under vacuum in the irradiation box placed in the beam line upstream of the converter. The irradiation station This station allows to put sample under vacuum in order to be irradiated by proton, deuteron or ions accelerated by the LINAG. It is connected to the pneumatic transfer system. The sample is fixed on a shuttle, is goes under vacuum thanks an air-lock, then the sample is put on the beam line to be irradiated. After irradiation, the sample is moved out by the air-lock to the transfer system to be sent to the TOF area. The activity measured as well as the beam intensity will allow deducing the cross-section of dedicated reactions. The duration of the activation and the intensity of the beam depend on the cross-section to be measured. The neutron flux is estimated considering the maximum ion intensity and the neutrons yield and compared to existing neutron TOF facilities around the world namely n_TOF at CERN, WNR at Los Alamos (where neutrons are produced in a spallation reaction) and GELINA in Geel (where neutrons are produced by photo-reactions). The length of the TOF area allows either high-intensity flux (5 m) or high-resolution (20 m) measurements. In order to avoid the overlap of neutrons from successive bursts, the beam repetition rate is adapted to the flight path: 1 MHz and 250 kHz for 5 and 20 m respectively. The maximum deuteron beam intensity is then 4 times lower at 20 m than at 5 m. It can be seen in Figure 5 that NFS is very competitive in terms of average flux in comparison with n_TOF, GELINA or WNR between 1 and 35 MeV. This intense average flux is due to the high beam-repetition rate, the instantaneous flux is lower than the other facilities. Moreover, NFS presents some advantages due to the neutron production mechanism itself. In spallation sources the high energy neutrons (up to hundreds MeV), may imply challenges for both collimation and background. Secondly, the gamma-flash, which is known to be very penalizing, especially because it induces dead time, will probably be strongly reduced at NFS. Figure 5: Comparison of the neutron flux of NFS with three other TOF facilities, WNR, n-tof and GELINA. The fluxes for NFS are shown at 5m and 20 m. The neutron flux in the converter room very close to the converter is presented in Figure 6. By using the thick beryllium converter a flux greater than 5.1011 n/cm2/s can be reached. This very high flux can be used to measure reaction cross-sections by activation technique with small target. Figure 6: Neutron flux at 5 cm in front of the converter The time resolution of the ion-beam and the length of the experimental area allow the energy measurement of the incident neutrons by TOF technique with a rather good resolution. Actually the burst time spread at the converter point is estimated to be about 1 ns. The use of fast detectors (photomultipliers or silicon detectors for example with Δt ≈ 1 ns) allows to measure the energy of neutrons with a resolution better than 1% (see Figure 7). With slow detectors, like High Purity Germanium detector (Δt ≈ 8 ns), the energy resolution at 40 MeV will not be worse than 5%. Figure 7: Energy resolution obtained with fast and slow detectors for flight path of 5 and 30 m Beam size and background The neutron beam characteristics and the background in the TOF area are key parameters of the NFS facility. Actually, the neutron beam must be very well collimated to interact only with the target and not hit the detection set-up surrounding the target. The background originates mainly from the collimator, the neutron beam dump and the building design. Neutron transport calculations have been realized to optimize the design of these components. All the simulations were performed with the MCNPX code version 2.5. The energy and angular distribution of the neutrons produced in the 40 MeV d + Be have been calculated using the model described in reference . Figure 8: Neutron beam radius at 1 m from the exit of the collimator for several collimator designs Several designs of the collimator have been studied in order to determine the best compromise between efficiency and cost. The Figure 8 shows the result of MCNPX simulations with several configurations of collimator. It can be seen that at 1 m of the exit of the collimator (approximately 5 m from the converter point) the neutron beam has a radius of 2 cm and the ratio signal over noise is around 104. The effect of the beam-dump design optimization is illustrated in Figure 9. In the simulations the neutrons are emitted from an extended source (a disk whose diameter is equal to the diameter of the beam at the center of the beam dump). The number of neutrons backscattered to the TOF area is strongly reduced in the optimized design. The photons created by neutron interaction (n,n’),(n,g)… have also been treated and the result is presented in Figure 10. The gamma produced in converter have not been taken into account. Figure 9: Neutron flux simulations (arbitrary units) in the beam dump zone, with the raw design (left) and the optimized design (right) Figure 10: Photon flux simulations (arbitrary units) in the beam dump zone, with the raw design (left) and the optimized design (right) The safety study was of prime importance for the design of the biological protections, the maintenance operations and the evaluation of the waste production for future dismantling operations. The Figure 11 shows a bidimensionnal representation of the neutron dose equivalent in the NFS facility when the most intense neutron production mode is used (40 MeV d + Be at 50 µA). In this calculation the inner part of the collimator has been removed in order to maximize the neutron dose in the TOF area. It can be observed that the neutron doses in the rooms adjoining the TOF and converter areas are compatible with the safety rules and validating the biological protections. The activation of the elements of the process as well as the concrete has been estimated by using the FISPACT code . The results were used to estimate the waste production and the residual gamma dose. The highest activated element in the NFS facility will be the beryllium converter and a dedicated lead shielding has been designed to store the converter after use. For most of the elements of the beam line aluminum is preferred to steal because the produced radioactive species have shorter half-lives. Figure 11: Prompt neutron dose equivalent in µSv/h in the NFS facility. Neutrons are produced by reaction 40 MeV d + Be at an intensity of 50 µA. Neutrons-induced reactions in the NFS energy-range play an important role in numerous applications like in reactors of the new generation, in nuclear medicine, for describing the so-called Single Event Upset (SEU) in electronics devices, for advancing the fusion technology or the development of nuclear model codes in general. Only very limited data exist for neutron induced reactions above 14 MeV and for many cases both fission and (n,xn) reaction cross sections are unknown. The NFS energy range corresponds also to the opening of new reaction channels like (n,p), (n,a), allowing the pre-equilibrium model studies, i.e. the transition between low (evaporation) and high energy models (intra-nuclear cascade). Among these topics, NFS is particularly well suited for the study of the neutron induced fission, the (n,xn) and (n,lcp) reactions and the proton and deuteron induced reactions. Letters Of Intent (LOI) for “Day-one experiments in phase 1” were submitted to the Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) of SPIRAL-2. It corresponds to experiments which could be performed just after the commissioning of NFS with a reduced intensity (≈10 µA). The probable development of innovative fast nuclear reactors being able to transmute long-lived nuclear wastes requires new high-quality data for a large set of fissioning systems (from thorium to curium) for an energy range going from thermal up to the fast (~2 MeV) region. Complementary to reaction cross section data, the mass and charge distributions are needed with a high precision for burn-up calculations of the reactor fuel, because they are directly connected to the control and the safety of the reactor. The TOF area is designed to receive actinides with an activity up to 1 GBq and 10 GBq for thin and thick samples respectively. The white intense pulsed neutron beam of NFS allows performing simultaneous measurements at several incoming neutron energies. The cross-section variations around fission threshold or at second chance fission energy range can be accurately described. The fission process can also be scanned over a wide range of excitation energy. In addition the collimated neutron beam and the low neutron background will allow using 4π neutron or gamma detectors. The measurement of fission cross-sections and the corresponding fragment angular distributions with different experimental techniques is the subject of 2 Letters of Intent. In both cases the two fission fragments are detected in coincidence and their trajectory measured. In addition the simultaneous measurement of elastic np scattering events will allow for good determination of the fission cross section. The high neutron flux allows performing measurement of fission fragment characteristics (mass, charge, kinetic energy) in the energy range between 500 keV and 20 MeV. In contrary to thermal neutron energies, only few data are available in the fast domain. For fundamental studies, it is important to perform measurements for even-even, even-odd and odd-odd systems. Fission modes, even-odd effects, deformation energy, etc, can be studied with such measurements. Thanks to the results of these measurements, models will be improved and more precise predictions will be done for nuclei difficult to access experimentally. The neutron multiplicity distributions as well as the energy released by gamma emission can also be measured at NFS. In fast reactors, a new kind of reactions appears compared to the situation in thermal reactors. Among them, the (n,xn) reactions (with x>1) are then possible despite their high threshold and play a non-negligible role, since above 10 MeV they have cross sections comparable to fission. They modify the neutron spectrum by converting fast neutrons (En>5 MeV) into slow neutrons (En<1 MeV) and especially they act upon the criticality of the reactor core. A good knowledge of the cross sections is necessary for assessing the neutron balance or to predict radioactive waste inventories. These reactions play also an important role in the Accelerator Driven Systems where neutrons in the energy range up to few 10th of MeV represent a significant part of the total neutron flux. Three methods allowing (n,xn) cross sections measurements will be used at NFS; namely the direct detection of neutrons, prompt gamma-ray spectroscopy or the activation technique. In addition to cross-section measurements, the study of pre-equilibrium processes in (n,xn) reactions is of first importance to improve or constrain existing nuclear reaction models. The energy range of NFS is particularly well suited because the pre-equilibrium importance increases in the 20-50 MeV range. Light charged particle production In neutron therapy a large part of the dose is deposited by light-ion production, a precise knowledge of the double-differential cross-section is absolutely required to accurately evaluate the dose. These data are also essential for the estimation of radiation effects in electronics like Single Events Upset in chips and for various nuclei like oxygen and silicon. The energy region between 15 and 30 MeV is important for the following reason; while the neutron flux in this energy range decreases with roughly 1/E (e.g. secondary cosmic ray neutrons), the light-ion production channel opens up in the 10-20 MeV range. Thus, folding the neutron flux in an application with the cross section for light-ion production generally results in a peak in the 15 to 30 MeV range. Double-differential cross-sections measurement for neutron-induced light-ion production (p, d and alpha particles) will be performed at NFS. Proton and deuteron induced reaction Proton and deuteron induced activation reactions are of great interest for the assessment of induced radioactivity in accelerator components, targets and beam stoppers and are important for isotope production for medical purposes. The cross sections are needed in the energy range from the threshold of the activation reactions (2 - 10 MeV) up to 40 MeV for both incident ions: deuterons and protons. Present status of the measured and evaluated data needs urgent and strong improvement. The measurement of excitation functions can be performed at NFS in an energy domain (20-40 MeV) where data are not existing or known with poor accuracy. These cross-sections will be measured by activation technique. Presentations on LoIs from the NFS Workshop of March 2014 are available here M. J. Saltmarsh et al., NIMA145 (1977) p81-90 J. P. Meulders et al., Phys. Med. Biol. (1975)vol 20 n°2, p235 C. J. Batty et al., NIM 68 (1969) p273-276 A. Takibayev, CEA/Saclay, Internal Report Irfu 11-75 (2011) M. Majerle and S. Simakov, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, Internal report, INR-Nr. 15/10 FUSION Nr. 368 (2010) FISPACT-2007 user manual ("http://www.fusion.org.uk/techdocs/ukaea-fus-534.pdf") A. Drouart et al., Nucl. Phys. A834, (2010) p747-751

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written by Francis Bacon WRITTEN BY HIS LORDSHIP IN LATIN AND ENGLISHED BY DR. WILLIAM RAWLEY IN HAPPY MEMORY ELIZABETH QUEEN OF ENGLAND A COLLECTION OF THE FELICITIES OF QUEEN ELIZABETH Queen Elizabeth, both in her natural endowments, and her fortune, was admirable amongst women, and memorable amongst princes. But this is no subject for the pen of a mere scholar, or any such cloistered writer. For these men are eager in their expressions, but shallow in their judgments; and perform the scholars part well, but transmit things but unfaithfully to posterity. Certainly it is a science belonging to statesmen, and to such as sit at the helms of great kingdoms, and have been acquainted with the weight and secrets of devil business, to handle this matter dexterously. Rare in all ages hath been the reign of a woman, more rare the felicity of a woman in her reign, but most rare a permanency and lasting joined with that felicity. As for this lady she reigned four-and-forty years complete, and yet she did not survive her felicity. Of this felicity I am purposed to say somewhat; yet without any excursion into praises; for praises are the tribute of men, but felicity the gift of God. First, I reckon it as a part of her felicity, that she was advanced to the regal throne from a private fortune. For this is ingenerate in the nature and opinions of men, to ascribe that to the greatest felicity, which is not counted upon, and cometh unlooked for, but this is not that I intend, it is this, princes that are trained up in their fathers courts, and to an immediate and apparent hope of succession, do get this by the tenderness and remissness of their education, that they become, commonly, less capable and less temperate in their affections. And therefore you shall find these to have been the ablest and most accomplished kings that were tutored by both fortunes. Such was with us, King Henry the Seventh; and with the French Lewis the Twelfth: both which, in recent memory and almost about the same time, obtained their crowns, not only from a private, but also from an adverse and afflicted fortune; and did both excel in their several ways; the former in prudence, and other in justice. Much like was the condition of this princess, whose blossoms and hopes were unequally aspected by fortune, that afterwards when she came to crown, fortune, might prove towards her always mild and constant. For Queen Elizabeth, soon after she was born, was entitled to the succession in the crown, upon the next turn disinherited again, then laid aside and slighted: during the reign of her brother, her estate was most prosperous and flourishing; during the reign of her sister, very tempestuous and full of hazard. Neither yet did she pass immediately from the prison to the crown, which sudden change might have been enough to make her cast off all moderation: but first she regained her liberty, then there buded forth some probable hopes of succession; and lastly, in a great still and happiness she was advanced to the imperial crown without either noise or competitor. All which I allege that it may appear that the divine Providence, intending to produce a most exquisite princess, was pleased to prepare and mould her by these degrees of discipline. Neither ought the misfortune of her mother justly to stain the pure stream of her blood: especially seeing it is very evident that King Henry the Eighth did first burn with new loves, before he was inflamed with indignation against Queen Anne: neither is it unknown to the ages since that he was a king naturally prone to loves and jealousies; and not containing himself in those cases from the effusion of blood. Besides, the very person for whom she was suspected showeth the accusation to be less probable, and built upon weak and frivolous supposition; which was both secretly whispered to many mens ears at that time; and which Queen Anne herself testified by her undaunted courage, and that memorable speech of hers at the time of her death. For having gotten, as she supposed, a faithful and friendly messenger, in the very hour before her death, she delivered these words to relate unto the king: That she had ever found the king very constant and firm to his purpose of advancing her; for first, from the estate of a gentlewoman only, and no way pretending to noble titles, he raised her to the honour of a marchioness; next, he vouchsafed to make her his consort both of his kingdom and bed: and now that there remained no higher earthly honour, he meant to corwn her innocency with the glory of martyrdom. But though the messenger durst not relate these words to the king, who was already inflamed with new loves, yet certain tradition, the conserver of truth, hath conveyed them to posterity. Another principal thing, which I cast into Queen Elizabeths felicity, was the time and period of her reign; not only for that it was long, but also because it fell into that season of her life, which was most active and fittest for the swaying of a scepter, for she was fully five-and-twenty years old (at which age the civil law freeth from a curator) when she same to the crown, and reigned to the seventieth year of her life; so that she never suffered either the detriments of pupilage, and check of an over-awing power, or the inconveniences of an impotent and unwieldy old age; and old age is not without a competent portion of miseries, even to private men; but to kings, besides the common burden of years, it brings for the most part a declining in the estates they govern, and a conclusion of their lives without honour. For there hath scarce been known a king that hath lived to an extreme and impotent old age, but he hath suffered some detriment in his territories, and gone less in his reputation. Of which thing there is a most eminent example in Philip the Second, King of Spain, a most puissant prince, and an excellent governor, who, in the last years of his life, and impotent old age, was sensible of this whereof we speak; and therefore with great circumspection submitted himself to natures law, voluntarily surrendered the territories he had gotten in France, established a firm peace in that kingdom, attempted the like in other places, that so he might transmit his kingdoms peaceable and entire to his next heir. Contrariwise, Queen Elizabeths fortune was so constant and deeply rooted, that no disaster in any of her dominions accompanied her indeed declining, but still able years: nay, further, for an undeniable token of her felicity, she died not before the rebellion in Ireland was fortunately decided, and quashed by a battle there, lest otherwise it might have defalcated from the total sum of her glory. Now the condition also of the people over whom she reigned, I take to be a matter worthy our observation; for if her lot had fallen amongst the desolate Palmyrenes, or in Asia, a soft and effeminate race of men, a woman-prince might have been sufficient for a womanish people; but for the English, a nation stout and warlike, to be ruled by the check of a woman, and to yield to humble obedience to her, is a thing deserving the highest admiration. Neither was this disposition of her people (hungry of war, and unwillingly bowing to peace) any impediment to her, but that she enjoyed and maintained peace all her days: and this desire in her of peace, together with her fortunate accomplishment thereof, I reckon to be one of chiefest praises. For this was happy for her time, comely for her sex, and comfortable to her conscience. Indeed, about the tenth year of her reign, there was an offer of a commotion in the northern parts, but it was soon laid asleep and extinguished; but all her reign beside was free from the least breath or air of civil broils. Now I judge the peace maintained by her to be the more eminent for two causes, which indeed make nothing for the merit of that peace, but much for the honour: the one, that it was set off, and made more conspicuous by the broils and dissensions of neighbouring nations, as it were by so many lights and torches: the other, that amidst the benefits of peace she lost not the honour of arms; insomuch, that the reputation of the English arms was not only preserved, but also advanced by her upon many glorious occasions. For the succours sent into the Netherlands, France, and Scotland, the expeditions by sea into both the Indies, whereof some circled the whole globe of the earth; the fleets sent into Portugal, and to annoy the coasts of Spain: and lastly, the often suppressions and overthrows of the rebels in Ireland, did both show the warlike prowess of our nation to be no whit diminished, and did much increase the renown of the queen. There was another ting that did greatly advance her glory; that both by her timely succours, her neighbour kings were settled in their rightful thrones, and the suppliant people, who by the ill advisedness of their kings were abandoned, and given over to the cruelty of their ministers, and to the fury of the multitude, and to all manner of butchery and desolation, were relieved by her; by reason whereof they subsist unto this day. Neither was she a princess less benigh and fortunae in the influence of her counsels than of her succours; as being one that had oftentimes interceded to the King of Spain, to mitigate his wrath against his subjects in the Netherlands, and to reduce them to his obedience upon some tolerable conditions; and further, as being one that did perpetually and upon all occasions represent to the French kings the observation of their own edicts, so often declaring and promising peace to their subjects. I cannot deny but that these good counsels of hers wanted the effect: in the former I verifly believe for the universal good of Europe, lest happily the ambition of Spain, being unloosed from its fetters, should have poured itself (as things then stood ) upon the other kingdoms and states of Christendom: and for the latter, the blood of so many innocents with their wives and children slain within their own harbours and nests by the scum of the people, (who like so many mastiffs were let loose, and heartened, and even set upon them by the state,) would not suffer it; which did continually cry unto God for vengeance, that so blood-sucking a kingdom might have her fill thereof, in the intestine slaughters and consumption of a civl war. Howsoever she persisted to perform the part of a wise and loving confederate. There is another cause also for which we may justly admire this peace so constantly pursued and maintained by the queen. And that is, that it did not proceed fro any bent or inclination of those times; but from the prudency of her government and discreet carriage of things. For whereas she herself was not without manifest danger from an ill-affected party at home for the cause of religion, and that the strength and forces of this kingdom were in the place of a bulwark to all Europe against the then dreadful and overflowing ambition and power of the King of Spain, she might have apprehended just cause of a war; but as she was still ready with her counsel, so she was not behindhand with her forces. And this we are taught by an event the most memorable of any in our time, if we look upon the felicity thereof. For when as the Spanish navy (set forth with such wonderful preparation in all kinds, the terror and amazement of all Europe, carried on with almost assurance of victory) came braving upon our seas; it took not so much as one poor cock-boat of ours, nor fired any one village, nor landed one man upon English ground; but was utterly defeated, and after a shameful flight and many shipwrecks quite dispersed, so as the peace of this kingdom was never more firm and solid. Neither was her felicity less in escaping treacherous attempts at home, than in subduing and defeating foreign invasions. For not a few treasons discovered and disappointed. And this was no cause to make her lead a more fearful or diffident life than before. No new increase of her guard, no immuring herself within her own walls, or forbearing to be seen abroad; but as one assured and confident, and that was more mindful of her escape from danger, than of the danger itself, she was constant to her former customs and fashions. Furthermore, it is worth our labour to consider the nature of the times in which she reigned. For there are some times so barbarous and ignorant that it is no greater matter to govern people than to govern a flock of sheep. But this queen fell upon times of a singular learning and sufficiency; in which it was not possible to be eminent, without admirable endowments of wit, and a rare temper of virtue. Again, the reigns of women are for the most part obscured by their husbands; upon whom all their praises and worthy acts do reflect: as for those that continue unmarried, it is they that impropriate the whole glory and merit to themselves. And this was the peculiar glory of this prencess, that she had no props or supports of her government, but those that were of her own making. She had no brother, the son of her mother; no unclue, none other of the royal blood and lineage that might be partner in her cares, and no upholder of the regal dignity. And as for those whom she raised to honour, she carried such a discreet hand over them, and so interchanged her favours as they still strived in emulation and desire to please her best, and she herself remained in all things an absolute princess. Childless she was, and left no issue behond her; which was the case of many of the most fortunate princes, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Trajan, and others. And this is a case that hath been often controverted and argued on both sides, whilst some hold the want of children to be a diminution of our happiness, as if it should be an estate more than human to be happy both in our own persons, and in our descendants, but others do account the want of children as an addition to earthly happiness, inasmuch as that happiness may be said to complete, over which fortune hath no power, when we are gone: which if we leave children cannot be. She had also many outward gifts of nature. A tall stature; a comely and straight making; an extraordinary majesty of aspect, joined with a sweetness; a most happy and constant healthfulness of body. Unto which I may add, that in the full possession both of her limbs and spirits until her last sickness, having received no blow from fortune, nor decay from old age; she obtained that which Augustus Caesar so importunately prayed for; and easy and undistempered passage out of this world. Which also is reported of Antoninus Pius, that excellent emperor; whose death had the resemblance of some soft and pleasing slumber. So in Queen Elizabeths disease, there was no ghastly or fearful accident6; no idleness of brain; nothing unaccustomed to man in general: she was transported either with desire of life, or tediousness of sickness, or extremity of pain; she had no grievous or uncomely symptoms, but all things were of that kind, as di rather show the frailty of nature, than a deordination or reproach of it. For some few days before her death, being much pined with the extreme drought of her body, and those cares that accompany a crown, and not wonted to refresh herself with wine, or any liberal diet, she was struck with a torpor and frigidity in her nerves; notwithstanding, which is rare in such diseases, she retained both her speech, and memory, and motion, though but slow and weak, even to the end. And in this case she continued but a few days; so as it can be called the last act of her life, but the first step to her death. For as it is a miserable condition to see the faculties of our body buried before us; and to survive long after them; so it is a fair and natural conclusion of our life, when the senses are by little and little laid asleep, that the dissolution of the whole should immediately follow. I will add one thing more to make up the full measure of her felicity: which is, that she was not only most happy in her own person, but in the abilities and virtues of her servants and ministers, for she was served by such persons as I suppose this island never brought forth the like before her times. Now when God beareth a love to kings, no doubt he raiseth up the spirits of wise servants as a concurrent blessing. There are two fair issues of her happiness, born to her since her death, I conceive not less glorious and eminent than those she enjoyed alive. The one of her successor, the other of her memory. For she had gotten such a successor, who although, for his masculine virtues, and blessing of posterity, and addition of territories, he may be said to exceed her greatness and somewhat to obscure it; notwithstanding, he is most zealous of her name and glory; and doth even give a perpetuity to her acts, considering both in the choice of the persos, and in the orders and institutions of the kingdom, he hath departed so little from her, so as a son could hardly succeed a father with less noise of innovation. As for her memory, it hath gotten such life in the mouths and hearts of men, as that envy being put out by her death, and her fame lighted, I cannot say whether the felicity of her life, or the felicity of her memory be the greater. For if, perhaps, there fly abroad any factious fames of her, raised either by discontented persons, or such as are averse in religion; which notwithstanding, dare now scarce show their faces, and are everywhere cried down; the same are neither true, neither can they be long-lived. And for this cause, especially, have I made this collection, such as it is, touching her felicity, and the marks of Gods favour towards her; that no malicious person should dare to interpose a curse, where God hath given a blessing. Now if any man shall allege that against me, was once said to Caesar; we see what we may admire, but we would fain see what we can comment; certainly, for my part, I hold true admiration to be the highest degree of commendation. And besides such felicities as we have recounted could not befall any princess, but such a one as was extraordinarily supported and cherished by Gods favour; and had much in her own person, and rare virtues, to create and work out unto herself such a fortune. Notwithstanding, I have thought good to insert something now concerning her moral part, yet only in those things which have ministered occasion to some malicious to traduce her. This queen, as touching her religion, was pious, moderate, constant, and an enemy to novelty. First, for her piety, though the same was most conspicuous in her acts and the form of government; yet it was portrayed also in the common course of her life, and her daily comportment. Seldom would she be absent from hearing divine service, and other duties of religion, either in her chapel, or in her privy closet. In the reading of the Scriptures, and the writings of the fathers, especially of Saint Augustine, she was very frequent; she composed certain prayers herself to emergent occasions. Whensoever she named God, thought it was in common discourse, she could for the most part add the title of Maker, saying, God my Maker: and compose both her eyes and countenance to a submissness and reverence. This I have often, myself, observed, being in her presence; now whereas some have divulged her unmindfulness of mortality, in that she would never endure any mention either of her age, or death, is most false: for she would often, and that many years before her death, with a great deal of meekness profess that she found herself grown an old woman, and she would sometimesw open herself what she liked best for an inscription upon her tomb, saying, that she loved no pompous or vainglorious titles, but would only have a line or two for her memory, wherein her name and her virginity, and the years of her reign, and her establishing of religion, and her maintaining of peace, should be in the fewest words comprehended. It is true, that whilst she was in her vigorous years, and able to bear children, if at any time she was moved to declare her successor, she would make answer, that she would never endure to see her winding-sheet before her eyes. And yet, notwithstanding, some few years before her death, one day when she was in deep meditation, and, as it may be guessed, in that of her mortality, one that might be bold said unto her, Madam, there are divers offices, and great places in the state, which you keep long void. She arose up in some displeasure, and said, I am sure my office will not long be void. As for her moderateness in religion, I shall seem to be at a stand, in regard of the severe laws made against her subjects of the Romish religion: notwithstanding, that which I shall say is no more than what I know for certain, and diligently observed. Most certain it is, that it was the firm resolution of this princess not to offer any violence to consciences; but then on the other side, not to suffer the state of her kingdom to be ruined under pretence of conscience and religion. Out of this fountain she concluded; first, that to allow freedom and toleration of two religions by public authority, in a nation fierce and warlike, and that would easily fall from discension of minds to siding and blows, would bring inevitable ruin to this kingdom. Again, in the newness of her reign, when there was a general distrust, she singled out some of the bishops of the most turbulent and factious spirits, and committed them to free custody; and this not without the warrant of former laws. As for the rest, either of the clergy or laity, she did did not ransack their consciences by any severe inquisition, but rather secured them by a gracious connivancy: and this was the state of things at the first. Neither did she depart from this clemency, when the excommunication of Pius Quintus came thundering against, her, which might both justly have provoked her, and have ministered occasion to new courses; but howsoever she followed her royal nature still: for as a wise lady, and of a high courage, she was not a white terrified at the roaring of a bull, being well assured of her peoples love and fidelity towards her, as also of the disability of the popish faction within the kingdom to do her hurt, if no foreign enemy joined with them. But then, about the three-and-twentieth year of her reign there followed a mighty change. And this distinction of the times is not any device of mine, but it is expressed in the public acts of that time, and as it were cut in brass; for before that year was there never any capital or severe punishment inflicted upon any of her subjects, as they had relation to the Romish religion, by the laws formerly made. But just then began that proud and vast intention of Spain to conquer this kingdom, by little and little to show itself. Of this the principal part was to stir up by all means a party within the kingdom, of such as were ill-affected to the state, and desirous of innovation, that might adhere to the foreigner at his landing. For this they had no other hopes than the difference in religion; wherefore they set it down to pursue this course with all their power: and the seminaries at that time budding, priests were sent into England to plant and disperse a love to the Romish religion; to teach and inculcate the power of the popes excommunication in freeing subjects from their allegiance, and to awaken and prepare the minds of men to an expectation of a change. About the same time, Ireland also was attempted by an invasion, and the queens name and government traduced by sundry and scandalous libels. To be short, there was an unusual swelling in the state, the forerunner of greater troubles: yet I will affirm, that every priest which was sent over was made of the council, or privy to the enterprise, but that some of them became the wicked instruments only of other mens malice. Notwithstanding this is true, and witnessed by the confession of many, that almost all the priests which were sent into the kingdom from that aforenamed year, unto the thirtieth year of Queen Elizabeths reign, at which time that design of the pope and Spain was put into execution, by those memorable preparation of the navy and land forces, had in their instruction, besides other parts of their function, to distil and insinuate into the people these particulars: It was impossible things should continue at the stay: they should see ere long a great change in this state; that the pope and Catholic princes were careful for the English, if they would not be want be wanting to themselves. Again, sundry of the priests did manifestly interpose themselves into those consultation and plots which tended to the undermining and ruining of this kingdom: and, which especially moved her, letters were intercepted out of divers parts that discovered the true face of the plot; in which was written, that they doubted not to go beyond the vigilancy of the queen and state in the matter of Catholics; for the queen would only have an eye lest there should arise any fit head, in the person of some lord, or other eminent gentleman of quality, under whom the Catholics might unite; but they had thought upon another course, as namely, by private men, and those but of mean rank, that should not confer, nor scarce know of each others employments, to prepare and mature the business by secrecy of confession. And these were their engines, the which, as hath appeared since in a case not much unlike, are usual and familiar to that order of men. In this great deluge of danger, there was a necessity imposed upon Queen Elizabeth to restrain, by some sharper bands of laws, that part of her subjects which were alienated from her, and had drunk too deep a draught of this poison ever to recover; and further, which by their retired living, and exemption from public offices, were grown very rich: and moreover, the mischief daily growing, when as the cause thereof was ascribed to none other than the seminary priests, who had been nourished in foreign parts, and received exhibition from the bounty and aims of foreign princes, professed enemies to this state; and who had conversed in such places where the name of Queen Elizabeth was never heard, but as of a heretic, and excommunicate, and accursed person; and who, though themselves, sometimes, had no hand in treason, yet they were known to be the intimate friends of them that had. And lastly, who by their arts and poisons had infected and soured the mass and lump of the Catholics, which before was more sweet and harmless, with a new kind of leaven, and desperate maliciousness: there could no other remedy be devised, but by forbidding such persons to enter into this kingdom upon pain of their lives; which at last, in the twenty-seventh year of her reign, was accordingly done. Nay, and when the event itself had confirmed this to be true, I mean immediately after that the dreadful tempest arose from Spain, threatening no less than utter desolation, yet did it nothing mollify or turn the edge of these mens malice and fury, but rather whetted it, as if they had cast off all natural affection to their country. As for the times succeeding, I mean after the thirtieth year of her reign, though indeed our fear of Spain, which had been the spur to this rigour, had fairly breathed out, or was well abated; yet considering the memory of times past had made so deep impression in mens hearts and cogitations, and that it would have seemed either inconstancy to repeal those former laws, or sloth to neglect them, the very constitution of things did suggest to the queen, that it was not safe to reduce them unto that state wherein they had continued until the three-and-twentieth year of her reign. Hereunto may be added the industry of some persons in improving the revenues of the exchequer, and the zeal of some other ministers of justice, which did never think their country safe unless the laws were rigorously executed; all which did importune and press the execution of the laws. Notwithstanding, the queen, for a manifest token of her royal nature, did so dull the edge of the laws, that but a very few priests, in respect of their number, did suffer death. Now all this which I have said is not by way of defence, for the matter needs it not; for neither could this kingdom have been safe without it, neither were the proceedings any way comparable or of kin to those bloody and unchristianly massacres in the Catholic countries, which proceeded merely from rancour and pride, and not from any necessity of state: howsoever, I hope I have made my first assertion good, that she was moderate in the point of religion, and that the change which happened was not in her nature, but upon the necessity of the time. Now for the constancy of Queen Elizabeth in religion, and the observance thereof, I know no better argument than this, That although she found the Romish religion confirmed in her sisters days by act of parliament and established by all strong and potent means that could be devised, and to have taken deep root in this kingdom; and that all those which had any authority, or bore any office in the state, had subscribed to it: yet for that she saw that it was not agreeable to the word of God, nor to the primitive purity, nor to her own conscience, she did, with a great deal of courage, and with the assistance of a very persons, quite expel and abolish it. Neither did she this by precipitate and heady course, but timing it wisely and soberly. And this may well be conjectured, as from the thing itself, so also by an answer of her, which she made upon occasion. For within a very few days of her coming to the crown, when many prisoners were released out of prison, as the custom is at the inauguration of a prince, there came to her one day as she was going to chapel, a certain courtier that had the liberty of a buffoon, and either out of this own motion, or by the instigation of a wiser man, presented her with a petition: and before a great number of courtiers, said to her with a loud voice, That there were yet four or five prisoners unjustly detained in prison; he came to be a suitor to have them set at liberty; those were the four evangelists, and the apostle Saint Paul, who had been long shut up in an unknown tongue, as it were in prison, so as they could not converse with the common people. The queen answered very gravely, That it was best first to inquire of them, whether they would be set at liberty or no. Thus she silenced an unseasonable motion with a doubtful answer, as reserving the matter wholly in her own power. Neither did she bring in this alteration timorously, or by pieces, but in a grave and mature manner, after a conference betwixt both side, and the calling and conclusion of a parliament. And thus within the compass of one year, she did so establish and settle all matters belonging to the church, as she departed not one hairs breath from them to the end of her life: nay, and her usual custom was, in the beginning of every parliament, to forewarn the houses not to question or innovate any thing already established in the discipline or rites of the church. And thus much of her religion. Now if there by any severer nature that shall tax her for that she suffered herself, and was very willing to be courted, wooed, and to have sonnets made in her commendation; and that she continued this longer than was decent for her years: notwithstanding, if you will take this matter at the best it is not without singular admiration, being much like unto that which we find in fabulous narrations, of a certain queen in the Fortunate Island and of her court and fashions, where fair purpose and love making was allowed, but lasciviousness banished. But if you will take it at the worst, even so it amounteth to a more high admiration, considering that these courtships did not much eclipse her fame, and not at all her majesty; neither did they make her less apt for government, or choke with the affairs and businesses of the public, for such passages as these do often entertain the time even with the greatest princes. But to make an end of this discourse, certainly this princess was good and moral, and such she would be acknowledged; she detested vice, and desired to purchase fame only by honourable courses. And indeed whilst I mention her moral parts, here comes a certain passage into my mind which I will insert. Once giving order to write to her ambassador about certain instructions to be delivered apart to the queen-mother of the house of Valois, and that her secretary had inserted a certain clause that the ambassador should say, as it were to endear her to the queen-mother, That they two were the only pair of female princes, from whom, for experience and arts of government, there was no less expected than from the greatest kings. She utterly disliked the comparison, and commanded it to be put out, saying, That she practiced other principles and arts of government than the queen-mother did. Besides she was not a little pleased, if any one should fortune to tell her, that suppose she had lived in a private fortune, yet she could not have escaped without some note of excellency and singularity in her sex. So little did she desire to borrow or be beholding to her fortune for her praise. But if I should wade further into this queens praises, moral or politic, either I must slide into certain commonplaces, and heads of virtue, which were not worthy of so great a princess: or if I should desire to give her virtues the true grace and luster, I must fall into a history of her life, which requireth both better leisure and a better pen than mine is. Thus much in brief according to my ability: but to say the truth, the only commender of this ladys virtues is time; which for as many ages as it hath run, hath not yet showed us one of the female sex equal to her in the administration of a kingdom. Why was Felicity not published while Bacon was alive? Why is he being so NICE to Liz ? She was his mother and did bring him much grief for not officially recognizing him as her royal offspring. And yes Bacon had to accept that - and did so for both his personal survival and Elizabeth's political survival. What's your take.... I think it's easy to see why it was not published until after Bacon was gone. Remember, when Raleigh's History of the World came out, James was irate with him for being too saucy in censoring kings. Bacon has some true, but hard words to say about King Henry VIII. In addition, Bacon points out that Queen Elizabeth came to the aid of the neighboring Protestant countries. This was one of the big grievances the Englishmen had against James, when the forces of James' daughter and her husband Frederick was beseiged and then defeated by the Catholic forces, James didn't lift a hand, and a lot of Englishmen felt embarrassed and humiliated because of this. Certainly his comment about Elizabeth would have immediately invoked comparison with the actions of James. I think this would have been a slap in his face. Why was he so nice to Liz? Certainly on the one hand he recognized he was a withered branch of her roots, but on the other hand Bacon was always ready to give anyone their due, and to praise anyone who deserved praise. He even praised his worse enemy - Coke. I think he was just giving Elizabeth her due. Based on an image of Elizabeth by David Bowers, enhanced with sons Essex (left) and Francis (right)

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Jamaican Caves Organisation Roaring River Cave – Westmoreland A report on the current biological conditions at Roaring River Cave as observed during an assessment carried out by members1 of the Jamaican Caves Organisation (JCO) for the Tourism Product Development Company (TPDco) on January 26, 2006. 1 Ivor C. Conolley (Vice-chair JCO), Elizabeth Slack (Peace Corps, JCO) Report prepared by RS Stewart (Chair JCO) Roaring River Cave, in Westmoreland, is one of the few caves used in Jamaica for the purposes of commercial tourism. At the request of the managers of the site, TPDco, the JCO visited the site on Thursday, January 26, 2006 to carry out a biological assessment using methods established during the Parks in Peril Project. In this report, we will give a brief overview of cave biology, present specific observations for Roaring River Cave, and offer suggestions on how tourism might take place in manner that allows both visitors and resident fauna to successfully coexist in this unique underground realm. The biota of Jamaican caves is made up primarily of only two kingdoms: fungi and animals. Plants are notable by their absence, and this is no surprise as there is little potential for the production of chlorophyll in a place without light. If artificial lighting is introduced, opportunistic algal growth will occur, but this can be regarded as an invasive species. The fungal species found in nutrient rich caves are often overlooked, and seldom studied, but this unglamorous group is an important part of the cave ecosystem. They are an essential part of the food-chain, and although they will not figure prominently in this report, their place in the overall system cannot be overlooked and will be necessarily referred to. The faunal content of caves is much greater and more diverse than that of fungi, but generally, the animals found can be placed into one of the following five groups: troglobitic invertebrates (terrestrial obligate cave-dwellers), troglophilic invertebrates (terrestrial opportunistic cave-dwellers), stygobitic invertebrates (aquatic obligate cave-dwellers), Chiroptera (bats), and invasive species in a variety of taxa. A sixth group, tropical frogs, has only one representative, Eleutherodactylus cundalli, which uses the outer part of caves for breeding, although foraging takes place outside of the cave itself. Invertebrates found in caves, whether troglobitic or troglophilic, can also be grouped into two categories: scavengers and predators. Many of the scavengers live upon the floor of the cave, and require loose soils. If the floor material is compacted, numbers will be adversely affected, with a corresponding effect on the predators that depend on them. Caves are biologically unique in many ways, and amongst these is the nature of the nutrient input upon which the resident species depend. Unlike the biota found aboveground, or in aquatic/marine environments, there is no illumination available to support plant growth. Fungi, which do not require light, still require some sort of food, whether this is plants to grow upon, or decomposed vegetation, or animal waste. But because there are no plants in a cave, or the animals that would feed upon them, cave fungi are entirely dependent on the introduction of nutrients from an outside source. This is also the case for the troglobites and stygobites that live in the cave, for even if they subsist upon fungi, they are in turn dependent on the introduction of the nutrients that the fungal species required. Essentially, the absence of plants in a cave creates biological conditions very different than those found in most other environments. All of the nutrients must enter the cave from the outside somehow; they cannot be created in the cave itself. The two main vectors for the introduction of nutrients to a cave are water-flow, and bats. (To a lesser extent, troglophilic species also transport nutrients by foraging outside of the cave, and then depositing faeces inside or serving as food for top-level predators.) Aquatic cave species (i.e. crabs and shrimp) primarily rely on water-borne organic detritus as their food-source. Some terrestrial cave species can take advantage of this input in a limited way, but the primary nutrient source for most trog species is bat guano, (and to a lesser extent, seeds and fruits that are transported into the cave by fruit bats). This bat introduced resource supports scavenging invertebrates, fungi, and all the species that depend on them. To make this more clear, two of the most common food-chains that are based on bat guano follow: 1: Bats forage external to the cave during the night and then deposit faeces in the area of the cave where they roost. Fungi grow upon this nutrient rich source. Fungal gnats in their larval stage browse this, and then when further developed, and airborne, become prey for troglobitic spiders. 2: Bats deposit faeces in roosting areas. Scavenging invertebrates directly browse the guano and then become prey for predators such as Amblypygids (tailless whip scorpions). In short, if you remove the nutrient input supplied by the bats (through disturbance that eliminates the bats themselves), you lose many other species that were dependent on it. Bats are more than just a mechanism for introducing nutrients to a cave, they are important in other ways. Insectivorous bats are capable of eating a vast number of mosquitoes every night. Fruitivores are important for pollination. Apart from the services they supply us, they are fascinating in their own right. Their use of echolocation to navigate and feed continues to be a rich field of study. Unfortunately, many people see them as something to be feared. The most common bat on the island is the Jamaican fruit bat, Artibeus jamaicensis. It is very tolerant of light and human visitation, and is the one that usually infests people’s attics. Indeed, it is tolerant to the point that it is often the one bat species remaining in a cave that has had regular disturbance. The other fifteen species that are more sensitive to disruption of their roosts, and that do not live in attics, will be absent (one of these species, Phyllonycteris aphylla, has had its roosts disturbed to the point where it may now be extinct). Nevertheless, local people who occasionally visit the roost to extract guano, or for tourist purposes, will confidently claim that there are still many bats. This is in fact not the case; they are just seeing a remnant population of A. jamaicensis. Apart from disruption of nutrient input by the elimination of bat roosts, one of the primary factors in the biological degradation of Jamaican caves is the presence of invasive species, most importantly the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana. The American cockroach is an introduced species that has become abundant in some caves. It is very good at what it does, which is scavenging, and it has out-competed most other invertebrate scavengers that it has come up against. The effect of this is two-fold: the native scavenging species that were not able to get to the food first starve to death (P. americana move very quickly); some of the species that were out-competed, and eradicated by the roaches, served as food for cave-adapted invert predators that then lost their prey. The result is that caves that have had P. americana introduced have experienced a great loss in their original biodiversity. The assessment process derived by the JCO and its collaborators uses certain indicators to indicate the overall health of the cave. These are described more fully in the report that was delivered to The Nature Conservancy - Jamaica for the caves component of the Parks in Peril Project, but essentially the method is this: certain species that are at the top of the food-chain are looked for, this indicating the relative abundance of those species upon which they feed; invasive species are looked for, with the American Cockroach the most important; available roosting space for bats, and percentage of this used, is noted. Along with these biological indicators, siltation of caves that take water is noted; soil-compaction is noted; damage to speleothems (formations) is noted; trash is noted; archaeological status is investigated. The conclusions and suggestions that will be found further on in this report are based upon this systematic assessment process. It was designed to be suitable for every cave visited and we are confident that it applies equally well to Roaring River Cave. [The following information is derived from field datasheets that are not included with this report.] Roaring River Cave Notes: Ivor C. Conolley The team left Kingston at 7:00 am and returned at 9:00 pm. Met with Opal Browning and Richard at the Ferris Cool Oasis Gas Station and then proceeded to the cave together. We were met by the manager of the Recreational Park and Cave and then introduced to a guide who was assigned to 'tour' us. He was sufficiently informed and knowledgeable about the cave to provide a highly acceptable tour. He was not operating from a prepared script; he used his own words. We were shown the areas used for touring visitors. The cave entrance opens into a small chamber with limited features, but not unattractive. The path continued as paved steps with electric lights down into a second chamber larger than the first. Off to the right is a body of water of significant depth. A metal ladder leads one into the water. A member of the team (Ivor) went into the water using a life vest and slowly moved around investigating the white limestone wall of what was evidently a shaft. Sections of the wall were stained with black organic matter akin to that found on the chert in the Roehampton School Cave. It was not as hard, however, and removable by scratching. No invertebrates were found in this area. The depth of this water varied seasonally. At its deepest we were told it was 120 feet (information from the guide who indicated he received it from scuba divers who went down). There was no flow but a slight current was visible. The ceiling was about 15 metres above the water surface. Anecdotally: fish sometimes in this water. No fish were observed at this time. Off to the right further, a tight squeeze through a passageway showed the stream passage some 3 metres below. Movement onwards was possible but it was decided not to continue through here at this time. With some difficulty one could have continued. This was an upper level of the stream passage above the level used by the visitors. There was evidence here by way of stained bell-holes of a former bat roost. It may be that further on there is more of the same. Back in the main area and the third chamber also the largest off on the right is what the tour guide described as the cave nostril. It is not a light hole but water he says trickles in sometimes. In various sections in niches bones are present that are from some type of fish. Other bones found which may be from a larger animal and possibly from the pre-Columbian period. A cake with sticks of incense was seen in the area of the 'nostril'. We were told that a Mother - a revivalist minister - held a religious ceremony there and the cake, rum and wine were left for the spirits. Further up at the end of the main passageway is a scramble up a steep incline to a rock choke. This is beyond what they call a roundabout. At the top of this scramble there was a slight movement of air coming from on opening in the rock on the floor of the cave. The cockroaches found were in this area2. On the right side of the cave were also openings. These were found in the second chamber. We fully explored a passageway used by visitors. This ended in a stal choke. Another passageway, entered by climbing up a ten foot vertical, led to a traversable passageway which legend has proceeds to Montego Bay3. We did not go that far but although the passageway is fairly tight it would warrant further investigation. It goes in an easterly direction. 2 We suspect that where this passage reaches the surface there is an area that is being used as a dump for trash. This would account for the presence of American roaches. [Stewart] 3 Many caves are rumoured to extend great distances, by way of unexplored passages, but in our experience, once the passages are explored, this turns out to not be the case. Nevertheless, this passage should be investigated as part of a general mapping survey of the cave. [Stewart] Notes: Elizabeth Slack The Roaring River Cave in Petersfield, Westmoreland, has been developed by the TPDCo as a tourist cave. This is immediately evident as one approaches the area, for there are signs to the cave from Ferris Cross. The entrance is enclosed in a grill, to prevent access by the general public. I assume bats can still pass through the bars4. The walkway from the road, to the entrance, and into and through the cave is paved with concrete. It is lit by light bulbs set on the floor and aimed up. It makes for a pleasant walk, with no danger of stumbling or stubbing one’s toes. However, it’s impossible to know if anything of significance is under the pavement. Because the lights are aimed up, it illuminates quite a distance up into the main chambers. This seems to have displaced a sizeable bat roost, one that probably numbered in the hundreds. When the bats left, the ecosystem had nothing to sustain itself, and all the attendant invertebrates that would normally be present have disappeared out of those areas. I understand the need to cater for tourists, but using a different and better-aimed light source would likely be less disruptive than what is presently there. I imagine something like what is laid along the sides of aisles in movie theatres or airplanes would be more suitable. The tour guides walk with flashlights, so they would still be able to highlight anything of interest. Bats don’t care for a constant flow of people, but it seems the cave does not see that level of visitation. Ivor and I were told that the pool water is no longer safe for swimming because of fecal contamination. The source of that contamination, it is believed, is a squatter settlement farther up the hill. Petersfield has an active citizens association; it was responsible for the development of the cave and finds the guides who are then trained by TPDCo. Perhaps the citizens association could undertake a pit-toilet building project, to clean the water. The pit-toilets should not be soak-aways, the most common type, but something that better contains the waste, like a VIDP. I wonder if the lack of Sesarma (crabs), fish or shrimps is due to contamination. The water tested came solely from the pool, but it is likely that the stream farther into the cave is tainted as well. The pool water runs clear most of the year, getting cloudy in times of heavy rain. Ivor and I noticed a flow, but Ivor felt no current when he was in the water. Ivor told me that beyond the far edge of the pool a short passage ends in a rock choke. The guides told us that the water depth varies a foot or two during the year. SCUBA divers have entered the pool; they found a maze of passages below but no bottom. Recreational SCUBA divers are not supposed to go below a hundred feet, so the pool is at least that deep5. The tourist part of the cave is largely free of trash, except for items left to placate ancestors. The rest of the cave, however, is littered with various sorts of debris, including some of a particularly personal origin. With a couple of possible exceptions, this debris is carried in, rather than washed in. Modern-day graffiti lines most walls of the cave. It’s ugly but not offensive. There is some flowstone present, but the trickle rate is very slow6. There is also flowstone and some curtains that are now dry. It had been dry in the area lately; the trickle rate may speed up in wet weather. The cave is poorly bedded, or perhaps not at all. The passage above the stream seems to have fossils embedded in its limestone. Above and beyond the roundabout there is a piece of rock with fossilised snail shells in it7. Ivor and I saw no rudists or chert. The cave had many more stalactites than stalagmites8. Some formations had clean calcite. There are a couple of fruit bats present in a dry side passage that rises off to one side. The passage also contained two terrestrial toads (Buffo marinus). There are empty light bulb sockets, so the area used to be lit. It is not currently, and so the bats have found it to be a suitable home. One guide understood the correlation between light and bats, that an area that is lit is not suitable accommodation for bats. There is evidence of pre-Columbian use of the cave, evinced in bones and snail shells in niches. Some of the bones were located in side passages, but some were along the main tourist track. Care needs to be exercised to prevent any further loss of archaeological resources. I also recommend doing a proper survey and possibly a dig to glean whatever information can be gotten, and the sooner the better. The cave is largely devoid of fauna, an indication of heavy human interference. There are a few bats remaining, we saw a few cockroaches, two toads, one eleuth and maybe a half dozen spiders from two species. The cave certainly has the potential to support a greater ecosystem, that is, greater population numbers of a greater number of species. I suspect that when the bat roost was larger this was the case. For the most part, the cave now feels dead. Besides the main entrance to the cave, there is second entrance next to it. Farther into the cave is the “nostril,” an opening in the fourth chamber. One guide explained that it lets fresh air into the cave, hence the name. There is organic debris in that area washed in through the hole. I’ve seen a fair number of caves in Jamaica, but this is the first I know of with anatomy. A short distance into the cave, there are two side-by-side holes. They connect to the same passage, which reportedly reaches the surface. The passage above the stream seems to continue on. It is a bit tight but doable, and may lead to more information about the source of the water. It also contains some of the evidence of pre-Columbian use. There was never any guano mining, and the few bats remaining don’t make that a worthwhile pursuit. A few stalactites seem to have been broken off. A short distance into the cave from the main entrance a passage branches off to the north-northwest. There is a paved path but the area is no longer lit. Now dry, it resembles an old stream passage, with several branches in different directions. The area contains one decaying bat. 4 The presence of bars at the entrance will affect use by bats to varying degrees depending on the species. A. jamaicensis is believed to be the least affected, although evidence for this remains anecdotal at this time. [Stewart] 5 The minimum depth of the water must at this time be regarded as unknown. [Stewart] 6 Flow and depositional rate are probably seasonal. [Stewart] 7 This is fossil-bearing breccia from the late Quaternary period (last several tens of thousands of years). [Stewart] 8 The associated stalagmites may be buried under sediment that was deposited on the floor of the chambers during a period later than that of the greatest speleothem formation activity. [Stewart] Observations made by the investigating team indicate that this site served historically as a roost for greater numbers of bats than it does now. The main indicator of this is the staining present in the bell-holes (deep indentations rising into the ceiling of the chambers). This staining is caused by oils on the fur of the bats and can last for many years after the bats have left. In many caves, these bell-holes are the favoured roosting spots, and when they are seen to have no bats present it indicates that the majority of the available roosting-space is not being utilized. As recorded by E Slack in her notes, “There are a couple of fruit bats present in a dry side passage that rises off to one side”, the total bat population appears to now consist of a small number of A. jamaicensis. We surmise that this state is due to the presence of lights and human visitation, and to a lesser extent, the gated entrance. The relative lack of guano has removed one of the main underpinnings of the food-chain, and as a result there are few of the invertebrates that would commonly occur in a biologically undisturbed cave. Small numbers of two species of Araneae (spiders) are present, rather than the hundreds of individuals, in a greater variety of species, that would be expected. This serves as a good indicator of low levels of flying prey species. The absence of Amblypygids indicates low levels of non-flying prey species. Sesarma verleyi (cave crabs), are notable by their absence. We can only speculate on the reasons for this; it may be because of the fecal contamination caused by the nearby squatter community, but this would have to be at very high levels (we have commonly noted S. verleyi in caves that have some input of fecal matter from upstream pastures, so we know that low levels of fecal contamination will not eradicate the population); there is a possibility that the contamination has a chemical component that has poisoned any crabs that were present; land-use external to the system may have altered the input of organic detritus that supplied nutrients. Periplaneta americana (American cockroaches) are present, with the suspected vector for introduction being trash that is dumped close to, or into, an opening to the cave. IC Conolley notes, “At the top of this scramble there was a slight movement of air coming from on opening in the rock on the floor of the cave. The cockroaches found were in this area.” P. americana consume, amongst other things, bat guano. In caves where there are few bats, and a corresponding low level of faeces deposition, the roaches are quite capable of eating all of what is available before it can serve as a nutrient base for other species. Although roaches were only noted in this part of the cave, it can be expected that they range throughout the rest of the system in search of guano, and then return to the location where they were observed, this being close to where the greatest amount of food is available and thus the main concentration. Invertebrates that live in loose soils found on cave floors would of course be adversely affected by concrete walkways, but in this cave it is probably not a factor due to the lack of nutrients. That is, they would not be present even if there were no concrete in place, because there is nothing for them to eat. To summarize the above: the cave has experienced a substantial reduction in its original biodiversity, in all likelihood as a result of human interference both internal and external to the system. It is not reasonable to ask that tourist activities cease at this site, so we would like to offer below a few suggestions on how the situation might be improved, while also enabling commercial activities to continue. A partial restoration of conditions conducive to occupation of the cave by bats will have a positive effect on the entire terrestrial biota of the system. The increase in nutrient input will allow extant troglobitic species to return to population levels that will make their eventual extinction much less likely. Although it is doubtful that the full set of bats species that originally inhabited the cave will return, the more common ones such as the Jamaican Fruit Bat and Moormops blainvilli should eventually find the site and reoccupy it. To allow this to occur, at least two changes must happen: First, a more judicial use of lighting is necessary. The suggestion made by E Slack in her notes, “I imagine something like what is laid along the sides of aisles in movie theatres or airplanes would be more suitable”, is quite good and we offer this as a possibility. The current situation, with the ceilings (roosting space) of the chambers directly lit, entirely prevents use by bats, even A. jamaicensis. It is our experience that this species will continue to occupy a roost if lights are not shone directly upon them, and if visitors also pass through the roosting area with a minimum of noise. The benefits of this change in lighting will not be restricted to the bats and the rest of the biota; by placing a greater emphasis on the biology of the site during the tours that are carried out, the visitors will be given a much deeper insight into the true nature of the cave, and may come away with more than just memories of its physical beauty. The educational component of the tour will be greatly enhanced and will better serve those guests whose interests are more in the field of ecotourism. For those guests who merely want an “adventure”, it is our experience that a cave seems much more mysterious when it is not fully illuminated. As Ms. Slack also notes, “The tour guides walk with flashlights, so they would still be able to highlight anything of interest”. We suggest that by having adequate light for the walkways proper so that everyone can see where they are stepping, and having the further parts of the chamber appearing only in the beams of flashlights, the experience will, if anything, be enhanced, not lessened. A final benefit is that this lighting scheme will probably consume less electricity and improve the operating margin for the managers of the site. Secondly, we strongly recommend that a section of the cave be set aside as a biological reserve with access severely restricted. This can be an area that is not commonly used, at present, so that it would minimize the effect on the commercial activities in the system, but it must be an area that has good roosting space for bats (bell-holes). In all likelihood, to enforce this, nothing more is required than a sign advising visitors that access is restricted beyond that point. Of course, the restrictions must also apply to guides and all other employees of TPDco. The determination of the best section to set aside as biological reserve can be arrived at by way of a more thorough study of the cave, with the results then presented to TPDco staff for consultation. As part of this process, an accurate map of the entire system should be created. The input of contamination to this cave should be dealt with. There is no need for a heavy-handed approach; simple education programs for those who live in the local squatter community, and funding to assist in proper septic disposal, will probably suffice. As part of the process, the source of the American roaches should be found. This can be done by mapping the cave, and then transposing the map aboveground to locate the area above the main concentration of the roaches (noted by Mr. Conolley). The presence of concrete on the floors of passages and chambers has a very negative effect on the biota of the cave. In the future, if funding allowed, it would be helpful to remove the concrete, restore soil conditions, and construct raised walkways that prevent visitors from damaging the surface below. We realize that funding may never become available for this, but if it does, it would be a great improvement on the current situation. An advantage of the regular visitation to this cave by employees of TPDco is the potential to manually eliminate the invasive roaches, P. americana. Whenever possible, it would be beneficial if guides take the opportunity to crush/squash/step-upon any roaches that are seen. If this becomes common practice, and if the aboveground source is found and dealt with, the negative effects of this invasive species will be greatly lessened. Additions to the current collection of graffiti in the cave must be prohibited. Roaring River Cave is not a chalkboard upon which to draw – it is a very special place that must be treated with respect. The possible evidence for pre-Columbian Amerindian use suggests that this be looked into further. It would be beneficial if the Archaeology Dept at UWI were apprised of this possibility. If all the parties concerned then wish, arrangements can be made for more detailed investigations. Our final recommendation is to suggest a change in the way the cave is viewed commercially. In the past, tourists were content with looking, and nothing more. With increased education has come an increased thirst for knowledge. Many people are no longer content with taking a few pictures and moving on; they want a more fulfilling experience. Roaring River Cave has the potential to become an educational resource for both residents of, and visitors to, Jamaica. The creation of a pamphlet that addresses the creation processes, biological worth, and hydrological importance of the cave would be of great value in assisting in this. Workshops designed to give Guides greater knowledge in the field of speleology (not restricted to the local context) would provide them with the tools to answer questions that they might not yet know the answers to themselves. This approach would move Roaring River Cave beyond being a simple tourist attraction, and allow it to become something of much greater value. We believe that appropriate marketing, which stresses the educational and ecotourism aspects of the site, would result in positive changes for both TPDco and the cave itself. An excerpt from the Jamaica Underground entry for Roaring River Cave follows: “An account (undated) attributed to E. Luther Brookes of Savanna-la-mar and quoted in Clerk.” [Fincham] A cave is by no means and uninteresting place; much less so the beautiful Roaring River Cave. “Roaring River” is the name given to one of Miss Haye’s estates since it is that of the river that waters the property. The river has its source in a cave, hence the appellation “Roaring River Cave". The cave is chiefly noted for three things: 1st, for its unsurpassed local splendour; 2nd, its traditional interest; and 3rd its great antiquity. It is beautifully cut out of the solid rock. No human architect, not even Wren, could plan; no human sculptor - no, not even the great Michael Angelo, could carve such a marvel of art as is this cave. It undoubtedly was not made by hands; its maker is God. The cave is divided into several apartments. There is one which looks every inch like a chapel, and contains that which represents a pulpit with an open bible on it. Being dark, a light is necessary when making a visit. At the farthest end stands a room, prominent for its contents. In it will be seen a table on which are a dozen cups and saucers . To enter this room one has to creep through a small aperture. In the centre of the cave is a round deep hole about two yards in diameter. This hole is full of water and abounds with various sorts of fishes which visitors generally catch by an easy method. A lighted candle is put upon floatable material in the water. The light attracts the fish, they congregate around it and are caught and prepared in delicious dishes… Of the golden cups, tradition says that the first man who found the cave and its contents vainly tried to procure one of them himself. Fatal, however, was the result, for his bones were found after some time by another adventurer. One of the cups being battered claims for this story some consideration. 1 Fincham, Alan. Jamaica underground : the caves, sinkholes and underground rivers of the island / Alan Fincham 2d edition. ISBN 976-640-055-54 2 This legend, golden cups and saucers, is also associated with other Jamaican caves (e.g. Windsor, Fontabelle Rising). [Stewart] 3 Judging by the current absence or low-levels of fish, they were somewhat too delicious - to the point where they have mostly been eaten. [Stewart] Glossary of terms: Aquatic – Species that live in the water. Biota – The complete set of species living in a particular environment. Breccia – In a cave context, this is sedimentary rock, often very soft, created by water-borne sediments deposited long after the original formation of the cave. It often contains fossils. Flowstone – Calcite formations that are created by calcium-bearing flows of water from cracks in the walls of a cave. Invasive – Generally, this refers to species that are non-native, but the term is more often used when the species causes a severe disruption to the original ecosystem. Invertebrates – Animals without backbones. Includes insects, spiders, and crabs. Obligate – Species that must live in a particular environment. Opportunistic – Species that will inhabit caves, but are not restricted to, or particularly fond of caves. Speleothems – Formations, including stalagmites, stalactites, helictites, and flowstone. Stals – Cavers short-form for stalactites and stalagmites. Stalactites – Calcite formations that hang from the ceiling. Created by water percolating from above. Stalagmites – Formations that grow from the floor upwards, usually under stalactites. Stalactites and stalagmites can grow together to form a column. Stygobite - Aquatic species that are restricted to, and only found in caves. E.g. Sesarma verleyi (Jamaican cave crab). Terrestrial – Species that live on dry land. Troglobite – Terrestrial species that are restricted to, and only found in caves. E.g. Troglopedetes jamaicanus (cave-adapted Springtail). Troglophile – Terrestrial or aquatic species that can successfully inhabit caves but are not restricted to them. E.g. Sesarma fossarum (Jamaican river crab). |Jamaican Cave Notes - Main Page|

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A "seemingly quirky finding" peers into animal minds. It may also help show how Nazis abused play and laughter to horrid ends. Nature's Edge Notebook #19 Observation, Analysis, Reflection, New Questions What is it like to be a squirrel? Or, say, a bat… or a giraffe, or a chickadee? Suppose you could actually feel what it's like to be another animal … not just guess, after observing its actions and behavior from the outside, but actually break through the prison of subjectivity - both yours and the squirrel's - and know you can feel it, as if from inside the squirrel's brain. Of course, no two species have exactly the same set of sensory inputs. For example, we lack the bat's special sonic radar, its "echolocation" systems. So ultimately we humans could only guess what it's fully "like." But one scientist's "seemingly quirky finding" - that rats emit a sort of giggling laughter when they are tickled by humans - is opening a new path for scientists and philosophers in their quest to answer this ancient question. It's all about emotion, and especially joy, that great reward in the brain, which, once experienced, we then naturally seek to achieve again … and which can help "make life worth living." As a result of their discovery that tickling rats makes them laugh, brain scientist Jaak Panksepp and his colleagues are now producing what they hope will prove to be more effective anti-depressants - chemicals that not only dull negative feelings, but safely enhance positive ones. Their work on how play and laughter can automatically produce the feeling of joy in the brain may also help clarify the difference between the artificially induced "high" produced by addictive drugs and the true "joy" that may be produced naturally and safely. On the dark side, his work on animal laughter offers insights into how the group-bonding effects of play behavior may be susceptible to manipulation for cruel ends. It seems to illuminate such abuses as the Nazi's manipulation of the Olympic Games to advance racist ideology, and even an infamous anti-Semitic board game marketed in Hitler's Germany in 1936. The Hunt For Hard Evidence To believe that you may well be able to "feel" at least something of what it's "like" to be another kind of animal would, of course, need some sort of evidence that your feelings and those of the other animal could be reasonably presumed to be in any way the same and that you experience those similar feelings in similar ways - be they in a human and a squirrel, or a human and a bat … or a salamander, or a Dover sole on the floor of the English Channel, or a goldfish in a fishbowl on a dresser peering down at a sleeping child. After Panksepp made his delightful discovery in the 1990s that rats emit repeated chirps of laughter when tickled (as seen in this brief video in our previous Nature's Edge Notebook), he and his team began to suspect they might just have discovered a way to get rats (and eventually perhaps other animals) to, in effect, tell us what they were feeling … and even, in a sense, something of what it is generally like to be a rat or a race horse or a three-wattled bell-bird. Some scientists are even playing with the idea that the happily chirping lab rats might eventually lead the way to new notions of how consciousness itself, or at least the general feeling of awareness, might be similar, if not exactly the same, in many species. Towards a Solid Science of the Emotional Feelings of Animals (though other neuroscientists remain doubtful) In an email to ABC News, Panksepp explains that his team is still exploring the chirping laughter of tickled lab rats 15 years after they discovered it, partly because "the laughter response … allows us to monitor the positive affective states (feelings) of animals objectively." He speaks of his "intent in really making a solid science of this seemingly quirky finding, … a science of the emotional feelings of animals … as opposed to just (of their) behaviors." Panksepp says that "most neuroscientists are still dead-set against talking about the feelings of animals - as if it were just a matter of opinion, as opposed to a conclusion based on the weight of abundant evidence." Enter his ticklish laughing rats. In experiment after experiment, Panksepp's labs have found them reacting to the feelings of joy in ways similar to humans and (apparently) other animals - seeking it out, "self-stimulating" for it, sometimes in ways that even demonstrate that such play-induced joy may have a "liability to addiction." If Panksepp is right, his rats could, in effect, be laughing in the faces of those scientists who, he says, still "deem the emotional feelings of animals to be outside the bounds of empirical measurement." His discovery that his rats' laughter arises from inborn structures deep in the brain, combined with years of experiments to determine what sort of activity and other stimulation does and does not produce "rat vocalizations" (laughing chirps), has led Panksepp to declare (in the journal "Future Neurology") that the happy chirps may indeed "be used as direct readouts of emotional states." What Pet Owners May Already 'Know' This may all seem rather obvious to pet owners, in a non-scientific sort of way. They often report that they and their beloved dogs or cats share mutual languages rich in vocabularies of an endless variety of modulated meows and purrs, yips and barks, growls and groans, sweet whimpers, sly screeches, subtle hums, and half-gurgles, ruffs, gruffs and rawls. These subtly varied sounds, say pet owners, communicate emotions common to human and cat, or human and dog - and even, they claim, can convey not only emotions but plain and practical "intellectual ideas" involving food, shelter, and the need for creative play, as well as observations about important disruptions in the status quo. But after years of steady work in his lab, Panksepp says he and his colleagues can now present something far more testable - more scientific - than the declarations of happy pet owners. They report that they have now tracked communicative sounds (at least in rats, but with well-established and reasonable analogues in other animals including humans) to the specific deep-brain structures that produce specific emotions. For his fellow scientists, he labels these sounds "validated emotional vocalizations." If you're not a scientist, you can get a sense of their work - have a bit of fun, engage in a little word play - by reading just the titles of three of the jargon-rich and peer-reviewed scientific articles in which he and his team have reported these findings over the years. Don't be afraid. This reporter is certainly no scientist either, but I find that if you read these titles slowly and calmly, they start to make sense pretty quickly: "'Laughing rats' and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy?" (Panksepp and Bergdorf in Physiology & Behavior, 4/2003.) "Cross-Species Affective Neuroscience Decoding of the Primal Affective Experiences of Humans and Related Animals." (Panksepp in PLoS Public Library of Science 9/2011) (That phrase, "Primal Affective Experiences," refers roughly to basic emotions or feelings that evolved long ago in various species… including in those animals that eventually evolved into the likes of us.) And if you're really feeling frisky, try this: "Frequency-modulated 50 kHz ultrasonic vocalizations: a tool for uncovering the molecular substrates of positive affect" (Burgdorf, Panksepp, Moskal in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews35 / 2011) (Rough translation: how "ultrasonic vocalizations" - i.e., the laughter of tickled rats - may help lead scientists to find "molecular substrates of positive affect" - i.e., those structures in the brain that help make you feel good.) 'The Dark Side of Laughter'… and 'An Ancient Heritage' The study of laughter and play has a long lineage. Many philosophers have offered their insights. Aristotle and Plato wrote that laughter showed derision, asserted superiority. The Bible's Book of Proverbs says, "a merry heart doeth good like a medicine." Modern writer Umberto Eco built an entire detective novel around, among other things, the subversive power of laughter: Eco's "The Name of the Rose," set in a remote monastery in medieval Liguria in the coastal mountains of northwest Italy, circles around the vexed (for some) theological question of whether Jesus Christ ever laughed. (Some grouchy monks apparently just couldn't stand the idea, thought it dangerous.) In their 2003 article above, "' Laughing rats' and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy?" , Panksepp and Burgdorf assert that there has been little meaningful scientific work on the nature and purpose of laughter since French physician Laurent Joubert published his "Treatise on Laughter" in 1579, until now. This fascinating article is not all that hard to read - at least the one-paragraph summary "Abstract" at the beginning. It also tells how it all started - how one day, sometime "during the spring in 1997, the senior author came to the Lab, and suggested to the junior author, 'Let's go tickle some rats.' " In considering the nature and the mystery of human laughter, they remark on the fact that laughter first appears in human babies soon after birth, and thus seems to be inborn: They say the fact that the "vocal pattern of human laughter, that first appears in rudimentary form at 2-3 months of age, suggests an ancient heritage." In other words, that laughter seems to have evolved long ago in animals far more "primitive" than us, and survived through the bloody struggles of natural selection (only the fittest making it to pass on their laughter-loving DNA)… making survival more likely, and thus being "preserved" (kept) by evolution right up to the modern human, to say nothing of the modern lab rat. All of which suggests that laughter can help confer a powerful advantage in the world's hard struggles in which an animal must stay alive long enough to pass on its genes… otherwise why would laughter be so widespread and long-lived down through the great eons of time? A sobering section in the article is headed, "… And the dark side of laughter." It cites evidence that "Usually the children that prevail in play tend to laugh the most, suggesting that, to some extent, laughter may reflect a social dominance-seeking response, which may pave the way for laughter to stigmatize and degrade others through such behavior." The authors also evoke painful playground memories: "All too often, especially in children, laughter tends to become a psychological tool for teasing and taunting - the establishment of exclusionary group identities that can set the stage for finding mirth in the misfortunes of others. These tendencies may arise rather naturally from the fact that within-group laughter promotes group solidarity, which can then be used to ostracize and exhibit scorn toward those outside the group." They are careful to say: "We doubt if most other animals are capable of exhibiting such psychological tendencies, but such possibilities certainly need to be considered in future research…" But they go on to cite other studies of human laughter and play that open the possibility of play behavior (and the instinctive inborn laughter and joy that attends it) being used even for horrendous ends, since laughter "can also serve as the basis for social ridicule." An Insight Into the Horrors of Hitler? We asked a scholar of the Third Reich, Professor Geoffrey Cocks, author of several books on psychiatry and medicine in Hitler's Germany, for his general thoughts about whether play and laughter might have been enlisted in that regime's development - something that might resonate with the above description of how "within-group laughter promotes group solidarity, which can then be used to ostracize and exhibit scorn toward those outside the group." Cocks replied to ABC News in an email that "First, there is a sequence in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) in which Hitler Youth at the 1934 Nuremberg rally are shown at play: one scene shows boys being tossed high in the air off a tarpaulin and another scene shows 'chariot races' with two boys the 'horses' and another standing on their backs as the 'charioteer.'" Director Riefenstahl's infamous propaganda film "Triumph of the Will" shows Hitler's massively choreographed rallies in Nuremburg - enormous plays of pageantry - apparently reinforcing group solidarity. She followed it with her 1938 film "Olympia," which depicts the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin Germany as a similarly cohesive display of imputed German "Aryan" racial superiority, displayed through the muscular German teamwork in these "games." The film was advertised with a poster of happily smiling young blond women. Cocks also suggested a possible example of the abuse of play in the Hitler Youth: "It is true that the Nazi youth organizations in particular did put a special emphasis on physical activity, including play, as a means of 'toughening' Germany's youth as well promoting solidarity." He added this grim note: "There were board games in Nazi Germany that were designed to strengthen racial and national resolve. The most infamous was the board game Juden Raus! ["Out With the Jews!"] (1936), in which the object was to collect the most Jews and throw them out of town." But a quick check online, after Googling the three words "Nazi board games," suggests some ironic news about the limits of this dark side of play and laughter. It seems that the board game " Juden Raus!" was an "unsuccessful commercial product," attempting to ride the wave of official anti-Semitism and racism that was being whipped up by Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Ironically, according to citations in recent historical research, this board game was "criticized by an SS journal that felt it trivialized anti-Semitic policies." Perhaps not serious enough? - And let's have no laughter; you never know where it might be redirected? Did even the mere possibility of fun and play, whatever might trigger it, frighten the SS as being somehow too free? Modern play studies find abundant evidence that play has evolved to keep brains and minds open and flexible, free to consider a wide range of options - something dictators might well fear. 'By and Large a Grim and Humorless Group' In any case, Cocks, while noting that "It may well be that the subject of laughter and humor as a weapon of exclusion under Nazism is a subject waiting to be explored," does reflect that the Nazis "were by and large a grim, humorless group." Which is, of course, in no way to say that they might not still have won World War Two. History tells of many victories by grim and humorless leaders who led brutal regimes. But we instinctively sense a big difference between derisive vaunting laughter that excludes and truly joyful laughter that seems evidence of open-heartedness, the kind of laughter we'd find it hard to imagine in a cruel despot. It seems that something in addition to "mere play" - perhaps from brain structures that promote empathy and sympathy - needs to moderate pure play if it is to resist abuse for cruel ends. A Possible Explanation of the Modern 'Roast' As Panksepp and Burgdorf point out, the neurobiological study of laughter (and its attendant emotion, joy) as inborn impulses of the brain - both seated deeply in the brainstem right alongside other basic impulses including fear, lust and rage - is in its infancy. But they do offer a hint about our society's evolving use of laughter as a way to keep dominant personalities from taking themselves too seriously, which can always be a dangerous characteristic, especially in potential role models. They point out the complex play of dominance and group-building in a recent comic invention that might have been incomprehensible to some past cultures that took dominance very seriously - the modern "roast." "In adults, most laughter occurs in the midst of simple friendly social interactions while greeting and 'ribbing' each other rather than in response to explicit verbal jokes," they write in the "'laughing' rats…" article: "The two are brought together in our institution of 'roasting' those we love and admire: The more dominant the targets of the roast, the more mirth there is to be had at their good-humored expense." It may lead you to think of the annual Correspondents' Dinner in Washington, D.C. In it, the president of the richest and most powerful country on earth is expected to publicly suffer probing jibes of wit and humor - possibly even offer some of his own - to the accompaniment of a great deal of merry laughter, that fertile signal of instructive play in which, say scientists, we learn a great deal about each other … knowledge that may be vital when, all together, we must face some future crisis. We invite you to follow our weekly Nature's Edge Notebook on Facebook and on Twitter @BBlakemoreABC This is the ninth in a series on animal intelligence and the science of play behavior : 1- " Hunting With a Most Endangered Hunter - Dateline Botswana" At: http://abcn.ws/rI6Obx (Nature's Edge Notebook #11) 2- "Dogs Use Subway, Cat Takes Bus…" At: http://abcn.ws/zXPpDd (Nature's Edge Notebook #12) 3- "Who Needs Words? Crows? You? Wild Gorillas? Alison Krauss? …" At: http://abcn.ws/wM25PJ (Nature's Edge Notebook #13) 4- "How Would a Prairie Dog Describe You? Just Ask One!" At: http://abcn.ws/yIZ9it (Nature's Edge Notebook #14) 5- "Dolphins Reported Talking Whale in Their Sleep: Freud's 'Royal Road to the unconscious' may have surfaced at a pool in France." At: http://abcn.ws/yXpddT (Nature's Edge Notebook #15) 6- "Fun and Play Are Key to Survival for Bears, Dogs, Humans, Birds, and Maybe Even Ants." At: http://abcn.ws/z4kS2G (Nature's Edge Notebook #16) 7- " Is Universe Made to Make You Giggle? Play Seen in Humans, Fish, Atoms, and the Universe. A Self-Organizing Quirkiness" is suspected by experts in nature itself … from ants to atoms to distant galaxies." At: http://abcn.ws/ApUElY ( Nature's Edge Notebook #17) 8- "Lessons Learned by Tickling Rats. Chirping Rats and Stand-up Comics: Play and laughter is found deep in the brain stem alongside rage and lust." At: http://abcn.ws/wcrRMJ (Nature's Edge Notebook #18)

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By Ron Hutchison The the city of Smyrna (today Izmir in Turkey) was located just a little north of the city of Ephesus. It's secular history can be studied by clicking on this link. Smyrna was the home of Polycarp, an elder in the church, who was martyred because of his faith in the second century. You may recall that when Polycarp was told to renounce Christ he said, "eighty-six years I have served the Lord, and He never wronged me; how then can I blaspheme my Lord and Savior?" Polycarp's strong faith was typical of the faith of the Christians who were in Smyrna at the time of the writing of the book of Revelation. The city of Smyrna was also a seat of the worship of the pagan idols Cybele, called "the Mother of the gods," and of Dionysus or Bacchus. It was also a seat of the worship of the city of Rome with a temple built to worship the goddess Roma in 195 B.C. Emperor worship was practiced with a temple built to honor the Roman Emperor Tiberius in 28 A.D. The church in Smyrna was probably established by the apostle Paul (Acts 19:8-10). It was being severely persecuted at the time this letter was written. Smyrna had a large Jewish population and many of the Jews were hostile toward the church. John Gill makes an interesting statement regarding the meaning of the name Smyrna: The churches at Smyrna and Philadelphia are the only congregations of the seven that Jesus addressed that were not condemned for having sin in the congregation. Before we begin a study of Revelation 2:8-11, we need to get a little background concerning the book of Revelation. I am one of the minority who believes that the book of Revelation was written before A.D. 70. The purpose of the book of Revelation was to encourage suffering Christians by showing them that Jesus was on His throne and the ungodly rulers were resisting His authority by persecuting His followers. The suffering they faced was not a sign that Jesus had left this world to Satan, but it showed that He is now King of kings: The book of Revelation was a book written for first century Christians. It is addressed to the seven churches of Asia (Revelation 1:4). It dealt with what these Christians were immediately facing in their time. I believe it is wrong for us to give a future interpretation to most of this book. It seems that those who do so always believe they are the ones living in the "last days" and that the prophecies of the book apply to their time. This self-centeredness is responsible for much of the false teaching and wild speculations regarding the book of Revelation and such passages as Matthew 24. Of course the events the book of Revelation foretold were in the future of those to whom the book was originally addressed, but they occurred soon after the book was given and in our past. For us, the great majority of the book of Revelation is history. The greatest enemy of the church in the first century was apostate Israel (Acts 9:23; 12:3; 13:45, 50; 14:2-6, 19; 17:5-9, 13; 18:12; 20:3, 19; 21:11, 27; 23:12; 25:1-26; 26:7, 21; 2 Corinthians 11:24; Revelation 3:9) . Israel used the Roman Empire to try to destroy the church of Christ just as it had done to crucify Jesus (Matthew 27:1-2, 17-25). The book of Revelation teaches that these great enemies of Christ and His church were soon to be judged and destroyed (Revelation 14:8; 17:1-18 cf. Matthew 23:29-39; 24:1-2; Luke 21:5-28; John 19:15; See also Isaiah 1:21; Jeremiah 2:20-24, 30-33; 3:1-3; Hosea 9:1; Ezekiel 16:26-29; 23:11-21). Thus, the primary message of the book of Revelation was for it's first century readers. It was intended for the seven churches of Asia (Revelation 1:4). Jesus clearly expected the readers to understand the various symbols used in the book (Revelation 13:18). Not once did He imply that the book applied to the 20th or 21st centuries or for that matter to the 19th, 18th, 17th, etc... Of course, it still has relevance today as we apply it's principles to our life and culture. Jesus Christ still demands from us what He demanded from the early church - absolute faithfulness to Him (Revelation 2:10). J.Stuart Russell wrote: Must it not of necessity refer to matters of contemporary history? The only tenable, the only reasonable, hypothesis is that it was intended to be understood by its original readers; but this is as much as to say that it must be occupied with the events and transactions of their own day, and these comprised within a comparatively brief space of time.” (J. Stuart Russell, The Parousia: A Critical Inquiry into the New Testament Doctrine of Our Lord’s Second Coming (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1983), p. 366.) We must realize that John writes this book about events "which must shortly take place" (Revelation 1:1), and warns that "the time is near" (Revelation 1:3). And in case we might not be convinced He says at the end of the book, "And the Lord God of the holy prophets sent His angel to show His servants the things which must shortly take place" (Revelation 22:6). If something is going to take place shortly and if the time is near, that does not mean it is centuries away. It means it is near! "Shortly" and "near" can't mean anything else but what they mean. While the book of Revelation may mention some things that will take place in our future (Revelation 22:14), it's main focus is on events that would directly affect the seven churches of Asia in the first century. Let me mention another point: In Revelation 22:10 John is instructed, "Do not seal the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is at hand." Again, we are told that the time is at hand or that it is contemporary with John. However, the angel's statement is in contrast to the command that the prophet Daniel received at the end of his book: "But you, Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book until the time of the end..." (Daniel 12;4). Daniel is specifically ordered to seal up his prophecy, because it referred to "the end," in the distant future. But John is told not to seal up his prophecy, because the time of which he speaks is "at hand." Thus, the focus on John's prophecy is contemporary to the first century readers. It is written to show those suffering Christians that Jesus is Lord and King, that He is in control, that He will be glorified in all things and that His enemies will go down in defeat. The Christians of that day were being tempted to compromise with false religions. They were being tempted to renounce Christ. They were being tempted to compromise with civil government (The Roman Empire). They needed this message of ultimate victory in the face of the trials they were facing. Of course, we need this same message today. We are tempted on every hand to compromise with the false religions of our day - to accept what our civil government does that is contrary to God's law (abortion, homosexuality etc...) The book of Revelation speaks just as powerfully to us today as it did to those of John's day. We are in the same battle today and we must never give an inch of ground to the enemies of our Lord and Savior! (Galatians 2:4-5). The book of Revelation is just that - a revelation. It was intended to reveal. It was not intended to be mysterious. It was intended to be understood (Revelation 1:1-3). It is the revelation of Jesus Christ. That is, Jesus Christ originated it. It is not a warning about things the people in the first century would never see (things that would take place in the far distant future) but a warning about things the first century Christians would personally experience. THE DATE OF WRITING I said at the beginning of this article that I am one of the minority who believe that the book of Revelation was written prior to A.D. 70. One of the reasons I believe this is set forth below. In Daniel 9:24-27, Daniel is inspired to give a prophecy concerning the coming of the Messiah and the destruction of Jerusalem. He wrote, "Seventy weeks are determined for your people and for your holy city, to finish the transgression, to make an end of sins, to make reconciliation for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most Holy" (Daniel 9:24). "Your people" refers to the Jews. The "holy city" refers to Jerusalem. The fulfillment of this prophecy was to take place during "seventy weeks." Most scholars believe this to be a time period of 490 years. During this "seventy weeks" several things were to happen: According to verses 25 and 27 the prophesy covers events that would take place "from the going forth of the command to restore and build Jerusalem...." to when "He shall bring an end to sacrifice and offering..." Notice that during this period the "Messiah shall be cut off..." (verse 26). This is referring to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Notice also that verse 26 refers to "the prince who is to come" who "shall destroy the city" (Jerusalem) and the sanctuary" (the temple in Jerusalem). Then verse 27 speaks of the one who destroys the temple as one who "shall bring an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of abominations shall be one who makes desolate." This is what Jesus spoke of in Matthew 24:1-34 and Luke 21: 5-28. It is referring to the Roman general Titus whose armies destroyed the temple. Jesus, in His inspired interpretation of Daniel 9, applies this prophecy to the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Notice that the things that would happen during the "seventy weeks" that are listed above would take place between the time of the command to restore and build Jerusalem (possibly referring to the decree of Artaxerxes in 444 B.C. See Nehemiah 2:5-8; 17-18, or the command given to Ezra in 458 B.C., See Ezra 7:11-26), and the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Among the things that would happen between these two events was "to seal up vision and prophecy" (Daniel 9:24). Vision and prophecy refers to inspired revelation. Daniel's prophecy tells us that revelation would cease before the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. This means that all of the New Testament books (including Revelation) had to be written before A.D. 70. Hence, it could not have been written in A.D. 96. The death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Christ marked the end of the Old Covenant and the beginning of the New (Matthew 26:28; Ephesians 2:14-16; Hebrews 9:15-17). At that time Israel's fate was sealed. The Kingdom would be taken from them (Matthew 21:33-46). "Wrath" came "upon them to the uttermost" (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16). Vengeance was brought upon them (Luke 21:20-22). God did not destroy Jerusalem until the writing of the New Covenant was completed. When that was done, He destroyed the kingdom of Israel (Matthew 23:34-36; 24:34; Luke 11:49-51). Jerusalem's destruction was the last blast of the trumpet, signaling that the "mystery of God" was finished (Revelation 10:7). There would be no more revelation after Israel was gone. The faith had been "once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 1:3). With the above thoughts in mind, let's now begin our study of Revelation 2:8-11. "And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write..." The word "angel" means "messenger." Jesus connects stars with the angels in chapter one (Revelation 1:20). Angels and stars are often associated with government and rule (cf. Genesis 37:9; Judges 5:20; Daniel 8:9-11; 10:13, 20-21). Clearly, Christ holds the angels of the churches responsible for the life and conduct of their respective congregations. It is my opinion that the angel of each church represents the government of each congregation which would be the eldership or the overseers of the church (Acts 14:23; 15:2-6, 22; 20:17-31; 21:8; 1 Timothy 3:1-7; 5:17-20; Titus 1:5-9; Philippians 1:1; James 5:14;1 Peter 5:1-5). "These things says the First and the Last, who was dead, and came to life..." Two things caused the church at Smyrna severe problems. First, the people of the city were emperor worshippers. There was a temple at Smyrna devoted to the worship of the Roman Emperor Tiberius. The Romans did not appreciate anyone who did not bow down to Caesar. Second, there was a large population of Jews who were hostile toward Christians. Both the Romans and the Jews heaped great persecution upon the Christians. Jesus says that He is "the First and the Last." This is the way God referred to Himself in Isaiah 44:6-8 and Isaiah 48:12. The context of these verses is that God is in control. He is the One who has planned and who controls all reality. He was there when everything began and He will be there when everything ends. This was a source of comfort and assurance to the Christians in Smyrna. The Romans and Jews were not in control, God is in control. God is sovereign. The things that happen to Christians, even though they may be hard to bear, are ordained by God to work out for our good and the good of others (Romans 8:28). This means that even our sufferings are a part of His plan and that when we are opposed, we do not need to fear that God has deserted us. We can be secure in the fact that since we have been called "according to His purpose," all things in life are a necessary aspect of that purpose. Not only is Christ the First and the Last, He "was dead, and came to life." This is speaking of His complete victory over death and the grave as the "firstfruits" of all those who die in the Lord (1 Corinthians 15:20-22). If the saints at Smyrna are persecuted even to the point of dying, it is no more than their Lord suffered at the hands of those same people (Jews and Romans). He died, but He is alive, and because He is alive, those who are persecuted will also live (1 Corinthians 15:12-20). His resurrection guarantees our resurrection. Thus, regardless of the force and brutality of their persecutors, the Christians in Smyrna could not be defeated. In fact, their death was their victory (1 Corinthians 15:54-57; 1 John 5:4-5). "I know your works, tribulation, and poverty (but you are rich); and I know the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan." It was not easy for Christians in Smyrna, but Jesus let them know that He knew what they are going through (Hebrews 4:15). This shows Jesus' care and concern for His people. No matter what you may be facing right now, Jesus knows about it. He is concerned about it. What a source of comfort and assurance this was for the Christians at Smyrna. He knew their "works." This refers to their way of life - their faithfulness in serving God. In Matthew 5:16 Jesus said, "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven." The works of the Christians in Smyrna were evidently good works. Their lives glorified the Father. Their persecution was brought about because of their faithful works. On one occasion the Jews picked up rocks to stone Jesus and "Jesus answered them, 'Many good works I have shown you from My Father. For which of those works do you stone Me?'" (John 10:32). Every work that Jesus did was a good work. And, although the Jews denied it (John 10:33), Jesus was persecuted because of His teaching and good works. Paul taught, "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them" (Ephesians 2:10). The Christians in Smyrna knew that they were created for good works. In 1 Timothy 5:24-25 Paul wrote, Some men's sins are clearly evident, preceding them to judgment, but those of some men follow later. Likewise, the good works of some are clearly evident, and those that are otherwise cannot be hidden. The sins of the apostate Jews and the pagan Romans were clearly evident. Likewise, the good works of the Christians were clearly evident. These good works were one of the reasons they were being persecuted. Jesus knew their works. Jesus also knew of their tribulation. He knew the persecution they were facing and would face in the future. Jesus promised His apostles that they would have tribulation (John 16:33). He told them, "Remember the word that I said to you, 'A servant is not greater than his master.' If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will keep yours also" (John 15:20). When Paul and Barnabas returned to some of the places where they had planted churches they told them, "We must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God" (Acts 14:22; see also 2 Timothy 3:12). We need to realize that the Jews and Romans persecuted Jesus. They hated Jesus and so they hated His disciples. We can expect nothing less. We must have the attitude that the apostles had when they were beaten by the Jewish council: "So they departed from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name" (Acts 5:41). This persecution did not stop the apostles from teaching and preaching Jesus as the Christ (Acts 5:42) and we must not let it stop us. He knew their poverty. The Christians in Smyrna were poverty stricken because of their stand for the faith. This means they had few material possessions. It may be that their property had been confiscated (Hebrews 10:34). It is also likely that they were robbed of the ability to work and support their families because they refused to align themselves with either the pagan emperor worshippers or the apostate Jews (cf. Revelation 13:16-17). Yet, in their poverty Jesus says they were rich. They were "rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him..." (James 2:5) They had nothing, but possessed all things (2 Corinthians 6:10). They were rich spiritually. They enjoyed blessings beyond what it was possible for the pagan Romans and apostate Jews to even imagine (Proverbs 10:22; 11:25; 13:7; 28:6). The Christians of Smyrna were "rich toward God" (Luke 12:21). Jesus had become poor so that they could become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9). They had the hope and promise of eternal life (1 John 2:25). If we remain faithful, the trials we face will help us experience the greatest wealth that anyone can experience - spiritual wealth. We will lack nothing (James 1:2-5). Jesus also said that He knew about the "...the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan." Jesus mentions the synagogue of Satan in His letter to the church in Philadelphia (Revelation 3:9). Here the Lord tells us the identity of those who opposed the church in Smyrna. It was those "who say they are Jews." It tells us what they were doing. They were blaspheming. They were speaking against Christ and His church. These Jews claimed to be children of Abraham, but in reality they were the children of Satan. These are the Israelites who had rejected Christ and thus had rejected the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Jesus confronted these kind of Jews as recorded in John 8. The Jews said to Him, "'Abraham is our father.' Jesus said to them, 'If you were Abraham's children, you would do the works of Abraham. But now you seek to kill Me, a Man who has told you the truth which I heard from God. Abraham did not do this. You do the deeds of your father.' Then they said to Him, 'We were not born of fornication; we have one Father; God.' Jesus said to them, 'If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and came from God; nor have I come of Myself, but He sent Me. Why do you not understand My speech? Because you are not able to listen to My word. You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it'" (John 8:39-44). The Jews in Smyrna were like the Jews in Jerusalem. They were not true Jews because they rejected Christ. This is why Jesus calls them "a synagogue of Satan." They were Satan's children, not Abraham's. Paul wrote, "For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh; but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not from men but from God." (Romans 2:28-29). The true Jew is the one who walks in the steps of the faith of Abraham (Romans 4:12, 16). The true Jew is the one who obeys the gospel (Galatians 3:7-9; 26-29). The history of the church is filled with examples of false witness by the Jews against the church (Acts 6:9-15; 13:10; 14:2-5; 17:5-8; 18:6, 12-13; 19:9; 21:27-36; 24:1-9; 25:2-3,7). These were instigated by Satan in his attempt to destroy the church. Jesus then gives the Christians in Smyrna a warning of what they are about to face: "Do not fear any of those things which you are about to suffer. Indeed, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested, and you will have tribulation ten days. Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life" (Revelation 2:10). There was going to be suffering. But they should not fear the things they were going to face. Jesus taught us, "And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matthew 10:28). The Christians in Smyrna would face severe persecution. Some of them would be thrown into prison. It was the devil that instigated this. He used the Jews allied with the Roman Empire, but it was the devil who was behind it all. It is because of his hostility toward Christ and His disciples (Genesis 3:15). Jesus says that this is so that they may be tested. The trials that Christians face are used by God to purify and discipline (cf. Job 23:10; 1 Peter 4:12-19). The tribulation that the church in Smyrna would face would be severe, but it would be relatively short - ten days. But many of those Christians would lose their lives, so Jesus tells them to be faithful until death and He would give them the crown of life. Paul wrote, "If we endure, We shall also reign with Him. If we deny Him, He also will deny us" (2 Timothy 2:12). Jesus said, "And you will be hated by all for My name's sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved" (Matthew 10:22). The crown of life is eternal salvation. Those who endure to the end, who remain faithful, will receive the crown of life which can never be taken away. Paul wrote, "Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain it. And everyone who competes for the prize is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a perishable crown, but we for an imperishable crown" (1 Corinthians 9:24-25). The crown of life is an imperishable crown. It will never fade away (1 Peter 1:3-4). James wrote, "Blessed is the man who endures temptation; for when he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love Him" (James 1:12). The crown of life is promised to those who love Jesus. Who is the one who loves Jesus? Jesus said in John 14:15, "If you love Me, keep My commandments." The person who loves Jesus is the one who keeps His commandments. The Christians at Smyrna truly loved Jesus, therefore they were promised the crown of life. However, that crown of life depended on them enduring - remaining faithful even in the face of severe persecution and physical death. The faithful Christian who overcomes opposition and endures unto death "shall not be hurt by the second death."' (Revelation 2:11). The fact that this was written to a first century church helps us understand the meaning of another passage in this book. Revelation 20:6 states, Blessed and holy is he who has part in the first resurrection. Over such the second death has no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with Him a thousand years. The one who will not be hurt by the second death is the one who has part in the first resurrection, and they are priests of God and Christ, a blessing that John has already stated to be a present reality (Revelation 1:6). Therefore, the first resurrection cannot refer to the physical resurrection at the end of the world (1 Corinthians 15:22-28). Rather, it must refer to what Paul was speaking of in Colossians 3:1-3: "If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God." Paul tells us that the Colossians were "raised with Christ." As a result they were to "seek those things which are above where Christ is..." He tells them that "you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God." There is a death and resurrection in every Christians' life. When does this death and resurrection take place? Look at Romans 6:1-4. "What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life." When is one raised with Christ? Paul says it is when we are baptized (immersed). When a person goes down into the watery grave of baptism there is a death that takes place. It is the persons death to sin. Then there is a resurrection that takes place. "Just as Christ was raised from the dead...even we also should walk in newness of life." Our death, burial and resurrection takes place in baptism. This is in the likeness of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus (Romans 6:5-11). This is the first resurrection that every Christian experiences. The one who experiences the first resurrection "shall not be hurt by the second death." The person who is baptized into Christ for the remission of his sins will be saved eternally (Galatians 3:26-27; Acts 2:38). Obedience to the gospel and living a faithful Christian life is how one escapes the second death which is eternal separation from God. Jesus says, "He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches." To hear what the Spirit says is to listen to the words that were revealed to John by the Holy Spirit. This indicates that John was inspired by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21; 2 Timothy 3:16-17). I sometimes wonder how I would bear up under the kind of persecution that my fellow Christians in Smyrna faced. Would I be able to stand strong as they did? Would I be willing to die instead of renouncing Christ? I'm not sure any of us can answer these questions until we face the same kind of circumstances. Unfortunately, and to my shame, I know I have sinned under far less severe circumstances. Let us follow the example of the Christians in Smyrna. Let us do all we can for the cause of Christ and when we face persecution because of it, let us endure to the end and receive the crown of life promised to those who love Jesus.

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Cobalt has come into the limelight over the last eighteen months or so. This is unsurprising given the surge in smartphone users, battery-powered devices and investment and uptake of electric vehicles. As such, the cobalt supply chain is being looked at with more and more scrutiny. In 2014, Amnesty International together with African Resource Watch (“Afrewatch”) exposed Chinese cobalt producer, Congo Dongfang Mining (CDM), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chinese mineral giant, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Ltd (Huayou Cobalt), for purchasing material from artisinal miners, which often exploits children. The expose managed to link key end-users including Apple, Samsung and Sony as benefiting from this system and accused these companies of failing to do basic checks to ensure that the cobalt used in their supply chains did not come from child labour. The Amnesty International Report was swiftly followed by the Wall Street Journal in January last year, which provided video-evidence of child labour and exploitative conditions. Sky News has since jumped on the anti-cobalt trail when in February 2017, it captured children as young as four years old tied up in the cobalt supply chain. Human Rights violations is not new to the mining industry. Nor is it new or even surprising to be occurring in the DRC- a country which is one of the poorest in Africa and in 2014 ranked 151st out of 159 countries in the Human Freedom Index, however the background to the DRC and how copper/mining licenses were awarded and just how the supply chain got so out of hand, explains fully the level of corruption and decisions made by both Government and industry to partake in this corruption which has led us down the current path. So the intention here is to set out in detail the history of the cobalt sector in the DRC, which is key to understanding governance circumstances surrounding the securing of these companies’ mining licenses, some of the constraints that companies in the DRC need to overcome and really just to try and make sense of the fact as to how cobalt, which is a relatively small industry, as opposed to copper, diamonds, gold and tantalum became the modern-day posterchild for human rights violations. 2. Overview of cobalt in the DRC Notwithstanding all its challenges, the DRC’s copper and cobalt industry is the largest, most productive and highest export-earning sector in the country. National official statistics in the DRC are particularly unreliable but – for what they are worth – they state that in 2013, industry, including mining, contributed 21.7% of national GDP. Industrial production in the country has dwindled over the years to near-zero, so nearly all of this figure relates to mining. In 2012, the IMF estimated that 97% of the country’s export earnings came from oil and minerals. A year later, government figures showed total recorded mining exports to be worth $7bn, or 71%, of an estimated national total of $9.9bn. Of this $7bn, recorded copper and cobalt exports contributed $6.6bn, 95%, and two-thirds of the country’s entire recorded exports. 2.1 The DRC’s illegal trade in minerals A large proportion of the DRC’s exports (and imports) are not recorded. While minerals appear to constitute the bulk of both the value and volume of the country’s unrecorded exports, copper and cobalt’s proportion of this is probably lower than that recorded for exports. Although there is, and has been for many years, the unrecorded export of copper and cobalt ores and concentrates from Katanga, most of which is mined using artisanal miners, the majority of copper and cobalt is mined industrially and officially exported. Despite worsening electrical power woes, the DRC’s official copper production was over 900,000 tonnes in 2013, a record for the country, 45% higher than was exported in 2012, and higher for the first time in years than copper production in neighbouring Zambia. Mined production of cobalt in the DRC increased an estimated 9% in 2013, reaching 51,500 tonnes compared to 47,330 tonnes in 2012. Production from the DRC’s top three cobalt producers represented over 68% of the country’s total production, with Mutanda Mining firmly taking over the position from TFM as the largest cobalt producer. In 2013, production of cobalt intermediates grew an estimated 37% to 32,300 tonnes of cobalt in primarily crude hydroxide form, with much of the incremental supply coming from Mutanda Mining, where cobalt output total reached 5,500 tonnes. The outlook for cobalt production in 2017 is expected to be 3.7% higher than in 2016, with the majority of the added capacity to be in the form of hydroxide. However we note that smelters such as Chambishi are looking at the possibility of fixing one output (such as hydroxide) and varying the other two forms ( metal and oxide for example) so it is difficult to predict the form of cobalt being produced. Chart 1: Production outlook of cobalt In contrast to copper and cobalt, well over half the country’s gold production is artisanally mined, with over 90% of this output being smuggled. Diamond smuggling is also common, and the proportion of the country’s tin and tantalum production that is exported illegally remains high despite ongoing efforts to track and trace supply chains in order to prevent conflict financing. With all these provisos, however, it may nonetheless be stated with confidence that copper and cobalt are by some way the country’s largest export earners. Industrial copper and cobalt miners are also, along with telecom companies, the country’s largest tax payers. In theory, the mining sector’s taxes are governed by the Mining Code, introduced in 2002, except for the few companies that still have hybrid mining conventions, such as Tenke Fungurume (“TFM”), now owned by China Molybdenum. 2.1.1 General note on artisinal mining and cobalt Hundreds of thousands of Katangans live as artisanal copper and cobalt miners, or in support services (rock crushing, restaurants, prostitution, mobile phones etc.). Unlike in other provinces, where artisanal mining has been going on for decades, it is a relatively new phenomenon in Katanga, arising from the slide into bankruptcy of Gècamines during the 1990s. Prior to this, there was little or no artisanal copper and cobalt mining in the province, though there was artisanal tin mining in Haut Katanga. The first artisanal miners of copper and cobalt were said to be ex-Gècamines employees themselves and their families, who were seeing the mines where they worked cease operations and their incomes dwindle to nothing. Artisanals progressively invaded industrial, or more properly ex-industrial sites on the Copperbelt, and began mining copper and cobalt ores. During the early 2000s, the ores were often sold to Chinese buyers, who would transport them unprocessed via South Africa for refining in China. The province subsequently banned the export of ore, which resulted in the emergence of a number of Chinese-operated mineral processors, who partially refined artisanally mined ores into concentrates for export back to their motherland. 2.2 Routes out of the country for copper and cobalt Infrastructural capacity is the Achilles Heel in the copper/cobalt supply chain. I presented on this subject at the 2010 Cobalt Development Institute (CDI) conference, but the findings definitely still apply. Traditionally colonial powers in Africa and later competing superpowers did not encourage road links between their respective peers, thus newly independent African states border restrictions were often tightened rather than relaxed as a way of protecting trade. Aside from this, wars and conflicts have led to the destruction of roads and river crossings, often preventing maintenance, leading to closures of major links. In the case of the DRC, war has partially destroyed the principal routes between West and East Africa and set back road infrastructure development. Furthermore, delays are exacerbated by highway checkpoints and border controls across Africa. Routes out of the DRC Figure 1: Road map of Africa showing border controls and checkpoints On Figure 1, we note the following three main points: - The Lobita-Beira Highway, otherwise known as the East-West Route. Most of that road is unpaved, it was used until the mid-70s, but now the Western Half from Angola South and Central DRC needs reconstruction. - Also there are two internal roads, the Kolwezi Likasi road and the Lumbumbashi Kasumbalesa roads. In the case of the former, it is hardly operational in the rainy season and even in the dry seasons, conditions are very poor. Nikanor did spend some money repairing the roads to ensure the transportation of equipment, but the lack of maintenance since then has returned the road to its previous condition. The bridge over the Lulaba River is in desperate need of repair, though it has been reported that a Chinese company will be rebuilding the road by the end of the year. The upgrade of the Kolwezi-Likasi road must be seen as a priority in order to ensure smooth carriage of copper and cobalt, though to date there has not yet been a company who has completed this upgrade. - The Lubumbashi Kasumbalesa road is in good condition as the toll system enables maintenance. However, the border at Kasumbalesa is badly organised as vehicles cannot pass on a Sunday, causing traffic jams on Monday and Tuesdays. Although the traffic jams between Lubumbashi and Kasumbalesa have been somewhat relieved by the Congolese Customs Body Control Centre, there is still a need for improvement. Therefore the only viable road options for export from Katanga Province have been: - Small volumes to the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania - North and South (NS) Corridor routes via Zimbabwe/Botswana Despite having to cross up to four borders and the large distance, the N-S corridor is, and is expected to remain, a preferred route. South Africa is a major supplier of goods to its southern African neighbours and therefore the NS corridors presents the opportunity for return loads, which has a positive effect on transportation costs. With respect to the rail network, although the rail system in Southern Africa is extensive connecting Durban to DRC and East Africa, most of the continents’ railways are disconnected lines. Additionally outside of South Africa, most networks still operate with their original facilities-some of which are more than a century old and have not been upgraded. Consequently, they are only capable of moving low axle loads. Furthermore, in some systems, major sections are not operational and require rehabilitation before operations can resume. Work is underway to rehabilitate the 1,344 km Benguela railway between Katanga and Lobito port in Angola. If successful, this would become the shortest possible export route to Europe and would link Angola to the copper belt in Zambia and Katanga. At present the line is only operational between Lobito and Cubal, having been rehabilitated and opened in 2005. However, it is in a very poor condition and runs at speeds of less than 15km/hr between Kolwezi and Dilolo. On the Angolan side, Civil War destroyed part of the network in 1975. In 2005, China provided $300-500m in financial aid to assist with the replacement of the track. However in January 2011 there was a dispute between the Chinese rail construction company and DRC railway Company, SNCC, over payment, which resulted in suspension of the project. Since this time, news regarding the upgrade has been scant. 2.3 Corporate Copper and Cobalt Miners in the DRC The DRC’s copper/cobalt sector is highly diversified, comprising of around thirty domestic and foreign companies operating in the space. The top five copper/cobalt producers in the country represent around two thirds of the country’s copper production. ENRC, China Molybdenum ( which bought Tenke from Freeport-McMoRan) and Glencore account for some of the largest copper mines in the country. 2.4 The origin of DRC copper/cobalt and the role of Gècamines President Mobutu Sese Seko nationalised the Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK) in 1967, creating the Générale Congolaise des Minerais, which later became the Générale des Carrières et des Mines (GCM or Gécamines). Gècamines, which was and is 100% state-owned, quickly became the president’s cash cow, was also required to spend increasing amounts on its workers and surrounding communities, effectively replacing the state in Katanga’s Copperbelt in the provision of social services. Spending on maintenance, investment and exploration dwindled, hastening the day when the company’s production collapsed. That day came in 1990, with the collapse of pillars holding up mine shafts in the Kamoto underground mine, one of the company’s biggest mines. Then followed a two-year period of great political turbulence in the country, with Mobutu and the government issuing rival currencies at one stage, and the army going on two devastating, presidentially-sanctioned national looting sprees. Gècamines’ copper output fell from over 450,000 tonnes in 1988 to under 40,000 tonnes in 1992, pushing it rapidly towards bankruptcy. Desperate for cash, in 1995 Mobutu authorised then-prime minister Leon Kengo Wa Dondo’s administration to sign a management agreement with Enterprises Generales Malta Forrest (EGMF) for Gècamines’ Kasombo concession, and a production agreement with Australia’s Anvil Mining for Dikulushi and Kapulo. A joint venture agreement was also concluded in somewhat mysterious circumstances between Gècamines and Canada’s Lundin for the massive Tenke Fungurume concession in which Phelps Dodge, and subsequently Freeport McMoRan of the United States later took a majority shareholding. Uniquely, at the time, Gècamines’ mining title to Tenke Fungurume was transferred to the new joint venture. In 1996, the Rwanda-backed/created Alliance des Forces Democratiques pour la Liberation du Congo-Zaire (AFDL), apparently led by Laurent-Desire Kabila, launched its war against Mobutu. As the resistance of the Forces Armees Zairois evaporated and the AFDL ploughed through the country, mining investors rapidly switched their attentions from Mobutu to Kabila. Kabila welcomed them and his team re-negotiated several mining contracts to secure additional signature bonuses and perks (including use of an executive jet) for him even before he reached Kinshasa. Kabila took Kinshasa and became president in 1997. A year later, the country was at war again, with rebel armies backed by Rwanda and Uganda for several years restricting Kabila’s zone of control to the western provinces alone. Luckily for Kabila, however, his zone included the Katangan Copperbelt. 2.4.1 Middle men-Katumba Mwanke and Dan Gertler Fighting the war and staying in power was an expensive business, and to help pay for it, Kabila authorised Augustin Katumba Mwanke, a former banker whom he made governor of Katanga, to raise money by either selling Gècamines’ assets and agreeing to new joint ventures. Among the first in the queue was Dan Gertler, a young Israeli diamond merchant who in 1997 lent Kabila $20m and facilitated introductions to Israeli security specialists. Gertler, who also befriended the president’s son Joseph, forming a connection that continues today, subsequently lent a further $15m, for which he was rewarded with a lucrative near-monopoly on the sale of diamonds from MIBA, a state-owned enterprise (SOE). Mwanke’s priority in agreeing to joint ventures was to secure signature bonuses for Kabila and his entourage. In return, investors demanded – and received – a host of concessions including long-term tax exemptions that in some cases exceeded thirty years. Kabila was murdered in 2001 and replaced by his son, Joseph, who swiftly reversed many of his father’s policies. Joseph co-operated with the UN rather than blocking them and in so doing invited back the IMF and the World Bank to the DRC. All three institutions responded eagerly, and the Bank was the driving force behind the Mining Code, which was approved by the National Assembly in 2002. Under the Code, a new Cadastre Miniere (CAMI; a mines registry) was established, tasked with allocating mining titles transparently, according to objective criteria, on a first-come-first-served basis, to operators with guaranteed financial and technical capacity. The Code also introduced provisions intended to ensure that licenses remained only with operators who could demonstrate they had made progress on the ground, and standardised the fiscal regime, determining tax and royalty levels, and requiring that all funds from title sales go directly to the Treasury. There were presidential elections in 2006, and Kabila needed money for his election campaign. During 2005, the state owned mining company, Gècamines, negotiated no less than twelve new and revised joint ventures for some of its best assets, like the Kamoto Underground Mine, Musonoi, and Kamoto East, Oliviera and Virgule (KOV). The joint venture agreements all featured significant signature bonuses, once again in return for tax breaks, excessive discounts on the value of existing infrastructure, and other costly concessions. Dan Gertler and Belgian-Congolese businessman George Forrest featured prominently among the private sector investors in the new joint ventures, many of which were headed up by people deployed by Mwanke. A striking feature of these agreements was how little effort Gècamines made in their preparation to value the reserves and infrastructure it was selling, to the point of refusing offers of help in this regard from donors and NGOs. This was because the Gècamines negotiators knew full well what poor value they were getting, but dared not speak out about the reason they were agreeing to them anyway. The big exception was Tenke Fungurume. In 2005 Phelps Dodge, which was at the time the main shareholder in the project, agreed to restructure the joint venture in a process facilitated by then-vice-president Jean-Pierre Bemba. Bemba was Kabila’s main opponent in the 2006 elections, in which both claimed victory. The courts, unsurprisingly, found in Kabila’s favour, and Bemba’s militia and the Republican Guard subsequently slugged it out in the streets of Kinshasa. Bemba’s militia came off worst and Bemba fled to Portugal, from where he was later extradited to face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The new joint venture terms for Tenke included an additional $50m signature bonus, and both Phelps Dodge and Lundin were later accused by some in Kabila’s circle of funding Bemba’s election campaign. Both companies denied the charges, but the matter soured relations between them and the government, improving only when Freeport McMoRan bought out Phelps Dodge’s stake. 2.5 Mine licenses are reviewed (and cancelled) Domestic and international concern about DRC mining sector joint ventures mounted, and in response in April 2007, Minister of Mines, Martin Kabwelulu announced a review of all mining contracts. The review was scheduled to take three months, but ended up taking four years, with the ministry spurning all international offers of technical assistance for the process. In most cases, the contract reviews resulted in title holders keeping their titles but agreeing new signature bonuses, higher royalties for SOEs, alterations in dividend flows in the SOEs’ favour and the removal or reduction of a number of fees that had previously been payable to the SOEs’ joint venture partners. The most controversial outcome of the review was the cancellation of Toronto-listed First Quantum Minerals (FQM)’s title for the Kolwezi cobalt and copper tailings. FQM initiated legal proceedings against the government following the contract cancellation, and subsequently had all its other Congolese assets confiscated too. 2.6 Other big players arrive Another important post-2006 development in the copper and cobalt mining sector was the steady replacement of the junior mining houses and speculators who had dominated the Gècamines’ joint ventures until then with much larger companies, including Kazakhstan’s Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) and Swiss commodities trader Glencore. As well documented by Bloomberg and Global Witness, ENRC and Glencore acquired their best Katangan mining assets from Gertler, who had previously acquired them from Gècamines for a far lower price. No firm proof has come to light, but the consensus view of those with knowledge of these deals is that Gertler kicked back to Mwanke and the president a sizeable portion of his windfall profit. Kabila won the 2011 elections but shortly after Kabila was sworn in as president, in February 2012, Mwanke was killed in a plane crash in Bukavu. Inevitably, conspiracy theories have since abounded about Mwanke’s death, particularly since others on the plane survived, but the real reason, say sources who have spoken to the survivors, was that the plane landed in heavy rain, and, instead of stopping, careered along the runway and plunged into a ditch. Those who had kept their seat belts on survived but Mwanke, who had removed his, did not. 2.7 Gècamines remains swamped in allegations of corruption Mwanke’s death was a major blow to Kabila, and particularly to his rent-seeking arrangements with the mining sector. Interestingly, Mwanke’s patronage network in SOEs, and in politics in general, has in most cases survived him and remained intact. The main exception is at Gècamines itself, where in 2014 Kalej was sacked as CEO for alleged corruption. However, Albert Yuma Mulimbi, the chairman of the Gécamines, survived, and appears to have developed a close bond with the president. In December 2012, following a series of detailed Bloomberg articles on the subject, the International Monetary Fund suspended its lending programme to the DRC in protest of Gècamines’ refusal to publish a contract relating to a sale of a 25% stake in Katanga’s Comide copper mine to Straker International, a British Virgin Islands company controlled by Gertler. (More information on this is detailed when we discuss the awarding of mining licenses and ENRC in subsequent issues) Prime Minister Augustin Matata Ponyo was furious and publicly berated Yuma for what had happened, but Yuma, whose confidence no doubt derived from his relationship with the president, stood his ground, saying Gècamines was a commercial company and that he did not have to answer to Matata. In 2013, the Africa Progress Panel, chaired by former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Anan in a report entitled ‘Equity in Extractives’, strongly attacked Gècamines’ asset sales, claiming that between 2010 and 2012 the country had “lost at least $1.36bn in revenues from the underpricing of mining assets that were sold to offshore companies. Total losses from the deals were equivalent to almost double the combined annual budget for health and education in 2012.” Embarrassed, the DRC government hosted a conference in Lubumbashi in January 2013 dedicated to the promotion of good governance and transparency in the mining sector, addressed by Kabila himself. Donors and some in the private sector were initially encouraged by the fine commitments expressed by Kabila and his government at the meeting, but there has been no obvious change since, save for improved transparency in private sector payments to state entities, resulting from the DRC’s (successful) efforts to gain membership in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). In our next Chapter, we will consider the big three players in the DRC and consider how these mining licenses were acquire. Mining licenses were awarded, often behind closed doors and shrouded in secrecy or through a series of extremely alarming M &A deals.

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This content is outdated and is no longer being maintained. It is provided as a courtesy for individuals who are still using these technologies. This page may contain URLs that were valid when originally published, but now link to sites or pages that no longer exist. Please see the patterns & practices guidance for the most current information. You have decided to follow the Move Copy of Data pattern. Furthermore: You want to move data between two identical or very nearly identical data stores. You may have to allow the data involved to be updated by applications at either the source or the target, and if so you must manage the integrity of those changes. Note: For simplicity, this pattern describes replicating between relational databases. The concepts, however, apply to other types of data stores as well. What proven architectural approach should you follow to create nearly-identical copies of the data and to manage the integrity of the copies if they can be updated at both the source and target within a replication interval? Most of the forces that were described in the Move Copy of Data pattern apply in this context and there are no additional ones. The relevant forces are repeated here for convenience. Any of the following compelling forces would justify using the solution described in this pattern: Data availability no longer matches requirements. For example, your existing centralized data stores were designed to support regular business hours of 08:00 to 18:00, and these data stores must be taken offline for after-hours maintenance and reporting. Your other applications, however, must support customer-direct self-service, which requires 24-hour availability. Another example is you are writing applications that are going to be installed on laptops for a mobile field force that require the data to be available while working offline. This requires copying the data to the laptops and synchronizing changes later when the laptops reconnect to the network. Network or application platform is unreliable. For example, your network fails frequently or is shut down for significant periods of time so that your new applications cannot deliver the required levels of service. Network bandwidth does not support real-time data access performance requirements. In this case, you might need to avoid the real-time problem by making a local data copy available. Hint: This force can lead to disaster if you misjudge it. Your early requirements, benchmarks, or prototyping might lead you to believe that the bandwidth is acceptable. However, a new or rapidly growing application can degrade performance quickly. The redundant data approach can minimize the effects of these changes. This approach carries its own risk, though, if the volume of data to be copied increases significantly, if latency requirements change, or if network bandwidth drops at the time you need to copy the data. The following enabling forces facilitate the move to the solution, and their absence may hinder such a move: Latency tolerance. The other applications must be able to tolerate the wait that is associated with moving the data. Data changes are generally non-conflicting. Often the business use of the data makes it relatively easy to isolate changes to the original data and its copies. For example, if you are providing a new application on a laptop for a client manager to use when making customer calls, the manager may update client data during the call. It is highly unlikely that the customer will call the company and request changes to an existing copy of the data during the same time period. Build on the data movement building block as described in Move Copy of Data by adding refinements that are appropriate to replication. To focus the terminology, the base building block for this pattern is called a replication building block. Also, in the special circumstances of the Master-Master Replication pattern,the building block will have a pair of related replication links to handle the two-way nature of the replication. For the same reason, the data movement link is called replication link; the replication link transmits a replication set across the link. In the link, the Acquire and Write services are always simple, and the Write service may be simple (as in the Master-Subordinate Replication pattern) or complex (as in the Master-Master Replication pattern). Figure 1 illustrates a replication building block. Figure 1: Replication building block The following paragraphs describe the elements of the replication building block in comparison to the more generic elements of the data movement building block. In a replication building block, the source is generally a database that contains data to be replicated. One database can be the source for many replication building blocks. The source database can also serve as the target for another replication building block. For example, in the Master-Master Replication pattern, the same pair of data stores swap roles (source becomes target, and target becomes source) for a common movement set that is updateable in either data store. A replication set is an identified set of data that exists within a single source, and it corresponds to the movement set. It is the subset of the particular database that you want to acquire for replication. For example, if you want to replicate data to a laptop for salespersons to use in making daily calls, each person needs a replication set containing the details of the clients that they are going to call on that day. A replication set is made up of a group of replication units. A replication unit is the smallest amount of data that can be identified in a transmission. The replication unit can be any one of the following: The complete replication set A table of the replication set A row (from a table of the replication set) A column (from a row of a table of the replication set) The replication link corresponds to the data movement link with specific refinements for replication. A replication link is a connection between the source and target along which the relevant data is replicated from one database to another with appropriate security. Movement of a replication set across the link is called a transmission. The replication link includes: The method of transmission of data at each step that moves data (which includes any intermediary transient data stores). For example, the method of transmission may be shared data storage, FTP, or a secure electronic link with managed row transmission. The Acquire, Manipulate, and Write replication services. The Acquire service gets the replication set from the source. Acquisition may be a simple one-step process, or it may be a multi-step process, for example if the replication set is in several tables in the data store, which could be a multistep process to acquire a composite movement set. Hint: The Data Replication pattern works when you are dealing with composite movement sets for a single platform, but when multiple database management systems (DBMSs) and/or operating systems are involved, you probably need to use the Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) pattern. Acquire can enrich the data by adding details, such as the time the data was acquired, to allow for management of the overall data integrity. Acquire can obtain the replication sets from the database rows directly, or it can acquire them from data caches where only data changes are stored. Typically these are either DBMS log record stores or user-written caching databases. In this case, these stores should be considered the sources. When acquiring data from these stores, Acquire must either collect all transactional changes or collect the net change, which is the final result of all the changes that have occurred to this row since the last transmission. Hint: When you want to acquire a composite movement set, and you need to decide whether to follow the pattern and have a replication building block for each source, or to write a variant of Acquire that gets the whole set. This is the classic reusable modular code versus monolithic code question. Both approaches are valid in certain circumstances. In general, you can: 1. Use the multiple replication building block approach as your default. It is the most flexible and reusable, but you must evaluate whether it is efficient enough. 2. Use a composite movement set when the target set has a simple aggregated view of the source data. For example, you want to assemble a single view of customer data, and to do that you need extra customer data from many product databases. In the banking industry, this view could show that this customer has a current account, a savings account, and two mortgages. In the target, this is held in a single aggregated record. In the source, these are all held in separate Product databases on the same platform. There is a common identifier for Customer in all the databases. Acquire then fetches the customer details from each database, and Manipulate stitches them together for Write to write to the target. (If the situation is any more complex than this, though, you are getting into ETL). The Manipulate service changes the form of the data in a simple way and passes it on in a format that can easily be written to the target. The essence of replication is that manipulation is simple and can be performed either within the database language (SQL) or by a simple tool provided usually by the DBMS vendor. Manipulate should not contain complex logic of the sort that would require you to write applications to implement it. The simplest manipulation is a mapping to the target structure by using the tool or SQL. This may include semantic changes such as mapping to a date data type. Other valid manipulations are: Splitting or combining data elements or rows Code page translations Elementary data integrity checks, such as type validation Aggregation functions that can be performed simply within the technology Note: The Manipulate service differs from the Transform service of ETL in the complexity of the change it performs. Although this difference can be difficult to characterize precisely, the goal is to differentiate Data Replication from ETL, which is another pattern. The Write service writes the data that the Manipulate service prepared to the target. If the target has changed the replication data since the last replication transmission, the Write service must check its rules to see whether it must resolve conflicts or not. If it does not have to resolve the conflicts, then it has to decide whether to: Overwrite the target with the new transmission data. Append the new transmission data, in which case Write must handle row versioning. If it does have to resolve the conflicts, the Master-Master Replication pattern applies for conflict detection and resolution. In a replication building block, the target is the database where the data is written. The structure of the target is very similar or identical to the source. The target could be several databases. If the data that you replicate to the target can be updated by applications there, and if the changes need to be reflected back into the source, you should have a second replication link returning so that the roles of source and target are exchanged. This relationship must be explicit because of the data integrity issues; it is a replication link attribute and is described in the Master-Master Replication and Master-Master Row-Level Synchronization patterns. The following examples illustrate how to use the replication building block. Feeding Management Information Reports You need to build a new system that provides online transaction processing (OLTP) transactions and summarized management information reports based on the information of the previous day. The summary reports are not updatable; they are management reports and are not used for what-if analysis. There are many reports that constitute a significant workload. You do not want the platform that hosts the operational database to bear the additional load of the reporting, and the additional complexity of accessing the previous day's data. The solution is to implement a master-subordinate replication link between the operational source database and a reporting target database. For more information, see the Master-Subordinate Replication, Master-Subordinate Snapshot Replicationand Master-Subordinate Transactional Incremental Replicationdesign patterns. Figure 2: Replication from an operational database to a reporting database Provisioning a Mobile Sales Force and Synchronizing Their Work Sales forces must have product and customer information available during their visits. They want to update customer information such as addresses immediately. The solution is to implement a master-master replication link between the central customer source database and the sales force laptop target databases. For more information, see the Master-Master Replication and Master-Master Row-Level Synchronization patterns. In a master-master replication, any changes that the target makes to the replicated data are sent back to the source, so that the source can stay synchronized with the target. Figure 3 illustrates this type of replication. Figure 3: Master-master replication Every sales representative gets an extract of an operational source database on his or her laptop. This target database can be updated while the laptop is disconnected from the master database. The next time the laptop is connected to the central database, any changes to the laptop target customer data are sent to the operational source database. Provisioning a Large Number of Targets Airline companies need a high volume of data for the computation of optimal flight routes for every individual flight. The data consists of weather information, fuel prices, flight rights on territories, and other restrictions. The data is only partially accessible in a machine-readable manner. One airline offers the service of maintaining this data in a database and provides the data to customers as a product. The customers can update the received data, but these updates are not sent back. The solution is to implement the Master-Subordinate Cascading Replication pattern to provide the data to a large number of targets. For more information, see the Master-Subordinate Replication and Master-Subordinate Cascading Replication patterns. The airline uses a central source database for data maintenance. From there, the data is replicated to an intermediary target database, which in turn serves as the source for replication to the customer sites. The replication is invoked immediately after every transaction. Figure 4: Cascading replication This pattern results in the same benefits and liabilities described in the Move Copy of Data pattern: Target data store optimization. The Target data stores can be configured and optimized in different ways to best support their different types of data access. For example, one case might be about manipulating individual rows, while another might be about reports on many records. Data autonomy. When the data stores are relatively independent of each other and can have different owners, the content of the source data store can be provided as a product, and it is then the responsibility of the target owner to operate on its data. Data privacy. By restricting the movement set to an agreed subset of the source data store, Move Copy of Data can provide only data that the application (or users) at the target can see. Security. Source data stores are not accessed by the target applications and hence are more secure. Administration complexity. This pattern might introduce additional operational tasks for data store administrators. For example, the ongoing transmissions have to be checked to ensure that they are running smoothly. Also, administrators must monitor the impact of the involved resources, such as the growth of cached changes, log files, and so on. Potential increased overhead on the sources. Every acquisition of data loads a certain overhead on the source. It is important to properly plan the additional load caused by extracting snapshots or by logging transactions that will be replicated. The additional load has to be compared to the load that would occur if all applications were connected to a single data store. You can use this pattern to optimize the operational load. Potential security exposure. The target data stores must not allow access to source data that the source would not permit. This is another administration challenge. Use the pattern to build your own solution by following this simple process: 1.Analyze the other application's data requirements to identify the existing source databases that the solution will use. 2.Within these source databases, identify the actual data required by the other applications and map this set of tables/columns to the target. 3.Define the operational requirements for the target and match these requirements to the source capabilities to deliver the data. 4.Define the functional requirements on Acquire, Manipulate, and Write (AMW) for each replication building block, and hence design the end-to-end AMW process. 5.Determine how many replication building blocks your architecture will require by considering the overall topology that is required to deliver the operational requirements for both source and target. Hence, divide the AMW functions amongst these building blocks. 6.Define the replication links between databases, their attributes, and their relationships and hence plan the full replication deployment that meets the combined functional and operational requirements. 7.Understand the operational considerations for each of replication link, match them to the overall replication operational requirements, and thus create the schedule for each replication link. To apply this process, you must consider the following design issues: Replication set size. Decide whether to replicate an entire table, a subset of a table, or data from more than one table. This is a tradeoff among the amount of data that changes, the overall table size, and the complexity of the link. Transmission volume. Choose the right amount of data to transmit. The decision between sending all changes for any one row, or just the net effect of all the changes, is a key one. Replication set data changes at the target. If these have to occur and if the source wants to see the changes, then try to make the changes naturally non-conflicting to avoid the need for conflict detection and resolution. Replication frequency. Decide the appropriate timing of the replication for the requirements and optimize the use of computing resources. Replication unit. As defined earlier, a replication set consists of a group of replication units. Identify the unit of data that will be transmitted from the source to the target. In the extreme requirements, this will be a transaction as it has been executed on the source. A less precise but easier to achieve requirement is to move a changed row. For environments with a high risk of conflicts, it can also be an individual change in a cell within a record. Initiator. Decide whether the source pushes the data or the target pulls it, and make sure that throughout your replication topology these decisions do not cause later replication links to have problems meeting their operational requirements. Locking issues. Verify that you can accept the locking impact of the replication on the source. If not, verify that a slight decrease in consistency at a point in time is acceptable for the targets so you can avoid lock conflict. Replication topology. Identify the players, their roles, and the overall integrity. Security. Ensure that the replicated data is treated with the right level of security at the target given the source security conditions. Also, verify that your replication link is secure enough in the overall topology requirements. Key updates. Verify whether the source allows updates to the key of records belonging to the replication set. If so, special care must be taken for a consistent replication of such operations. Note:Key updates are SQL updates to the columns of the physical key within a replication set. Such key updates must be handled specially by the replication. Referential integrity. Verify whether the target has implemented referential integrity. If so, you need rules to prevent changes from the replication link being applied twice if the change triggers a target change in another replicated table. For more information, see the following related patterns: Patterns That May Have Led You Here Move Copy of Data. The Move Copy of Data pattern describes the fundamental architecture building block from which Data Replication inherits basic concepts. Patterns That You Can Use Next Master-Master Replication. This pattern discusses a situation in which changes occur to a common set of data at either source or target, and the other party wants such changes replicated to it. Master-Subordinate Replication. This pattern presents the solution for a replication where the changes are replicated to the target without taking changes of the target into account. It will eventually overwrite any changes on the target. Other Patterns of Interest Master-Subordinate Cascading Replication. This pattern discusses a replication deployment where many targets want to subscribe to the replication set that is being replicated Extract-Transform-Load (ETL). This pattern is an alternative to Data Replication, if the Acquire or the Manipulate service is complex, but the Write service is simple. This content is outdated and is no longer being maintained. It is provided as a courtesy for individuals who are still using these technologies. This page may contain URLs that were valid when originally published, but now link to sites or pages that no longer exist.

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| fashion | gov't | games | genealogy | history | kids/teens | movies | repairs | traffic | weather | featured sites | site map |Top > Society > History > By Region > North America > United States > Presidents > Thomas Jefferson| Portrait of Thomas Jefferson (National Archives) Jefferson carried with him from the college of William and Mary at Williamsburg, in his twentieth year, a good knowledge of Latin, Greek and French (to which he soon added Spanish, Italian and Anglo-Saxon), and a familiarity with the higher mathematics and natural sciences only possessed, at his age, by men who have a rare natural taste and ability for those studies. He remained an ardent student throughout life, able to give and take in association with the many scholars, American and foreign, whom he numbered among his friends and correspondents. With a liberal Scotsman, Dr William Small, then of the faculty of William and Mary and later a friend of Erasmus Darwin, and George Wythe (1726-1806), a very accomplished scholar and leader of the Virginia bar. Jefferson was an expert violinist, a good singer and dancer, proficient in outdoor sports, and an excellent horseman. Thorough-bred horses always remained to him a necessary luxury. He never used tobacco, never played cards, never gambled, and was never party to a personal quarrel. Soon after leaving college he entered Wythe's law office, and in 1767, after five years of close study, was admitted to the bar. His thorough preparation enabled him to compete from the first with the leading lawyers of the colony, and his success shows that the bar had no rewards that were not fairly within his reach. As an advocate, however, he did not shine; a weakness of voice made continued speaking impossible, and he bad neither the ability nor the temperament for oratory. To his legal scholarship and collecting zeal Virginia owed the preservation of a large part of her early statutes. He seems to have lacked interest in litigiousness, which was extraordinarily developed in colonial Virginia; and he saw and wished to reform the law's abuses. It is probable that he turned, therefore, the more willingly to politics; at any rate, soon after entering public life he abandoned his law practice. The death of his father had left him an estate of 1900 acres, the income from which (about £400) gave him the position of an independent country gentleman; and while engaged in the law he had added to his farms after the ambitious Virginia fashion, until, when he married in his thirtieth year, there were 5000 acres all paid for; and almost as much more came to him in 1773 on the death of his father-in-law. On the 1st of January 1772, Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton (1749-1782), a childless widow of twenty-three, very handsome, accomplished, and very fond of music. Their married life was exceedingly happy, and Jefferson never remarried after her early death. Of six children born from their union, two daughters alone survived infancy. Jefferson was emotional and very affectionate in his home, and his generous and devoted relations with his children and grandchildren are among the finest features of his character. Jefferson began his public service as a justice of the peace and parish vestryman; he was chosen a member of the Virginia house of burgesses in 1769 and of every succeeding assembly and convention of the colony until he entered the Continental Congress in 1775. His forceful, facile pen gave him great influence from the first; but though a foremost member of several great deliberative bodies, he can fairly be said never to have made a speech. He hated the” morbid rage of debate "because he believed that men were never convinced by argument, but only by reflection, through reading or unprovocative conversation; and this belief guided him through life. Moreover it is very improbable that he could ever have shone as a public speaker, and to this fact unfriendly critics have attributed, at least in part, his abstention from debate. The house of burgesses of 1769, and its successors in 1773 and 1774, were dissolved by the governor for their action on the subject of colonial grievances and intercolonial co-operation. Jefferson was prominent in all; was a signer of the Virginia agreement of non-importation and economy (1769); and was elected in 1774 to the first Virginia convention, called to consider the state of the colony and advance intercolonial union. Prevented by illness from attending, Jefferson sent to the convention elaborate resolutions, which he proposed as instructions to the Virginia delegates to the Continental Congress that was to meet at Philadelphia in September. Reappointed to the next Congress, he signalized his service by the authorship of the Declaration of Independence. Again reappointed, he surrendered his seat, and after refusing a proffered election to serve as a commissioner with Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane in France, he entered again, in October 1776, the Virginia legislature, where he considered his services most needed. The local work to which Jefferson attributed such importance was a revision of Virginia's laws. Of the measures proposed to this end he says: "I considered four, passed or reported, as forming a system by which every trace would be eradicated of ancient or future aristocracy, and a foundation laid for a government truly republican "the repeal of the laws of entail; the abolition of primogeniture and the unequal division of inheritances (Jefferson was himself an eldest son); the guarantee of freedom of conscience and relief of the people from supporting, by taxation, an established church; and a system of general education. District, grammar and classical schools, a free state library and a state college, were all included in his plan. He was the first American statesman to make education by the state a fundamental article of democratic faith. His bill for elementary education he regarded as the most important part of the code, but Virginia had no strong middle class, and the planters would not assume the burden of educating the poor. At this time Jefferson championed the natural right of expatriation, and gradual emancipation of the slaves. His earliest legislative effort, in the five-day session of 1769, had been marked by an effort to secure to masters freedom to manumit their slaves without removing them from the state. It was unsuccessful, and the more radical measure he now favoured was even more impossible of attainment; but a bill he introduced to prohibit the importation of slaves was passed in 1778 - the only important change effected in the slave system of the state during the War of Independence. Finally he endeavoured, though unsuccessfully, to secure the introduction of juries into the courts of chancery. In 1779, at almost the gloomiest stage of the war in the southern states, Jefferson succeeded Patrick Henry as the governor of Virginia, being the second to hold that office after the organization of the state government. In his second term (1780-1781) the state was overrun by British expeditions, and Jefferson, a civilian, was blamed for the ineffectual resistance. He was unanimously returned by Albemarle County as a delegate to the state legislature; and on the day previously set for legislative inquiry on a resolution offered by an impulsive critic, he received, by unanimous vote of the house, a declaration of thanks and confidence. He wished however to retire permanently from public life, a wish strengthened by the illness and death of his wife. At this time he composed his Notes on Virginia, a work full of humanitarian liberalism. Congress twice offered him an appointment as one of the plenipotentiaries to negotiate peace with England, but, though he accepted the second offer, the business was so far advanced before he could sail that his appointment was recalled. During the following winter (1783) he was again in Congress, and headed the committee appointed to consider the treaty of peace. In the succeeding session his service was marked by a report, from which resulted the present monetary system of the United States; and by the honour of reporting the first definitely formulated plan for the government of the western territories,i that embodied in the ordinance of 1784. He was already particularly associated with the great territory north-west of the Ohio; for Virginia had tendered to Congress in 1781, while Jefferson was governor, a cession of her claims to it, and now in 1784 formally transferred the territory by act of Jefferson and his fellow delegates in congress: a consummation for which he had laboured from the beginning. His anti-slavery opinions grew in strength with years (though he was somewhat inconsistent in his attitude on the Missouri question in 1820-1821). From 1784 to 1789 Jefferson was in France, first under an appointment to assist Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in negotiating treaties of commerce with European states, and then as Franklin's successor (1785-1789) as minister to France. In these years he travelled widely in western Europe. Though the commercial principles of the United States were far too liberal for acceptance, as such, by powers holding colonies in America, Jefferson won some specific concessions to American trade. He was exceedingly popular as a minister. His theories had a deep and broad basis in English whiggism; and though he may well have found at least confirmation of his own ideas in French writers - he did not read sympathetically the writers commonly named, Rousseau and Montesquieu; besides, his democracy was seasoned, and he was rather a teacher than a student of revolutionary politics when he went to Paris. The Notes on Virginia were widely read in Paris, and undoubtedly had some influence in forwarding the dissolution of the doctrines of divine rights and passive obedience among the cultivated classes of France. Jefferson was deeply interested in all the events leading up to the French Revolution, and all his ideas were colored by his experience of the five seething years passed in Paris. On the 3rd of June 1789 he proposed to the leaders of the third estate a compromise between the king and the nation. In July he received the extraordinary honour of being invited to assist in the deliberations of the committee appointed by the national assembly to draft a constitution which he declined for he observed official proprieties and in no way wished to offend the French government to which he was accredited. When Jefferson left France it was with the intention of soon returning; but President Washington offered him the secretaryship of state in the new federal government, and Jefferson reluctantly accepted. Alexander Hamilton was secretary of the treasury. These two men, opposite in temperament and political belief, clashed in irreconcilable hostility, and in the conflict of public sentiment, first on the financial measures of Hamilton, and then on the questions with regard to France and Great Britain, Jefferson's sympathies being predominantly with the former, Hamilton's with the latter, they formed about themselves the two great parties of Democrats and Federalists. The schools of thought for which they stood have since contended for mastery in American politics: Hamilton's gradually strengthened by the necessities of stronger administration, as time gave widening amplitude and increasing weight to the specific powers-and so to Hamilton's great doctrine of the "implied powers" - of the general government of a growing country; Jefferson's rooted in colonial life, and buttressed by the hopes and convictions of democracy. The most perplexing questions treated by Jefferson as secretary of state arose out of the policy of neutrality adopted by the United States toward France, to whom she was bound by treaties and by a heavy debt of gratitude. In the presidential election of 1796 John Adams, the Federalist candidate, received the largest number of electoral votes, and Jefferson, the Republican candidate, the next largest number, and under the law as it then existed the former became president and the latter vice-president. The Federalist party had ruined itself, and it lost the presidential election of 1800. The Republican candidates, Jefferson and Aaron Burr, receiving equal votes, it devolved upon the House of Representatives, in accordance with the system which then obtained, to make one of the two president, the other vice-president. In 1804, Jefferson was re-elected President by 162 out of 176 votes. Jefferson's administrations were distinguished by the simplicity that marked his conduct in private life. He eschewed the pomp and ceremonies, natural inheritances from English origins, that had been an innocent setting to the character of his two noble predecessors. His dress was of "plain cloth" on the day of his inauguration. Instead of driving to the Capitol in a coach and six, he walked without a guard or servant from his lodgings-or, as a rival tradition has it, he rode, and hitched his horse to a neighbouring fence-attended by a crowd of citizens. Instead of opening Congress with a speech to which a formal reply was expected, he sent in a written message by a private hand. He discontinued the practice of sending ministers abroad in public vessels. Between himself and the governors of states he recognized no difference in rank. He would not have his birthday celebrated by state balls. The weekly levee was practically abandoned. Even such titles as "Excellency," "Honourable," "Mr" were distasteful to him. It was formally agreed in cabinet meeting that "when brought together in society, all are perfectly equal, whether foreign or domestic, titled or untitled, in or out of office." Thus diplomatic grades were ignored in social precedence and foreign relations were seriously compromised by dinner-table complications. One minister who appeared in gold lace and dress sword for his first, and regularly appointed, official call on the president, was received - as he insisted with studied purpose - by Jefferson in negligent undress and slippers down at the heel. Jefferson's first administration was marked by a reduction of the army, navy, diplomatic establishment and, to the uttermost, of governmental expenses; some reduction of the civil service, accompanied by a large shifting of offices to Republicans; and, above all, by the Louisiana Purchase, following which Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, sent by Jefferson, ducted their famous exploring expedition across the continent to the Pacific. When, on the 4th of March 1809, Jefferson retired from the presidency, he had been almost continuously in the public service for forty years. He refused to be re-elected for a third time, though requested by the legislatures of five states to be a candidate. Jefferson's last years were devoted to the establishment of the university of Virginia at Charlottesville, near his home. He planned the buildings, gathered its faculty-mainly from abroad-and shaped its organization. Practically all the great ideas of aim, administration and curriculum that dominated American universities at the end of the r9th century were anticipated by him. His fine library of over 10,000 volumes was purchased at a low price by Congress in 1815, and a national contribution ($26,500) just before his death enabled him to die in peace. He died on the 4th of July 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, on the same day as John Adams. He chose for his tomb the epitaph: "Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the university of Virginia." Jefferson was about 6 ft. in height, large-boned, slim, erect and sinewy. He had angular features, a very ruddy complexion, sandy hair, and hazel-flecked, grey eyes. Age lessened the unattractiveness of his exterior. In later years he was negligent in dress and loose in bearing. There was grace, nevertheless, in his manners; and his frank and earnest address, his quick sympathy (yet he seemed cold to strangers), his vivacious, desultory, informing talk, gave him an engaging charm. Beneath a quiet surface he was fairly aglow with intense convictions and a very emotional temperament. Yet he seems to have acted habitually, in great and little things, on system. His mind, no less trenchant and subtle than Hamilton's, was the most impressible, the most receptive, mind of his time in America. The range of his interests is remarkable. He was classed as a "French infidel "and atheist. His attitude toward religion was in fact deeply reverent and sincere, but he insisted that religion was purely an individual matter, "evidenced, as concerns the world by each one's daily life," and demanded absolute freedom of private judgment. He looked on Unitarianism with much sympathy and desired its growth. "I am a Christian," he wrote in 1823, "in the only sense in which he (Jesus) wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other." Reference: Excerpts of the above History article are from the 1911 edition Encyclopedia. Drafting the Declaration of Independence. The Committee-Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Livingston and Sherman. Copy of engraving after Alonzo Chappel., 1776 (National Archives) Dunlap Broadside [Declaration of Independence], 07/04/1776 (National Archives) This is the first printed version of the Declaration of Independence. Drafted for the most part by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence justified breaking the colonial ties to Great Britain by providing a basic philosophy of government and a list of grievances against the Crown. John Dunlap of Philadelphia was the printer to the Continental Congress. Charcoal drawing of Thomas Jefferson (National Archives) Last annual message of President Thomas Jefferson to the U.S. Congress, 11/08/1808 (National Archives) Rank: 3rd (1801-1809) Followed: John Adams Succeeded by: James Madison Date of Birth April 13, 1743 Place of Birth: Shadwell, Virginia Date of Death: July 4, 1826 Place of Death: Monticello, Virginia First Lady: Martha Wayles Skelton Occupation: lawyer, farmer Political Party: Democratic-Republican Vice President: Aaron Burr (1801-1805) George Clinton (1805-1809) Thomas Jefferson (b. 1743 d. 1826) was the third President of the United States, from 1801 to 1809. He was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, and a source of many other contributions to American culture. Achievements of his presidency include the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition. His home in Virginia was Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia, which included automatic doors and other convenient devices that he designed himself. He helped to found the University of Virginia. Jefferson's ideal for the United States was that of an agricultural nation of yeoman farmers, in contrast to the vision of Alexander Hamilton, who envisioned a nation of commerce and manufacturing. Like many landholders of his time, Jefferson owned slaves. A subject of considerable controversy since Jefferson's own time was whether Jefferson was the father of any of the children of his slave Sally Hemings. Jefferson is known for taking a strong independent stance in regards to religion. He compiled a collection of what he considered to be the most profound and meaningful passages from the Bible, and published it as an independent work. This became known as the Jefferson Bible. "To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical." Research Another American President |Arts/Entertainment | Autos | Books | Business | Colleges | Computers | Health | Home/Garden | Jobs | Kids/Teens| | News/Media | Recreation | Reference | Regional | Science | Shopping | Society | Sports | Travel | World| Copyright © 1997-2017 SearchBeat, All Rights Reserved

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Comparing the Scale to the CCRF and UDHR The Global Community believes that the introduction of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been a great step in humanity's evolution to better itself. But now is time to leave it behind and reach to our next step, that is, the Scale of Human and Earth Rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights resides in the fact that it gives equal emphasis to cultural rights, economic and social rights, and civil and political rights. The Global Community asks how meaningful is the right to life or to participation in political life if the ecological base (the base of life) and the global life-support systems are seriously threatened: * wilderness is vastly disappearing; species of the fauna and flora becoming extinct The Global Community found evident that the ecological base is the essential prerequisite for the effectiveness and exercise of all rights recognized for human beings. The stewardship of the ecological base has to be given priority before the fulfilment of various economic and social wishes. Demands resulting from the socio-economic system of a particular country have to find their limits in the protection of the global ecosystem. Vital interests of future generations have to be considered as having priority before less vital interests of the present generation. Supply chains have to be designed in a way, that the goods can enter after usage or consumption into natural or industrial recycling processes. If serious damages to persons, animals, plants and the ecosystem cannot be excluded, an action or pattern of behaviour should be refrained from. A measure for supplying goods or services should choose a path which entails the least possible impact on the ecological and social system concerned. This way functioning proven systems will not be disturbed, and unnecessary risks will not be taken. Supply strategies consuming less resources should have preference before those enhancing more resource consumption. When there is a need to find a solution to a problem or a concern, a sound solution would be to choose a measure or conduct an action, if possible, which causes reversible damage as opposed to a measure or an action causing an irreversible loss. Following the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, nations throughout the world developed their own version in line with the Universal Declaration. As an example, in 1982, Prime Minister Trudeau brought Canada's Constitution home, and with it, the new Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Charter rights are divided into a number of categories: Fundamental Freedoms, Democratic Rights, Legal Rights, Equality Rights, Official Languages, and Minority Language Educational Rights. A copy of the Canadian Charter is included here at the end. Let us now fit the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the key rights of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms onto the six sections of the Scale of Human and Earth Rights Scale of Human and Earth Rights The Scale of Human and Earth Rights contains six (6) sections. Section 1 has more importance than all other sections below, and so on. Concerning Sections 1, 2, and 3, it shall be Earth Government highest priority to guarantee these rights to Member Nations and to have proper lesgislation and implement and enforce global law as described in the Global Constitution. Section 1. Ecological rights and the protection of the global life-support systems Section 2. Primordial human rights Section 3. The ecological rights, the protection of the global life-support systems and the primordial human rights of future generations The following table illustrates the importance of both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It is made clear how little importance was given to Sections 1,2,3, and 4 of the Scale of Human and Earth Rights. And it is made clear how urgent it is to replace both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Charters from all nations by the Scale of Human and Earth Rights. Here is how the degree of importance was obtained. For instance in Section 1 it was found that parts of Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (see description below)was included as promoting very softly the protection of human life but was not promoting at all the protection of the global life-support systems. Section 1 on the Scale of Human and Earth Rights promotes both the protection of human life and the global life-support systems. No key rights were found in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that would promote in any way the protection of human life and that of the global life-support systems. It is a failure of the Canadian Charter to be in line with the Universal Declaration. And it is a failure of both the Universal Declaration and the Canadian Charter to be in line with the Scale of Human and Earth Rights. As a result of this failure, a 1% combine importance was recorded in the table. What this means? It means that neither the Universal Declaration or the Canadian Charter gives any importance to human life and the protection of the global life-support systems. These results are consistent and in agreement with the fact that democracy hardly survive an overpopulation such as is seen in the United States. What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues at its present rate? It will be completely destroyed. Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies, the more people there are, the less one person matters. It would be preferable to split a large population into smaller populations. To determine rights requires an understanding of needs and reponsibilities and their importance. The Scale of Human and Earth Rights and the Charter of the Global Community are the best guidance for continuing this process. The Scale shows social values in order of importance and so will help us understand the rights of a community. What are the universal needs of a person, family, and that of a global community? Primordial human rights are separate categories from those of ecological rights, community rights, the right of the greatest number of people, economic rights, social rights, cultural rights and religious rights. Ecological and primordial human rights are the only rights that have existed unchanged throughout the evolutionary origin of our species. Any major change would have threatened our very existence. All other human rights listed here are rights created by human beings and can be changed depending of new circumstances; they are not stagnant but are rather flexible and adaptive, and they can evolve. Ecological and primordial human rights of this generation and of future generations are therefore much more important than any other human rights existing now and in the future. Primordial human rights are those human rights that individuals have by virtue of their very existence as human beings. Primordial human rights are necessarily human needs but not all human needs are primordial human rights. Nevertheless there are very specific primordial human needs. First there are the material needs, the requisites for a dignified life: Without these primordial human needs one cannot have and enjoy the following non-primordial human needs: For instance, the existing and future uses of water are constantly challenged; balancing supply and demand is made even harder by the amounts of pollution found in the air, land and waters. A large part of our body is made of water, and we cannot live without water; therefore water is a primordial human right by our very nature. In order to avoid conflicts and wars over drinking (fresh)water, fresh water has been categorized as a primordial human right. Industrial pollution plays a major role in the deterioration of nature but this time the level of pollution is above the carrying capacity of a healthy ecosystem. Pollution also affects significantly human health and all lifeforms on Earth. Every person needs Oxygen to live so clean air is certainly also a primordial human right by our very nature. Morally right actions or policies are those actions that result in the greatest number of people. The Global Community asks how meaningful is the right of the greatest number of people if they agree to the challenge or damage the ecological base of the Earth. The greatest number of people cannot and will not be allowed to supersede the rights of the ecological base of Earth. The Global Community asks how meaningful is the right to life or to participation in political life if poverty, gender inequality, destitution and epidemics prevent individuals from enjoying freedom of movement, freedom to vote, to marry and so on? The Global Community found evident that economic and social rights are the essential prerequisite for the effectiveness and exercise of all other rights (other than ecological and primordial human rights now and in the future) recognized for human beings. The developing countries are having a harder time than others to achieve the exercise of these rights on a lasting basis, with the problems of economic globalization presenting new challenges. We must therefore beware of enforcing economic rights alone to the detriment of individual civil rights and the rights of all individuals to decide their own fate and the future of their country, their political rights. The universality of human rights recognizes the right of all individuals to participate in the cultural life of their community and of other country, to receive education and training, and to be informed. The Global Community is aware that traditional customs and standards could burden the sustainability of all life on Earth. They could burden Earth society or any society forever, and holds individuals in a straitjacket. We cannot accept that. No one can! There are choices to be made and you must make them. Cultures can develop and can go on developing. Even religious beliefs may evolve. We are living now and we are able to create these changes. We are at least as bright, most certainly brighter, than the people who were living thousand of years ago. As far as the Global Community is concerned, cultural and religious differences cannot be a reason or an excuse or a pretext for not respecting human rights including and most importantly the ecological rights. Quite the contrary, all kinds of cultures may promote human rights and especially cultural rights. They are different in their achievements, but they are equal in dignity where they are expressions of freedom. At any time or in any given place, men, women and children use their culture to invent new ways of making human rights a living reality. Diversity enriches us if it respects the dignity of each individual, and if it takes account of human rights as a whole. Security is a primordial human and Earth right. The Global Community has broadened the traditional focus of the security of nations to include both the security of people as well as that of the planet. Global security policies include: * every person on Earth has a right to a secure existence, and all states have an obligation to protect those rights Another major source of global unsecurity for people is the culture of violence in everyday life as it is shown on television screens and cinemas. The American Way of Life is creating this culture of violence. An american child at age six year old has seen more violence on television than any other child of the Middle East over a life span. This culture of violence infects both industrial and developing countries, rich and poor. This trend of culture of violence must end. The movie and TV industry is a threat to global security. The media is responsible for the propagation of violence through communications. Why has government not done anyhting to regulate the media industry? Surely everyone understood that on the Scale of Human and Earth Rights security of the people of any nation is more important than the human rights related to the freedom of expression of the media industry. Security of the people and the state is on top of the Scale. It is part of the primordial human rights. While freedom of expression is a right found lower on the Scale and is classified partly * Community rights and the right that the greatest number of people has by virtue of its number (50% plus one) and after voting representatives democratically (these rights can be and are usually a part of the constitution of a country) So the freedom of expression of a person is not as important as the security of that person and the security of the state. Consumers' rights impinge on the rights of other humans living in the Global Community. The right to choice is the consumer right that refers to the right to have a range and variety of goods and services at competitive, fair prices and variable, satisfactory quality. In order to assure choice in the developed country markets, governments have implemented trade laws to facilitate cross border transactions and transnational corporations (TNCs) have set up business off shore so they can lessen the cost of the production process. The goods that are available in the developed country markets are provided by slave labour, child labour, sweatshops or in countries that allow the TNCs to forego adhering to pollution or ecological concerns and human rights in pursuit of profit. Labour rights are abused in efforts to earn more profits. This leads to abhorrent working conditions, job insecurity and low living standards (all human rights). Consumers in developed countries have been socialized to want more and more things to consume but have not been socialized to appreciate the impact of their consumption choices on the human rights of other people; that is, they are not being responsible for their decisions. The Global Community has now at hand the method and framework to conduct societal checks and balances of a global sustainable development. A more balance world economy will result of annual checks and balances. Corporations will take their social responsibilities and become involved in designing, monitoring, and implementing these checks and balances. Several corporations have already done so. Results will be taken into account in the evaluation of sustainable development. Corporations are required to expand their responsibilities to include human and Earth rights, the environment, community and family aspects, safe working conditions, fair wages and sustainable consumption aspects. Let us now categorized the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the key rights of the Canadian Charter of Rights Freedoms as they would fit on the Scale of Human and Earth Rights. Of course this is by no mean written in stone. Furthermore, several new Articles (not shown in here) developed by the Global Community have been added to the Sections. For instance, Section 3 is not included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Section 1 is also not really included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet Section 1 is the most important of all. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (CCRF) was also included here as another example of how a Charter can be analyzed with respect to the Scale. Fundamental Freedoms (Section 2) conscience and religionDemocratic Rights (sections 3, 4 and 5) right to voteMobility Rights (section 6) the right to move to and live in any provinceLegal Rights (sections 7-14) life, liberty, and security of the personEquality Rights (section 15) equal treatment before and under the lawLanguage Rights English and French are the official languages of Canada Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) Adopted and proclaimed by General Assembly resolution 2 (III) of 10 December 1948 On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the full text of which appears in the following pages. Following this historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and "to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories." Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people, Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law, Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations, Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms, Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge, Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law. All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination. Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile. Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him. (1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence. (2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. (1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. (1) Everyone has the right to a nationality. (1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly (1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives. Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality. (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay. (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized. (1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible. Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein. Over the past several decades humanity has better itself through the acceptance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by most nations. But now is time to leave it behind and reach to our next step, that is a scale of social values, the Scale of Human and Earth Rights and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. As a first step the Global Community researched and developed the Universal Declaration of Human and Earth Rights to complement for the deficiencies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But it was found to be a useless exercise of adding new statements to the Declaration. Instead, and truly this is the new way of the future, the Global Community researched and developed the statement of rights and responsibilities of a person and of belonging to 'a global community' and to 'the Global Community', the Earth Community, the human family. This was not, at first, meant to replace the Universal Declaration of Human and Earth Rights developed by the Global Community. But the Declaration becomes redundant. Only the statement was necessary. Even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights becomes redundant as it is implicitly included in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities of a person and of belonging to 'a global community' and to 'The Global Community'. There are a lot more rights and responsibilites found in the Statement than in the Declaration. The Global Community wants to help businesses to be active corporate members of the Global Community, the human family, the Earth Community. You may be eligible to become a citizen of The Global Community. A typical global community may be what a group of people, together, wants it to be. It can be a group of people with the same values. It can be a group of people with the same cultural background, or the same religious background. The people making a global community may be living in many different locations on the planet. With today's communications it is easy to group people in this fashion. It can be a village, or two villages together where people have decided to unite as one global community. The two villages may be found in different parts of the world. It can be a town, a city, or a nation. It can be two or more nations together. A global community could be a group of Africans, maybe NGOs, or maybe businesses, in one(or several) of the nations of Africa, who decided to unite with another group(s), or businesses, situated in Canada, or elsewhere in the world. Together they can grow as a global community and be strong and healthy. Global warming is the highest threat to Earth security and is everyone's business. Terrorism was, and still is, a problem humanity needed to tackle head-on and resolve the best we could, but global warming is by far the greatest threat to security of all people on Earth and to life itself. We have never tackle the problem head-on. We played around the problem and its solution. We know the solution to the problem of global warming, we know what we need to do to make this generation and future generations safe and secure, but we just never do what we really have to do to resolve the problem. The biggest problem is that Canadians and Americans are getting too proud about things that are completely unimportant and missing out on the things that are truly important, and we have been left behind by most other nations on those things that are truly important for the generations to come and to life itself. I advise you to get acquainted with the Scale of Human and Earth Rights and with the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities in this Newsletter. The Global Community is asking North Americans and everyone else on Earth to tackle the problem head-on. We must solve the problem we have with global warming. Oil companies are responsible and accountable of their products from beginning to end. The 'end' for an oil company does not end at the gas pump where a consumer buy your refine products. No! The end for you goes all the way to global warming, to pollution of the environment, to the destruction of the global life-support systems, to taking away lives of future generations, to the destruction of life on Earth. Very much so! The Global Community proposes to ask you to pay a global tax on your products. The tax would be high enough to discourage consumers from buying your products and force you to use viable alternatives. The Governments of the United States and Canada should put a high tax on all oil based products and their derivatives and certainly gasoline should have the highest tax possible. The tax would be a carbon tax for the environment and the global life-support systems. A workable type of Tobin tax should also be in place as it is a powerful instrument to promote sustainable development and force shareholders in moving away from producing oil. The Global Community also proposes to develope a method of raising global taxes, of redistributing incomes to the poorest communities, of providing debt-free technical assistance to non-industrial and developing countries to help them out of poverty and to meet environmental and social standards. The WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, the EU and the UN are worldwide organizations that can and should be used to raise global taxes to redistribute to the poorest and developing nations. Everyone ask how we could rid the world of weapons of mass destruction. Here is a new 'old' way to do it: trading permits. It can be done with greenhouses gases to solve the problem with global warming. What about using a similar technique to get rid of all weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, biological and chemical, and others. How many nations would be interested? The question to ask is would it work? First of all does it work for the greenhouse gases? In connection between human well-being and a sound environment, Earth rights are ecological rights and the rights that human beings have in protecting their global life-support systems. Earth rights are those rights that demonstrate the connection between human well-being and a sound environment. They include individuals and global communities human rights and the rights to a clean environment, and participation in development decisions. We define ecological rights as those rights of the ecosystem of the Earth beyond human purpose. They are those rights that protect and preserve the ecological heritage of the Earth for future generations. The Earth Court of Justice guarantees ecological rights in its Statute. The Court guarantees also the rights to a safe environment and an environment free from environmental degradation. Section 4 on the Scale includes 'direct democracy' Rights of direct democracy As defined in Chapter 10.6.3 of the Global Constitution, direct democracy is a community right. Direct democracy is the right of global citizens to hold referendums on any issue -- and to veto legislation. Direct Democracy implies that: * Global Citizens are willing and able to participate fully in the decision making process on issues that most affect them. Direct democracy is important to sustain life on the planet but its position on the Scale gives it its overall importance. 'Direct democracy' is very much like a voting system based on 'proportional representation'. There are many different aspects of 'direct democracy'. For instance, in a single riding there may be as many as 8 seats and and several candidates running. Parties offer voters a slate of local candidates. Voters can rank candidates of the same party, but may also choose to give support to candidates of different parties. Voters rank as many or as few candidates as they wish. Voters can rank any number of candidates without fear their vote will be wasted by selecting unpopular candidates. A voterís rankings will be considered in order until that voterís ballot can be used. When your number one choice is eliminated for lack of support your number two becomes your first choice. When a voterís ballot is used in support of a given candidate, but that candidate has a surplus of votes, a ballotís unused portion will be transferred to the voterís next choice until a ballotís full value has been used. Most votes will count, little fear of wasting oneís vote, no fear of vote splitting. No need to support a candidate or party you donít really want for fear of helping elect those you like even less. You can vote authentically. This is freedom for voters. This is how democracy is supposed to work. This voting system empowers voters more than parties because votes are for candidates not for parties. Also, candidate selection will take place at the local riding level, not at party head office. Most importantly, voters will rank candidates of the same party as well as candidates of different parties. It maximizes choice for voters. Competition is not just between candidates of different parties but also between candidates of the same party. This voting system is also a measure of independence from party control and that will make a very significant contribution to greater accountability in government. It will yield a legislature that mirrors the political, social, ethnic, and geographic diversity of a population. Electing candidates in multi-member ridings ensures a broader range of political interests and issues will be represented than is possible under any other system. Preferential voting induces a politics of cooperation, consensus, and civility. Direct democracy comprises a form of democracy and theory of civics wherein all citizens can directly participate in the political decision-making process. Some proposed systems would give people both legislative and executive powers, but most extant systems allow input into the legislative process only. Direct democracy in its traditional form is rule by the people through referenda. The people are given the right to pass laws, veto laws and withdraw support from a representative (if the system has representatives) at any time. Direct democracy in its modern sense is characterized by three pillars: The second pillar can include the ability to hold a binding referendum on whether a given law should be scrapped. This effectively grants the populace a veto on government legislation. The third pillar gives the people the right to recall elected officials by petition and referendum. In Canada, the use of citizens' assemblies (also known as an estates-general in the province of Quebec), involving citizen bodies chosen at random, is growing and avoids the disadvantages of older, more plebiscitary forms of direct democracy. The province of British Columbia recently set up a Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform in which members were chosen at random for each riding. The citizens' assembly has just recommended the province use Single Transferable Voting (STV) to elect the provincial legislature. In a referendum conducted on May 17, 2005, 57% of the voters approved by this new system of voting.

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Prepared By J. W. Miller Barboursville became the county seat of Cabell County in 1813. The county was taken from Kanawha County in 1809. It included all of Wayne, Lincoln, and a large part of Logan, Boone, and Putnam counties. Its area was 1750 square miles, with a population in 1810 of 2717, including 221 slaves and 25 Indians not taxed. Or about 1 1/2 persons to the square mile. We now have one sixth of this area, and more than 300 people to the square mile. Immigration began to come in about 1780 and land was easy to get, was marked out and claimed, and the state would sell the settler as much as one thousand acres or more, at the small price of $1.60 per 100 acres. Hence, everybody tried to see how much land they could get. |As soon as the town became the county seat, immigration became heavy. Hotels, livery stables, stores, shops and factories of all kinds were built. The stores carried large stocks of goods bought in New York or Philadelphia; generally on six or twelve months time. We had no drummers then. The merchants would go to the eastern markets about twice a year to buy their stock. These goods were exchanged for country produce, grain, dried fruit, hogs, ginseng, deer hides, and feathers. Women brought in products of the loom, jeans, linsey, flax, tow linen, and white flannel, all of which had a ready sale at home. There was much traffic between Barboursville and Logan.| Barboursville was known as a manufacturing town. There was a furniture factory, a fan mill factory, hat factory, wagon and buggy factory, two or three harness shops, a large tannery, which supplied the home market and exported as well, large lots of leather, there were several tailors, blacksmiths, shoemakers, a large mill built by Miller & Moore, which cut large quantities of steam boat bottoms, lumber of clear oak, some of it 36 feet long. All of it went to Jeffersonville, Indian, by barges, which were built in Barboursville. This saw mill was wrecked during the Civil War. A great many of these workers were Germans. There were immigrants from every nation who came here to better their conditions, and to found peaceful homes. Our farmers came mostly from Virginia and Pennsylvania. Schools were good for those times and were well attended. Boys and girls came to school from all over the county, as nearly everybody had a horse, or in winter they could board in town at $1.50 to $2.00 per week. The first teacher I have any record of was David McGinnis, who taught here in about 1840. He was one of the first Marshall College students, and was studying for the ministry. The teachers, as I remember them, were Mr. Simpson, Edward Vertegan and wife, Joseph Foster and wife, Miss Fannie Chapman, Jared Armstrong, Mr. McClelland, Dr. V. R. Moss, James Thornburg, B. H. Thackston. All taught private schools before the Civil War. Tuition was $1.00, $1.50 to $2.00 per month. If it were possible to trace the boys who attended these schools, it would undoubtedly be found that their education compared with the best. Barboursville was surrounded by an agricultural section, producing large crops of grain, fat hogs, sheep, and cattle. Hogs constituted the "cash crop". They were butchered and packed in Barboursville. Hams and lard went to Pittsburgh or Philadelphia; side meat and shoulders to the salt works in Kanawha. Hogs were as fine as we have today, and were much cheaper to raise on mash, and finished with corn. Wagons came from North Carolina, loaded with apple brandy. They sold it here, and loaded back with bacon and salt. It would no doubt create much consternation to hear a boat whistle here in Barboursville, for the gate to open at the locks, so the steamboat could pass through. Then the polite clerk, in the old days, went down, assisting the ladies and children ashore, followed by the colored porter with the baggage. Yes, we saw just that sixty-five years ago. For Guyandotte River was locked and dammed by the New York Navigation Company as far as Branchland. Seven locks were put in at great expense, in order that the company might ship coal out. This was the beginning of coal development in the Guyandotte Valley. These locks and dams had no keepers during the Civil War, and so were ruined by floods, and were eventually taken out by the Government. My father, W. C. Miller, built two of these locks by contract, one just above the mouth of Mud River, and one at Branchland. His foreman, Billingly Stafford, was drowned during this work, and was buried in our old cemetery. Eventually they began to build the railroad, which is now the Chesapeake and Ohio. Every man in the county could get work of some kind during that time. This railroad line was about half finished at the beginning of the Civil War, and the work had to be abandoned until the close of the war. When the West was settled, and trade began flowing East again, it went to Pittsburgh and through Pennsylvania. Virginia built three good turnpikes to divert travel through that state again. And so we were given the Kanawha and James River Turnpike, which ran from Covington, Virginia, to the Big Sandy, and to this day remains the great National Highway. There were toll gates every four miles, and mile stones at every mile along the way. It was well built, and well kept up. Immigration and general travel was at all times heavy, immigrants going West in covered wagons, with their dogs and tar bucket tied to the hind of the ox in harness. The old stage coach, drawn by four horses carrying twelve or more passengers would make good time. And when travel was especially heavy, we had two stages a day. There was heavy travel from the South, too, by carriages; these were most wealthy and prosperous planters on their way to the White Sulphur Springs. All livestock was driven to market over this road. Hogs were started from Kentucky half fattened, traveled about eight miles per day, and were fattened along the road; they were finally packed in Richmond. Barboursville men and boys have participated in every war since the war for Independence. During the Revolutionary War they were mostly engaged in fighting hostile Indians on the raw border, allies of the British. During the War of 1812 Captain William Brumfield raised a Cavalry Company in this county. We had to raise men and supplies, and besides we were assessed $1,540.00. This Company had a hard time, as many of these brave volunteers died in a plague in Norfolk. Elisha McComas, then our of our town boys, raised a company to fight in the Mexican War. They camped on the site of what is now Mike Sanders' house. The state would not receive this Company, inasmuch as her quota was filled. Undaunted, they went to Norfolk, and enlisted in the United States Army, being known as Company C, Eleventh United States Infantry. I have no record of the losses among these soldiers, nor their history. From meager accounts I have been able to glean, their losses were heavy, and there is record that one Lieutenant Joe Samuels came back to Barboursville, his home town, and died shortly afterward of Mexican fever. Between battles and sickness of the climate, they were practically wiped out. During the Civil War our people were grievously divided, and brother fought against brother, father against son. As was so splendidly the case through this section, every man had the courage of his convictions, and fought with courage for the principles which he thought were right. Many of our boys fill unknown graves. I seem to hear the shriek of the mothers ringing down through the years, when they received the terse words: "Killed in battle". When peace was finally declared, our boys returned to a devastated country - no crops, no stock, no money. The pay of the Union soldier was so small he had no chance to save any. The Confederate soldier had better pay, but the more money he had, the poorer he found fimself, inasmuch as Confederate money was worthless. Under the generous terms of General Grant's decision, they were given some horses, and with a few condemned war-broken horses they went to work. The fertile soil soon gave forth crops of golden grain, the hum of the threshing machine was once more heard on the farms. As soon as their farms were re-established they went in for live-stock-horses, mules, sheep, cattle, and hogs. There were always ready buyers. Horses and mules were shipped to Richmond and North carolina, stock cattle to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, northwestern Virginia, and central Ohio, fat cattle to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. We did not need to depend on Swift and Armour for our meats, as we had two good butchers here. Our county at that time was one of the best agricultural areas in the state. Everybody worked but father - he made all the others work for him, and he was the wise head of the family, as he ought to be, and was intended to be. In these latter days he seems to be the only one working, and wondering how he can make the others work. The cultivation of soil is the first and most important feature of any thriving land since civilization began and ought to continue to be. No doubt it will always be. Herodotus, the father of history, tells us the story of the valley of the Euphrates; he brings out the fact that with poor cultivation the yield was fifty fold, with fair cultivation an hundred fold, and with good cultivation two hundred fold. That seems to have been the garden of the world during his days. Its great cities, Babylon and Ninevah are only marked by great heaps of sand today; instead of the millions of peoples who roamed in and out of the sand, it is now a barren desert, peopled only by a few wandering tribes of Arabs, grazing half starved sheep and goats. The early histories also tell us that the Nile produced wonderful crops for Egypt, and stress the point of good cultivation. The Chinese, also, one of the oldest known nations found out years ago, that their land would have to be preserved carefully to feed their increasing populations. So they terraced the hillsides from bottom to top to keep the soil from washing away; today, any soil so washed away is carried back in baskets. With the dense population of today, the Chinese people are on the verge of starvation, and great care is needed to preserve what they have left. Which of these courses will we take? Shall we sap the land by unadvised farming, and make of it a desert waste to our children's children, or hand it down to future generations more fertile, richer than it is today? This should be food for thought. Let us not make the mistake of planting "corn and tobacco" until we sap the land our fathers gave us.They were sent here when Loring took the Kanawha Valley, to cut off the retreat of the Union forces. They were the first Confederate soldiers to invade Ohio. They crossed into Ohio at Ravenswood, and recrossed at Greenbottom, arriving here just in time to meet the retreating Federals. |One of the first battles of the Civil War was fought in Barboursville on July 11, 1861, between the Wayne and Cabell County militia under Colonel Ferguson, and the Second Kentucky under Colonel Woodruff. The militia could not stand up under the bayonet charge, and retreated in haste, leaving one dead, a Mr. Reynolds, from Milton, and Absolom Ballinger wounded. Federal loss, five killed and eighteen wounded. I though our Militia was well trained, but lost confidence in them when I watched them in action during this fight. Our second fight was on Main Street in September 1862 between the Eighth Virginia Cavalry and a regiment of Ohio Cavalry under Colonel Powell. This battle was fought after night. Both sides retreated, one Union soldier being killed. The Eighth Virginia Cavalry was commanded by General Jenkins, and most of the boys from our county belonged to it.| |Our old court house, built about 1814 was located between Music Hall and the college. It had a whipping post near it. The first lawyers, I remember, were Henry J. Fisher, George W. Summers, Benjamin Smith and Gideon W. Camden; David McComas, Green Samuels, and J. H. Brown. There were very few criminal cases. Horse stealing was more frequent than any other crime.| I can't help coming to the defense of our old time people some modern writers and speakers tell us our old people did not have any education or did not want any, and that the aristocracy of Virginia did not want to be taxed to educate the people west of the mountains. Thomas Jefferson one of the greatest statesmen of his day was a great advocate of free schools. He succeeded in having a law passed providing for the education of all children whose parents were not able to educate them. Such children were certified by a board to the teacher who got an order on the sheriff for his pay at $.50 per month. This law worked all right in the cities and towns, but the country population was so thin they could not support schools. Town schools were good; our teachers were generally graduates of colleges, and taught all the higher branches and many of our boys and girls were sent off to colleges. I can name you grandmothers and mothers who have long passed away, who received their education at Mrs. Levis School at Shelbyville, Kentucky; Ohio Wesleyan, Cincinnati, Ohio; Steubenville, Ohio; and Staunton, Virginia. I can name the old boys who went to Marshall soon after it was made an academy and continued up to the Civil War frequently walking home in all kinds of weather, and as a result our community furnished a Lieutenant Governor of Virginia; two Adjutant Generals, one of state and one on General Military Staff; one Brigadier General, several Captains and Lieutenants, several fine lawyers, two judges, several doctors, financiers, a Vice President of the American Trust and Bonded Company, New York, and Commissioners of Internal Revenue, both terms under Grover Cleveland. We came to the conclusion that our boys needed education and got some of it. Old time people were more patriotic than they are today, people from all parts of the county would meet here every Fourth of July, march out to some suburban grove, listen to addresses by speakers chosen for the occasion and then feast on barbecued beef prepared by expert Nego cooks, who commenced to prepare it the day before. They had annual fairs; the Court House now the college building was used to display fruits, vegetables, wines, canned goods, needle work, etc. The stock was shown on the streets or lots. The exhibit was good and all took much interest in it. The first sorgham molasses I ever saw was at one of these fairs about 1852 was made in iron kettles it was very dark and thin, but was quite a curiosity. I have spoken of the amount of live stock on the farms. I quote prices from a memorandum book dated 1886, as I bought from farm to farm when I was in the live stock business.* On one trip I bought 35 cattle for $707.00 or $20.25 per On one trip I bought 99 sheep for 170.00 or 1.70 per head and 57 hogs for 417.00 or 8.00 per head. On one trip I bought 10 Texas Ponies for 447.25 or 44.25. On two or three trips, 695 sheep for 1435.00 or 2.05 per head. On one trip I bought 212 sheep for 573.00 or 2.75 per head. On one trip I bought 52 cattle for 936.20 or 3.25 to 3.40 per cwt. On one trip I bought 34 yearlings for 466.00 or 13.75 per head. On one trip I bought 30 head cattle including 11 yearlings at $2.85 per cwt. The price of yearlings averaged about $10 to $15 per head; and the price of two-year-olds, $16 to $20 per head. I bought two car loads of Putnam County two-year-olds, one car at $27.50 and one at $30 per head. Putnam County cattle was the best that I handled, but I could find more cattle in Logan ranges than any of the other counties. In 1884 I found 108 yearling cattle on Island Creek, belonging to one man I did not buy this bunch but came out with sixty eight two-year-olds. I had special rates of $48 per car to Baltimore. The Range cattle were raised cheap with good profit to owner. Barboursville was the county seat from 1813 to 1888, or for seventy five years, after a hot election it was removed to Huntington and Barboursville College became the owner of the Court House. At this time Rev. Wads was holding a quarterly meeting here. He went up to my house to dinner with my wife, and in passing the home where I now live my wife told him it would be a good place for a female school, he said he would talk it up, and for me to see Mr. Poteet, the owner, and get his price on the property which I did. He priced it about $500 less than he had been asking. Before a deal was made, however, sentiment sprang up in Huntington in favor of giving the Court House building to the proposed seminary. The County Court; George Grobe, Thomas Bias, and George Hackworth, found out they could not legally give the property away, but if a stock company was formed they would put the price at one thousand dollars and deed it and take a lien for the purchase money. E. W. Blume, Henry Poteet, Henry Stowasser, Charles H. Miller, and Fredrick Miller or his son Will, each took two hundred dollars stock. The deed was made and a lien taken which was paid and released at the close of 1888. This Institution was turned over by the Stock Holders as a Conference School to the M. E. Church South, until 1901. The Institution was known as Barboursville College. In consideration of the liberality of Morris Harvey. The trustees changed the name to Morris Harvey College, the building and grounds have been greatly improved and beautified and the faculty increased. Rev. T. S. Wade was the first president and Rev. G. W. Hampton vice president. It must not be thought that because our mothers and grandmothers brought the products of the farm to the stores to trade for other goods that they did not have any fine clothes. On extra occasions their silks would stand alone and when our sisters came out in their imported organdies and Empress Cloth dresses covered with a hand made silk or lace shawl that touched the ground they would get a beau in about fifteen minutes. Flax, hemp, and cotton were raised on every farm as part of the crops and had to be worked up. Barboursville has kept up in the march of progress; she has grown until we reach from hill to hill. After being scored we feel proud of our score; perfect in transportation; perfect in our boys who have made prominent men. Sometimes we imagine we see the original owners of this land, John Samuels, and William Merritt walking over our town and looking over the improvement we have made and hear them say what fools we were to give this valuable property away. I cannot close this history without saying something about our old time colored people. In making this state we took from Virginia more than half her territory, but we only inherited four per cent of the slaves. I never witnessed any of the cruelties Harriett Beecher Stowe tells us about in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The slaves were respected and honored by all regardless of the station they occupied in life. They received their freedom with full honor; they helped to carve this country out of a wilderness and no man can say aught against them. I call to mind a negro man my father raised from a small orphan boy. When he received his freedom we were glad to know he was ready to take his place in the world. He was an expert cook, his first salary was eight dollars a month as steward on a steam boat, his wife was chamber maid at a good salary, and when he wrote me, "I have a son named after you and a daughter named after your sister." It pleased me to know he remembered old home folks. Morris Harvey College has an incorporated history of thirty-six years. The institution was founded in 1888 as the Barboursville Seminary; but finding it difficult to maintain the school because of the lack of endowment and equipment, the citizens of Barboursville induced the Western Virginia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to take over the plant and make it a denominational college. at Morris Harvey In the above status, the school continued to function under the authority of state and church, until the close of the spring semester of 1909. Degrees in education, literature, arts, and sciences were conferred. The records show, that at this time, the requirements of education in the state and of endowment by the General Board of Education in the church were so raised, that the standard college rank was lost and the institution became a junior college, and so remained until 1919. In 1901, Mr. Morris Harvey, a resident of Fayetteville, West Virginia, became interested in education and his attention was toward Barboursville College. In recognition of his liberal gifts, the Board of Trustees changed the name of the school to Morris Harvey College. On account of the growing demand for more complete education at the hands of the church, and at the request of the local Board of Trustees, the General Board of Education determined in 1919 that the school should be made once more a standard, four year, collegiate institution. Pursuant to this decision, in each of the scholastic years of 1919-1921, the addition of the senior year made the program complete, and at the following commencement (1921) the first class with degrees in Arts and Sciences was graduated after a lapse of more than a decade. The curriculum now leads to bachelors' degrees in the college, or certificates in the special departments. The latter include four years in piano and voice; six grades and post graduate in violin; two years in home economics. There is also the standard academy following the requirements prescribed by the state for secondary schools. This is a distinctly separate unit. In a survey of the history of such an institution as this, the following question is often asked: Why the church college in the program of education? In the concern to be rid of the dictatorial system of education at the hands of the medieval, and sometimes, the later church; the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, and an almost equally dictatorial and intolerant scientific system has taken its place. The modern church college stands for investigation and advancement. It also stands for the development of the soul along all lines. The aim is broad. While one student is being prepared to enter advanced technical courses, another is being equipped to pursue liberal arts. Both students acquire a broader outlook by association; besides the influence of religion is brought to bear on each. The church college, while recognizing the demands of the state boards of education, preserves the equilibrium of society in a scientific and mechanical age by keeping a one-sided view of education from becoming predominant. In all fairness, in this connection, the church must recognize the state schools, university and colleges, in the maintenance of educational equipoise by preventing the return of any sort of scholasticism. Development in education has run a cycle. At first colleges, secular or religious, were small but in the course of time the growth resulted in the great university. Now, the tendency is, in some universities to emphasize the college unit once more. In some universities the college is used as the basis of government because large student bodies are unwieldy and impersonal, or as in some instances, unmanageable and inefficient. The small college cultivates the more intimate fellowship of student with student, and of professor and student. The alumni of Morris Harvey College have been going into big higher institutions of learning, especially is this true of more recent years. These graduates have made good and are now serving state and church acceptably. Thus Morris Harvey College is justified in her existence by the aims and ideals of her curriculum, by the tendency of modern education, and by the records of her alumni. Wilson B. Moore Dr. V. R. Moss B. J. McComas Dr. Charles Moss John Love* (No. 2) Community Histories Index

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In the last few episodes, we’ve been talking about the standard model of physics, explaining what everything is made up of. But the reality is that we probably don’t know a fraction of how everything is put together. This week we’re going to talk about baryons, the particles made up of quarks. The most famous ones are the proton and the neutron, but that’s just the tip of the baryonic iceberg. And then we’re going to talk about where the standard model ends, and what’s next in particle physics. Show notes here Transcription services provided by: GMR Transcription Female Speaker: This episode of Astronomy Cast is brought to you by Swinburne Astronomy Online, the world’s longest-running online astronomy degree program. Visit astronomy.swin.edu.au for more information. Fraser: Astronomy Cast Episode 395, baryons and beyond the standard model. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cane. I’m the publisher the universe today. With me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and the Director of Cosmo Quest. Hey Pamela. How you doing? Pamela: I’m doing well. How are you doing Fraser? Fraser: Great. I’ve got nothing. No announcements. Nothing to tell people or ask people. Do you have anything? Astro Gear? Pamela: I would remind people, especially since it is Cyber Monday, if you’re watching live, to go to astrogear.spreadshirt.com and check out our cool shirts, hoodies, mugs, all of these random things that you can use to inflict sciency things upon people. My favorite is our Ceres, the other former planet shirt. Because I’m Team Ceres. Fraser: And you have worn that many times, even on the show. Pamela: I have. I have. We also have a Pluto shirt. Explore. Classic Pluto. Fraser: Classic Pluto. Not that newfangled Pluto. Pamela: Well it’s Pluto planet classic, sort of like Coke Classic. Pamela: Just Pluto planet classic. Fraser: All right. Show now? Fraser: Today’s episode of Astronomy Cast is brought to you by Casper Mattresses. And I know we’ve mentioned Casper a few times in the past. They are kind of an amazing new mattress company, where instead of going to a showroom, they ship you the mattress through the mail in this crazy box. It’s all just sort of really squished in. And then you open it up and the thing kind of expands. And it’s this great sort of hybrid foam mattress. It’s got his latex foam, and then also this memory foam. The two work together in this mattress. Now I own – the story is – they sent Pamela and myself sample mattresses. I had to have mine sent to the states at the time, so I – with my girlfriend, and now wife in the states. And I really loved the mattress, but we had to leave it there when my wife moved to Canada. So I bought a second one for our bed. So on my own dime, and then I got another one for the spare bedroom, because we needed another mattress in there. So I now have had three Casper mattresses that I’ve slept on, and they’re great. I really like them, and I definitely stand behind these mattresses. So the cool thing about buying Casper mattresses, it’s completely risk free. They offer free delivery and return within a 100 day period. So, that’ll give you the time to find out if you like the mattress or not. And I think you’ll like it. So it’s just the right sink, just the right bounce. You’re really gonna like it. Free risk, free trial, return policy. The mattresses are made in America, which is great, so you know they’re not coming from overseas. And the prices are really reasonable. So 500 for a twin size mattress, 950 for a king size mattress. And you’ll find that’s the same price or much cheaper than some of the mattress you find in the store. So, to get a deal on your Casper mattress, all you have to do is go to casper.com/astro and use the promo code astro, and they’ll knock $50 off the price of your mattress. Now terms and conditions apply. And you can get them in Canada, as well. Not just the states. So once again, go to casper.com/astro, and use the promo code astro to get $50 off of your mattress purchase. All right. Thanks Casper. Female Speaker: This episode of Astronomy Cast is brought to you by 8th Light Inc. 8th Light is an agile software development company. They craft beautiful applications that are durable and reliable. 8th Light provides disciplined software leadership on demand and shares its expertise to make your project better. For more information, visit them online at www.8thlight.com. Just remember, that’s www dot the digit 8-T-H-L-I-G-H-T dot com. Drop them a note. 8th light. Software is their craft. Astronomy Cast is proudly sponsored by Cleancoders.com. Training videos with personality for software professionals. Fraser: In the last few episodes, we’ve been talking about the standard model of physics, explaining what everything is made up of. But the reality is, we probably don’t know a fraction of how everything is put together. This week we’re gonna talk about baryons, the particles made up of quarks. Famous ones are the proton and the neutron, but that’s just the tip of the baryonic iceberg. And we’re gonna talk about where the standard model ends, and what’s next in particle physics. So we kinda glossed over baryons, and I think we realized we went straight to leptons and quarks, but, in fact, we didn’t spend a lot of time on baryons. And I think, originally, in my very small understanding, we have protons and we had neutrons. Those are your baryons. But apparently, now looking at the list, there’s a lot! Pamela: There are a lot. And just to review things for those trying to follow along at home, because this is a crazy alphabet soup. And I love your phrase just the tip of the baryonic iceberg. So we have leptons, which are fundamental particles that cannot be broken up any further. And these are our electron, muon, and tau particles and their partner neutrinos, the electron neutrino, the tau neutrino, and the muon neutrino. Then we have the quarks, also fundamental particles, up, down, charmed, strange, top, bottom. And these combined are called fermions. And fermions are things that have a multiple of spin ½. So they have a spin of a half, three halves, five halves, spin half is the key. And because of that, they follow the Pauli exclusion principle, and you can’t have two things with the same spin in the same energy level. So for instance, in an atom, you will have a spin up, and a spin down sharing an energy level. Okay. So that’s the fermions. Then we have the bosons. These are the things that carry force, give us mass. So we have the photon, which is tied to the electromagnetic force. We have the W-, the W+, and the Z boson, also called the Z zero boson. And these are what handle the weak force. Pamela: We also have the gluon, which is the strong force, and the Higgs boson, which gives us mass. Okay. So those are all the fundamental particles. Everything else is a non-fundamental particle. So everything else has to get built out of these fundamental particles. Fraser: And one of the things that get built is baryon. Pamela: Exactly. So things that are made of quarks are called hadrons. And hadrons are generally grouped into how many quarks make up the thing in the hadron. So we have mesons, which are combinations of two quarks. We don’t deal with those in real life, generally. And then we have the baryons. Baryons are what we deal with all the time. You and I are pretty much baryonic matter. Fraser: Right. We are made of baryons. Pamela: We are made of baryons. This is an awesome thing. We are fermions and we are baryons. And those baryons that make up us are made out of three quarks. In fact, they are made up of the ever so boring up and down quark, and these are what are called the protons and the neutrons. Fraser: And so what is sort of the major difference between the proton and the neutron? I mean, we know that it’s the – neutrons have a neutral charge, while protons have a positive charge. Are there any other differences? Pamela: So the proton is an up, up, down. The neutron is an up, down, down. And, yeah. They’re basically very close to exact same mass. The biggest difference is as far as we know, protons are annoyingly stable. Now I say annoyingly stable because a lot of theoretical physics would like these suckers to decay. It just makes the physics actually work. But as near as we can tell, they are utterly rock solid, not changing their identity, stable. The neutrons, on the other hand, when they’re not bound up inside the nucleus of an atom, they like to decay rather quickly, in about 100 seconds or so. Fraser: What do they decay into? Pamela: They actually decay into a proton, a electron, and an electron neutrino. Fraser: Oh, okay, okay. And I guess that’s – when we talk about neutron stars, which are this degenerate matter, right? This is where you’ve artificially taken all the protons and all the electrons, and you’ve mashed them together into neutrons, right? Fraser: And I guess it’s just the opposite way. Pamela: And this is where you end up with protons and neutrons being close to the same mass, but not the exact same mass. So that difference in mass is how you get both a proton and an electron out when you let the neutron sitting on your shelf decay. Fraser: Right, right. And as you said, they do adhere to the Pauli exclusion principle. Right? So you can’t put two protons, neutrons, et cetera into the same – Pamela: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They don’t. It’s the electrons that are spin ½ – Pamela: and are Pauli exclusion principle. The way these work, because quarks, they’re also spin ½, but they combine, and it just works out that you end up with spin zero, if I’m reading the chart I’m looking at correctly. Anyways, they don’t obey the Pauli exclusion principle. They’re good. Fraser: Now we’ve got a lot of building blocks. We’ve got the six different kinds of quarks that we know about. And yet the two major kinds of baryonic matter in the universe, right, with the proton with the up, up, down, and with the neutron with the up, down, down. But with all of those other combinations, there must be a lot of other baryonic matter out there. So what else is out there? Pamela: Well, they go on forever, it feels like. So if you think about it, we have these six different quarks. And then we’re looking to combine them in combinations of three. And so that is one heck of a recombinant works problem. And what’s kind of awesome and disturbing at the same time is people have gone through and named pretty much all of the combinations. And this means that we end up with really funky names. So if you combine a down quark, a charm quark, and a bottom quark, because you can, you end up with what they call a charmed bottom. Pamela: And that – Fraser: Do we have to put an explicit language on this episode now? Well anyway. Pamela: That’s it’s actual scientific name. Fraser: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Pamela: We also have the double charmed omega particle, which is a strange charm charm. It’s just sort of like at a certain point; they just decided to start amusing themselves while naming these things. But the thing is all of these things decay, and some of them actually haven’t even been observed. So, for instance, we’ve named the charmed bottom, but it’s never been observed. We don’t what its decay route is. We don’t know if it does exist, how long it exists for. But that’s what we’re looking at. Fraser: Right. How many times, how many different ways can you take strange, charm, down, up, down, charm – right? You just keep putting those combinations together, and you’re gonna come up with new particles. And you can work out the math, I guess. You can work out what the spin is gonna need to be. What the charge is gonna be. But it’s not; you don’t know whether this can even exist. Pamela: Exactly. And what’s cool, though, is we can work out so much about it. So for instance, we refer to baryons as general as falling into two different families. There’s the angular momentum half baryons – this gets into crazy quantum mechanics stuff that you really need two years of quantum mechanics to understand. I’m not going to torture you that much. Suffice to say angular momentum half, and angular momentum three half baryons. And all of the three half ones, all of them, are unstable. So we have these two different families of particles. But we’ve detected things in both families. So, for instance, a delta particle, which is made up of three different ups, because why not combine three things going up. That sounds kind of positive on a Monday afternoon. We know it has a rest mass of 1232 mega electron volts. We know it decays into a proton and a pion, and we know how long it lasts, which is way less than a second. But what’s cool is we have by slamming things together in particle accelerators to generate vast amounts of energy in a very small place, we’ve been able to create circumstances that allow that energy to rain out into all of these different unstable particles that we can then study. So we have the ability on the math side to go through and say, “Okay. We’ve got six different things that we can combine together in all of these crazy different awesome ways.” There’s a triple charmed omega particle, for instance, that is a kind of awesome idea. There’s also a charmed double bottom omega particle, just if you wanna get weird. Fraser: But with all of these combinations, though, right, these don’t occur naturally in the universe. Pamela: So there’s a difference between not occurring naturally and not being stable. All of these things probably exist in the universe for fractions of a second. When I say fraction – Fraser: In a supernova. Pamela: In a supernova, in a collision between two cosmic rays. So you can imagine a situation where you have a high energy event that isn’t a supernova. So perhaps a coronal mass ejection lets off a cosmic ray, and it’s zipping its way through the universe. And it just happens to collide with another particle zipping its way through the universe. And they combine for that fraction of a moment, to, for ten to the 23rd, 24th of a second, create a sigma particle, a charmed sigma particle. Whatever it might be that falls out of that energy. Fraser: Right, and with way more energy that a large hadron collider could ever produce. Pamela: And that’s the wild thing, is we’re working to catch up with the universe. The universe just does this because it has really big naturally-occurring magnetic fields. We have to do really bad thing to the power grid to create these really big magnetic fields. Fraser: And so this is one of the great things about the large hadron collider. Everyone’s afraid that the LHC is gonna destroy the planet. Fraser: But the reality is that it generates energies that are vastly, at many orders of magnitude less than the universe does all the time. Fraser: So we talk about okay, so maybe these particles are being generated; in fact, vast amounts, and they are all decaying. And so the trick is that nothing else is stable in the way that protons and neutrons arguably are. Pamela: Yes. And so this is where we live in a reality where yeah, we occasionally do experience muons in detectors, because they rain out of the upper atmosphere. But most of our day-to-day interactions are protons, neutrons, electrons, and that’s about it. Pamela: Up and down. That’s all we’ve got. Up and down quarks. Fraser: Right. Okay. So sort of the second part of this show is we wanna talk a bit about where are the gaps, where are the holes, and what comes next? So let’s do this in two ways. One is what are some of the things that we know about that we don’t know how they fit into the model? Pamela: The biggest one, which is kind of ridiculous to admit to, the biggest one is actually gravity. We talk about there being a graviton boson, maybe, sort of, we don’t know. But as near as anyone can calculate, gravity just doesn’t fit in at the quantum mechanics level. So there’s that big problem. Pamela: Looking beyond that big problem, we don’t know how to explain dark matter and dark energy. And the one thing we do know about dark matter is it’s some sort of non-baryonic particle. So it’s something that must be stable, or at least is constantly regenerating, that doesn’t interact via the electromagnetic force in a way that we know how to deal with. Fraser: So could one possibility be, then, that maybe there is some other stable form of, some other stable baryon that was maybe generated during the big bang, or is still being generated by all of these cosmic rays bumping into each other, and this is somehow producing some particle that – at a higher level of energy than we create in a lab – that has these properties? Pamela: Well, the issue seems to be that quarks are quite happy to interact via the electromagnetic force. So since we know that dark matter is not interacting via the electromagnetic force – this is where it doesn’t deal with light, as light passes through the universe, except to bend it, it doesn’t interact in any of the normal ways that other stuff does. That means that since baryons are made up of quarks, and they interact via the electromagnetic force, we’re looking for something that isn’t a baryon. And so we’re looking for something outside of all of these awesomely-named quark-made particles. Fraser: So, right now then, where do particle physicists think that dark matter exists compared to the standard model? Which group would it probably be in? Pamela: It’s not. That’s the thing. Fraser: No group. It’s not a lepton. Pamela: It’s outside. Fraser: It’s not a hadron. Pamela: It’s outside. Fraser: It’s outside. Pamela: Yeah. It’s a non-baryonic particle. Fraser: But is the thought, okay, so then what, I mean I understand that it’s outside, but particle physicists have done plenty of math and done plenty of predictions about what dark matter particles can be, and they’re going to try and create them with things like the LHC. So what kind of characteristics are they looking for? I mean, give us something. Pamela: So we’re currently at a stage where it’s hard to say that folks are doing much more than looking at the universe, putting constraints based on what we’re observing on what we expect to find, and kinda hoping that things that fall out of theories like super symmetry, which we’ll get to, explain what we’re observing. So we know that there is a very small cross-sectional radius for collisions between dark matter particles. We see this from looking at how clouds of dark matter pass through one another when super clusters interact. We know that it doesn’t interact with the electromagnetic force. We know it does interact with gravity. That’s kind of where we’re at, and different people are going down different rabbit holes trying to find a rabbit to pull out and call dark matter. So we have some folks that are going down loopy gravity. Some people that are going down string theory. Some people that are going down super symmetry, and string theory, actually, can go down wherever it wants and call itself super symmetry, or call itself string theory, rather. Pamela: So we don’t know. We have a word, non-baryonic dark matter, and that’s a good word. And that’s as firm as our observational understanding really lets us stand right now. Fraser: So if you were able to generate it in the large hadron collider, how would you know that you found it? How would you know that those are the characteristics of dark matter? Pamela: Well, what we’re looking for as we crank up the large hadron collider, and prepare to crank up the cyclotron at fermi lab, what we’re looking for are significantly more massive particles than we’ve found so far. And different kinds of things in super symmetry are starting to get predicted that have these higher masses and don’t interact. May be? But honestly, we’re sort of grasping at straws saying we need a weakly interacting mass of particle. Let’s see if we can get a massive particle that weakly interacts to fall out of the collisions. Fraser: Okay. So that’s one, which is dark matter. And now dark energy, I guess, is another one. Maybe particles appearing, but maybe it’s just space itself, right? Pamela: Right. So dark energy has no explanation. We don’t know where the explanation’s gonna fall out of. What we do know is attempts to explain dark energy using vacuum energy, which is that flux of particles coming in and out of reality because there’s just this background energy that they can use to temporarily exist. When we start looking for leftover energy from things popping in and out of existence, all attempts to use that leftover to explain dark energy is off by like 120 orders of magnitude. So that’s just wrong. Pamela: And then there’s other things that leave us perplexed, like standard model physics doesn’t require the neutrino to have mass. And the problem is we know from a variety of different experiments that neutrinos that are formed with one identity, formed as an electron neutrino, for instance, can transmute into a different type of neutrino, like a tau neutrino, or a muon neutrino. And this ability to flip identities requires the neutrino to have mass that can go into that identity flip. So that’s not explained. And then there’s just the whole fact that why do we have so much matter and so little anti-matter in the universe? That doesn’t fall naturally out of anything. Fraser: Okay. And you’ve made a couple of references now to super symmetry. So we actually did an episode on super symmetry, quite a few hundred episodes ago. But can you give, sort of, us the short version of what super symmetry is? Pamela: So the short version is that there is a entire mirror set of generations of particles. So when we talk about the particles that we normally deal with falling into three generations – the generation that corresponds to the electron proton up and down, and so on through, going from the lightest and most stable to the heaviest. Fraser: Right. I remember that. That was a couple of episodes ago. We talked about those three generations. Pamela: So take those exact same three generations, flip them over, and call them the super symmetrical particles. And so these are essentially super partner particles. So we have – for the photon, we have the photino. For the gluon, the gluino. For the leptons, we have the sleptons. For the neutrinos, we have the S-neutrinos. I don’t know how you say S and N. Fraser: Right. You put an S in front of everything. Fraser: Right. I know. So instead of the top quark, you get the stop quark. Pamela: And so the idea is that all of these partner protons and neutrons or I guess photons and bosons, all of these partner things, they’re there to basically balance everything out, and they have different masses. And these different masses start to crop up as explaining what dark matter is, and helping to allow to fix the problems with vacuum energy. Maybe. We don’t know. And that’s where it all gets highly, highly confusing. Fraser: And so if true, these particles are gonna have incredibly high masses compared to the regular masses of the partner particles, right? So the – Fraser: And so there’s just, there are limits to what even the most powerful collider possible, the large hadron collider so far, on what kinds of particles it can actually generate. And so these particles might just be beyond what it can create. Pamela: Exactly. And it’s hoped that the top quarks’ sister particle – Fraser: The stop quarks, yeah. Pamela: is actually the lowest mass of these, and is something that’s potentially within reach. So we’re trying to find that. So, we’re not sure – Fraser: And if I understand, the recently upgraded large hadron collider can just reach the stop quark. Pamela: And that’s the hope. Pamela: So we’re looking. We’re looking. And it’s tricky. So they do have differences. So for instance, the S-fermion, there’s been zero particles, so they’re gonna behave without that Pauli exclusion principle. There just gonna act differently, and we’re hoping that the way that they act differently allows them to explain dark matter, and we’re hoping that the predicted energies, at least for the stop quark, is in reality as low as its theorized to be, and is thus observable. Now, if it’s not, it doesn’t mean that anything’s wrong with the universe. It just means we get to keep looking, and particle physicists still have a job, and there’s no Nobel Prize on the imminent future, but hey, maybe there’s funding for bigger and bigger accelerators. Fraser: Does super symmetry, I mean, one of its things is it will help unify gravity into the standard model, right? Pamela: It tries to. I wouldn’t say it succeeds, but it works towards that. We actually don’t have any theories that are fully successful at unifying quantum mechanics and relativity. Fraser: Wow. It’s kind of amazing. I mean it’s pretty – you think about the future people, and they’ll be able to look back – hopefully, if this ever gets figured out, right? – and they’ll be like, look at those people. Back then, they didn’t know that here’s how you unify gravity and the standard model. Pamela: But that’s really an internal prejudice. It’s the human desire for there to be one underlying cause that explains everything. One of the things that people find extremely dissatisfying about the standard model is I think it has 19 finely-tuned constants in order to work. And people don’t want a universe that’s filled with constants. They don’t want a fine-tuned universe. They want a plop down these laws of physics, and it just goes. Pamela: And it could be gravity doesn’t unify. Fraser: There’s a great game coming out that I wanna get called “No Man’s Sky.” I don’t know if you’ve heard about this? Fraser: But in the game, the whole universe is procedurally generated. And so no matter where you go, every part of the universe has been figured out, sort of, just in advance, by the math. And it’s the same thing. They picked these very specific – they picked a seed that then produced everything. And if they pick a different seed in their math, then it creates something different. And this is sort of this idea that our universe exists the way that it does just because all of these variables ended up the way they are. All these constants, right? And then if they’d ended up a different way, then gravity wouldn’t work properly, and so you can have all kinds of malformed universes from our perspective, but this is the one that was just barely suitable for life. Pamela: And that gets back to the ideas of multiverses, which I think we did an episode on. Pamela: And so there’s really nothing wrong with gravity not unifying. It’s just uncomfortable. And sometimes we just need to be a little bit uncomfortable. Fraser: I need my whole universe to fit on a t-shirt. It’s gotta happen. Very small font is fine, but I still need to have the theory of everything on my t-shirt. Okay, cool. Well thanks a lot Pamela. Pamela: Oh, for sure. Fraser: We’re gonna go in a different direction next week. Pamela: We really are. Next week we’re gonna talk about happy books and all of the nerd stuff that you can get in this season of giving. Fraser: We will recommend our favorite things to get people for the holidays. Pamela: Whatever holiday you might be celebrating. Fraser: Yeah, whatever holiday you celebrate. Yeah, exactly. Festivus. Pamela: Birthdays! My birthday is in December. Fraser: That’s right. Well thanks again Pamela. Pamela: Sounds great. Fraser: Thanks for listening to Astronomy Cast, a non-profit resource provided by Astro Sphere New Media Association, Fraser Cain, and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can find show notes and transcripts for every episode at Astonomycast.com. You can email us at firstname.lastname@example.org. Tweet us @astronomycast. Like us on Facebook, or circle us on Google Plus. We record our show live on Google Plus every Monday at 12:00 pm Pacific, 3:00 pm Eastern, or 2000 Greenwich Mean Time. If you miss the live event, you can always catch up over at cosmoquest.org. If you enjoy Astronomy Cast, why not give us a donation? It helps us pay for bandwidth, transcripts, and show notes. Just click the donate link on the website. All donations are tax deductible for U.S. residents. You can support the show for free, too. Write a review or recommend us to your friends. Every little bit helps. Click support the show on our website to see some suggestions. To subscribe to this show, point your podcatching software at astronomycast.com/podcast.xml, or subscribe directly from iTunes. Our music is provided by Travis Earl, and the show is edited by Preston Gibson.

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The martyrdom of Imam Husayn ibn 'Ali ('a) and his companions in Karbala' proved to be the beginning of the downfall of the Banu Umayyah dynasty which had usurped the Islamic khilafah by deceit, repression, and corruption of the Muslim community.Though the Imam ('a) was martyred with his family and companions, and apparently his murderers seemed to emerge winners from the conflict, it was the martyr of Karbala' who was the real victor. The mourning ceremonies that have been held through the last fourteen hundred years to commemorate this most significant event in the history of Islam are generally known as Muharram ceremonies, as they are held during the month of Muharram in remembrance of the 'Ashura' movement. This incident has its background whose elaborate details have been given by Muslim historians and I need not cite them here. Briefly, it may be said that Imam Husayn's revolt, staged against the tyranny, injustice, and repression of the regime and torture and execution of pious Muslims, which violated the Islamic concept of a just Islamic polity and society, was to uphold the ideals and values of Islam propounded in the Qur'an and the traditions of the Prophet (S), to rescue the higher human values, moral, social, political and spiritual, and to preserve the true spirit of Islam. It was basically aimed by the martyred Imam ('a) to rescue Islam as the message of the last Prophet, a message that had to endure, not only in the hearts and spirits of saints but on the plane of society, and he achieved his purpose most completely. The episode of Karbala' became the everlasting stage on which, more than anything else, the great spirit of an Imam of the Ahl al-Bayt was put for eternal display, not in mere words or traditions recorded in books, but against the background of the greatest tragedy in human history and scenes of love and loyalty, bravery and sacrifice, nobility and high spirituality, blood and battle, and also those of treachery and betrayal, human abasement and wretchedness, perversity and depravity. Due to his refusal to compromise with godlessness and tyranny, the Imam has been remembered as the very embodiment of tawhid, of la ilaha illallah, by all great Islamic mystics, thinkers, writers and poets. In the words of the great Indian Sufi of Iranian origin, Khwajah It is important to note that the Imam's address to Time inspired a number of Muslim thinkers to propound a new revolutionary concept of Time with reference to the Qur'anic verses in the Surat al-'Asr. The Imam did not actually vilify time, but he condemned the time-servers. Otherwise Time, as interpreted by Iqbal, the contemporary philosopher poet of the Indian subcontinent, is, in the light of the Qur'an and the Prophetic traditions, an expression and manifestation of the continuing process of God's creativity as well as the creativity of the human being. While addressing Time, Imam Husayn ('a) indicated that man is not a time-server but time is at the service of man. He proved by his example that man has the power to turn the tide of time and he actually did it. The tragedy of Karbala', which was in the words of Imam Khumayni the symbol of blood's triumph-the blood of the martyrs-over the sword, transformed not only the history of Islam but also human history for ever. Husayn ('a) initiated a movement that proved to be an archetype representing an eternal struggle of truth against falsehood, justice against injustice and tyranny, human dignity against dehumanization, the revolt of the oppressed against oppressors, and overpowering of the strong by society's weak. The unlslamic rule of the Umayyads was challenged after him by his followers and descendants, such as Zayd ibn 'Ali, Yahya ibn Zayd, and before them by Mukhtar al-Thaqafi and the Tawwabin, which created a ferment that finally resulted in the overthrow of the Umayyads and the coming to power of Banu 'Abbas, who deceitfully claimed to avenge the martyrdom of Husayn ('a) and to advocate his revolutionary mission. However, this movement continued to be inspired by the message of 'Ashura' during the reign of the 'Abbasid caliphs and afterwards. The emergence of Shi'i Sufi movements, like those of the Sarbidaran, the Nuqtawis, and the Mar'ashis, as well as the Fatimi-lsmaiili sects, culminated in the victory of the Safawi Sufi order in Iran, who made it a point that the 'Ashura' movement should continue as an inspiring force and dynamic principle in Muslim polity and society. It were the Safawis during whose reign the 'Ashura' commemoration ceremonies took a particular shape. The remembrance of the tragedy of Karbala' as a ritual did not remain confined to Iran and Iraq, but also influenced the socio-political and cultural life of Muslims in the Indian sub-continent. As a result of this, in India, particularly in Avadh, there developed a culture that was inspired by the spirit of 'Ashura' which was all-embracing. Other Muslim sects and even non- Muslims came under the cultural influence of this movement. Unfortunately this movement, which represented a resurgence of the 'Ashura' culture in literature and other art forms, gradually degenerated in the course of time in Iran, Iraq, and the sub-continent, losing its revolutionary spirit. One of the greatest contributions of Imam Khumayni is that he recreated and revived the spirit of 'Ashura' through his messages against the despotic Pahlavi rule and the exploitive domination of alien powers over Muslims throughout the world. Some of his disciples and contemporaries have also contributed to this 'Ashura'ic resurgence of Islam, Shari'ati and Mutahhari in particular. Imam Khumayni and other champions of the revolutionary ideology of Islam in Iran made use of the traditional ritual 'Ashura' ceremonies to reach the common Muslim masses for effectively conveying their message to the grassroots of the Muslim society. There have been various attempts in the Muslim world to reinterpret and reconstruct Islamic ideology to meet the challenges of time. Ghazali demolished what was in his view unlslamic in the ideas of Muslim philosophers; Jamaluddin Asadabadi, popularly known as Afghani, emphasized the importance of ijtihad and propagated a pan-lslamic ideology; his followers in Egypt and the Arab world, particularly Muhammad 'Abduh, Rashid Rida' and others, revived the practice of ijtihad in the Sunni world. Before them, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi and Shah Waliullah had made attempts to awaken Muslims to the needs of the time and revive the Islamic spirit. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Iqbal tried to reconstruct Islamic beliefs according to the challenges of the time and the ascendant supremacy of science and Western philosophy. In the words of Iqbal, all the earlier Muslim thinkers had failed in their mission because they destroyed the prevalent philosophies but could not reconstruct Islamic ideas on a secure ground, and they failed to influence the Muslim society in general. This failure, in my view, is due to these thinkers' inability to reach the Muslim masses and convey their message to them in a popular idiom. The success of Imam Khumayni and the other ideologues of revolutionary Iran found the popular platform of the Muharram ceremonies as a convenient weapon against the repressive Pahlavi rulers, imperialism and Western domination, particularly the exploitive American dominance of the East, to awaken Muslim masses and revive in them the spirit of martyrdom inspired by the episode of Karbala'. Because of this they succeeded in their movement, while others had failed to achieve the desired end. Imam Khumayni not only rekindled the flame hidden in the hearts of the pupils of 'Ashura' culture, but also vehemently criticized the so-called 'ulama' and fuqaha' who, as time-servers, interpreted Islam and Islamic laws according to the convenience of the rulers and the exploiting class. One who makes a study of al-Kawthar, a selection in two volumes of the speeches of Imam Khumayni, as well his writings on the Islamic government, in particular his lectures on wilayat-e faqih, one would be surprised to find that the most vehement criticism of Muslim clerics, Shi'i and Sunni, was made by a Muslim scholar. It was because Imam Khumayni understood profoundly the spirit of the 'Ashura' movement and was angry that the so-called 'ulama' and rawdeh-khwans had transformed its true spirit into a mere ritual of lamentation over the martyrdom of Husayn ('a) and his companions, making it a regular means of their livelihood. He criticized and condemned these persons and rejuvenated the true spirit of 'Ashura' among the Muslim masses, who were sincerely devoted to Muharram ceremonies. These ceremonies provided him with the most effective weapon to propagate his message based on the Islamic values of justice and truth. Had there been no such platform to reach the masses, he might have also failed in his attempt to revive true Islamic values and reawaken the Muslim masses. It was here that the secret of his success lay. The important milestones of his movement could not have been covered without taking recourse to 'Ashura'. The tragic event of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn ('a) at Karbala' deeply influenced the tide of time in various ways, in the fields of philosophy, kalam, political thought, social reform, and cultural resurgence of the Muslim world. In India (and also Pakistan and Bangladesh), a culture developed that was inspired and motivated by the 'Ashura' movement. Even during the period of Muslim decadence that culture has, in the words of Iqbal, produced the cream of Muslim poetry and literature in the form of the elegies (marathi) in Urdu, which have exercised a great influence on the Indo-Muslim culture, an influence that extended to non-Muslim communities as well. Presently one can find the influence of the 'Ashura' movement in this region even in non-Muslim literature and culture. Even in the so-called progressive (Marxist and modern) literature, particularly poetry, one can find Karbala' and 'Ashura' used as metaphors to depict the present reality. All these aspects may be elaborated in the form of a lengthy article or even a book, but here, for the purpose of brevity, I would abstain from going into details. Of course, there emerged some movements in the Muslim world inspired by the 'Ashura', but could not leave a lasting effect and died away after a short time. Imam Khumayni's success in bringing about the Islamic Revolution in Iran and, through it, influencing the entire Muslims world, lies in the fact that he made the 'Ashura' movement the prime mover of a continuing process in human history for evolving a better society that could safeguard the principles of justice, social equity, and the cultural independence of the East. The impact of the 'Ashura' movement on Muslim polity and culture and its role in changing and moulding the history of Islam and the world may be discussed in detail under various heads such as: its impact on Muslim theology ('ilm al-kalam), mysticism, and philosophy, its impact on socio-economic reforms in the Muslim world, its impact on political upheavals in the Muslim world, and its impact on culture, literature, fine arts and other creative expressions of Muslim ethos. Imam Khumayni played the most influential role in our times in translating the revolutionary and creative potential of this movement into reality through his writings, speeches, leadership, and his reinterpretation of the fundamental principle of "enjoining good and prohibiting evil." It is necessary to elaborate certain significant aspects of the commemoration ceremonies of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn ('a). Generally these ceremonies are viewed from two angles: one is the spiritual, pietistic angle that considers them a means of catharsis and redemption; the other is the socio-political approach that regards it as instrumental in the realization of the Islamic ideals for which the great sacrifice (dibh-e 'azim) was made. The former approach, which treats the 'Ashura' rituals from a pietistic angle, gives importance to mourning, lamenting, breasting beating in remembrance of the mazlum Imam and considers sorrow as the means of participating in the sufferings of the Imam ('a), his family, and companions. This approach is supported by the traditions of the Imams ('a) of the Prophet's Family. There are traditions that emphasize that the tragedy of Karbala' was predestined and all prophets of God from Adam to the Seal of the Prophets (S) had been informed of the sacrifice of Husayn ('a) through Gabrael in advance. They themselves mourned and made it obigatory for all believers to mourn and be sorrowful in the remembrance of this great tragedy. Fatimah al-Zahra' ('a), the bereaved mother of Husayn ('a), is believed to be the host of the mourning observances, and she is the main addressee of all expressions of sorrow and the condolences that are offered, in this world as well as the other world, and, it believed, she will intercede in favour of her son's mourners on the Day of Judgement. Authentic traditions record that Imam 'Ali ibn al-Husayn Zayn al- 'Abidin ('a) mourned his father and his companions throughout his life after Karbala'. He was present at the site of the tragedy and witnessed all the sufferings of his father. Moreover, he had to shoulder the responsibility of taking care of the womenfolk and children of his family after 'Ashura' and he passed through the tribulations of the journey of the captive family of the Prophet (S) from Karbala' to Kufah and from Kufah to Damascus, putting up with all the humiliation with exemplary equanimity, patience, and firmness of character. He is regarded by the Sufis as one of their early great masters, who also emphasized the value of God's fear and sorrow for the sake of purifying the heart and soul. His collection of supplications, known as al-Sahifat al-Sajjadiyyah or al-Sahifat al-kamilah, is a valuable source of ma'rifah and high spirituality. The other great mourner of Karbala' was Imam Husayn's sister, Zaynab, known as "Zaynab-e Kubra" and "Thani-e Zahra" (i.e. the Second Fatimah). She bore the martyrdom of her two young sons, 'Awn and Muhammad, without shedding a tear, but was the first to mourn her brother. After the episode of Karbala', Imam Sajjad and Zaynab made continuous efforts to create the institution of mourning for the martyred Imam as a vehicle for the revolutionary message of Islam against perverse socio-political conditions that negated the Islamic ideal of a healthy society ruled by committed and competent leaders. The institution of mourning over Imam Husayn became a vehicle for the propagation of almost everything that Islam stood for. It was not the martyrdom of an ordinary moral, no matter however pious or saintly. It was the martyrdom of an Infallible Imam and the greatest wali and vicegerent of God and the God-appointed heir to the Prophet's authority and spirituality. To those who understood the sublime spiritual station of Husayn ibn 'Ali it was as if the Prophet himself had been martyred at Karbala'. And what greater calamity could be imagined? As the martyred Imam represented the highest embodiment of Islam, his martyrdom was the greatest crime that could be perpetrated against Islam and God. As we know, the chiefs and elders of Quraysh had conspired to murder the Prophet (S) on the night of his migration to Madinah. Acting out a plan aimed to mislead the waiting assassins, 'Ali ibn Abl Talib slept on the Prophet's bed that night, while the Prophet (S) left the town. Later, for a decade, the Quraysh, led by Banu Umayyah, and in particular Abu Sufyan, unrelenting in their hostility against Islam and its prophet, made repeated attempts to annihilate the Muslim community in Madinah, which formed the nucleus of the expanding revolutionary creed. When these attempts did not succeed, they joined the fold of Islam, and this time all their efforts were aimed to recapture the supremacy they had lost due to the Prophet's movement and to destroy Islam from within. The martyrdom of Imam Husayn and his companions at Karbala' was viewed by Banu Umayyah as a great victory in the course of a long struggle against Islam and its prophet. Their sense of triumph is reflect in the following verses of Ibn al-Ziba'ra that Yazid is reported by historians to have recited when, after the battle Karbala', Imam 'Ali ibn al-Husayn ('a) and the women and children of the Prophet's family were brought as captives into his court at Damascus: Alas! Had only my elders that were slain at Badr, seen the torments of Khazraj by the edge of the sword. They would have cried 'hurra!' and given cries of joy, and said: Bravo, O Yazid, for what you have done! We have killed the elect of their chiefs, avenging by his death, the viclims of Badr. The clan of Hashim dallied with kingdom, and there was neither any revelations nor any news from the heavens. I am not of Khindif should I fail to take revenge, from the family of Ahmad for what they have done. As can be seen, the vengeful spirit that pervades these verses is one that characterized the pagan Arab tribes of the Jahiliyyah. It is a base spirit that still wallows in the loyalties and attachments of a barbaric tribal society that is a stranger to the message of Islam of a universal creed based on higher moral and spiritual values. Besides mourning for the martyrs, 'Ali ibn al-Husayn ('a), Zaynab ('a) and her younger sister, Umm KulthEm, made very forceful orations describing the sufferings of 'Ashura' and its aftermath that moved the listeners to tears. These orations and elegies composed by Zaynab ('a) and 'Umm Kulthum ('a) extempore exercised great influence on the Muslims and were instrumental in propagating the message of 'Ashura' and the message of Imam Husayn's sacrifice. These may be taken as the early foundations of the 'Ashura' movement and beginnings of the mourning ceremonies. There are equally authentic traditions of Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq ('a) and Imam 'Ali al-Rida ('a) exhorting their followers regarding the observance of mourning in remembrance of Imam Husayn ('a) and his companions as a means of redemption. In traditions ascribed to the Prophet (S), Fatimah ('a) and the Imams ('a) of the Prophet's family there is another significant aspect to be taken note of. A recurring theme that characterizes them is that not only the prophets and the angles mourned the martyrdom of Imam Husayn and his companions, but also the whole cosmos mourned this tragedy. Strong winds began to blow on that tenth of Muharram and when the Imam was beheaded after he fell in the field of battle, there arose tides in rivers and oceans as if they would flood the entire earth, the stars collided, the sun was eclipsed, mountains moved from their places and the seven heavens rained blood, as blood gushed forth from the ground. Such descriptions of the effect of Imam Husayn's martyrdom on the whole order of being persuade his devotees to participate in a mourning ritual that encompasses all the natural and supranatural realms. If not taken literally, these traditions may be treated as metaphorical expressions of a tragedy possessing cosmic dimensions. There is no doubt that these traditions served as the source of inspiration for the devotees and made them feel one with the whole universe and its purpose. Later, when ta'ziyyah, majalis and rawdah khwani became popular rituals among the Shi'ah, sufis, and some other Muslim sects, gradually more and more such descriptions were improvised and many events that never occurred were intertwined with the historically recorded events and authentic traditions of the Imams ('a). This was done sometimes intentionally and sometimes due to ignorance by rawdah khwans, zakirs and poets. In poetry there might be some justification for the flights of imagination at the pretext of poetic license, but in written prose works such mixing of myth with history and attributing inauthentic or totally false traditions to the Imams ('a) is unpardonable. This practice was started by some professional rawdah writers with a view to gaining popularity among naive audiences by touching their most sensitive chords to make them weep. Mulla Wa'iz Kashifi, the author of Rawdat al-shuhada, is severely criticized by Muhaddith Nuri in Lu'lu' wa al-marjan, and by Mutahhari in H'amaseh-ye Husayni. Muhaddith Nuri devotes the major part of his book to describing how sinful it is to attribute some sayings or occurrences that have no authentic basis. Imam Khumayni at the risk of losing popularity among the naive and inviting wrath of professional akhands all over the Muslim world boldly restrained the devotees from unnecessarily shedding their blood during mourning ceremonies and advised them to donate their blood for the cause of defending the Islamic revolution. He also transformed the concept of intizar, waiting for the appearance of the Twelfth Imam ('a), from a passive state of waiting into active adherence to the Islamic principle of amr b'il-ma'ruf wa nahy 'an'il-munkar. This injunction was aimed to give to the participation of mourners in the ceremonies a consciousness of the relevance of the ongoing socio-political struggle of Islam and the Muslim world against imperialism and oppressors by following the example of Imam Husayn ('a). Thus he successfully synthesized the ritual mourning with social action. He did not disapprove of mourning, but rather encouraged it with a view to making it the main source of a revolution. Every religion and culture has its own myths along with its history and set of beliefs or ideology. The myths woven together with historical facts create the ethos and milliue of the popular Shi'i psyche. The ta'ziyah and majalis provided a basis for the integration of the entire cosmos into the community of Imam Husayn's devotees. They served as a perpetual instrument of keeping alive the memory of the tragedy of Karbala' by all possible means. The other approach which made use of 'Ashura' as a vehicle of social and political action may be reconciled with the spiritual and ritual view of the sufferings of Imam Husayn (a) in a creative and innovative way. The Shi'i ethos is dominated by an urge to relive the sufferings of the Holy Family ('a) every year. The Shi'ah re-enact the sufferings of Husayn ('a) and his family with renewed vigour year after year. In this enactment of reliving 'Ashura', men and women, young and old, all participate with a unique sense of commitment and devotion. Thus the 'Ashura' sufferings have come to occupy the very core of their own individual existential experience. That is why poetry inspired by this interiorized subjective experience becomes a genuine and authentic expression of collective human suffering and attains universal validity. For the mourners of Imam Husayn ('a), 'Ashura' is the "Eternal Now." This experience occurs in a pure and real space time continuum, a duration that is eternity. It transcends serial mathematical time of day-to-day life and renders meaning and purpose to human existence. This experience prompts every member of the community of Husayn's devotees to participate in jihad and a holy struggle against untruth, injustice and all forms of repression and exploitation of the weak (mustad'ifin) by the oppressors (mustakbirin). This Qur'anic terminology was for the first time used in historical and modern context by Imam Khumayni and was further popularized by 'Ali Shari'ati. Mahmoud Ayoub, in Redemptive Suffering in Islam, says. "No one can deny the far-reaching significance of the main rituals (i.e. five daily prayers, fasting of Ramadan, and the pilgrimage ritual of hajj) to the entire Muslim community. But we wish to argue here that the special rituals of the Shi'ah community, the rituals of ta'ziyah and ziyarah, present an intensity of feeling and a total encompassing of space and time unparalleled in the general piety of the Sunni Islam". (p. 277) As mentioned earlier these rituals, which acquired prevalence during the reign of the Al-e Buwayh and found specific forms during the Safawi regime, continued to inspire and stimulate the Shi'i psyche for a long time, despite Shari'ati's claim that the Safawis exploited Shi'i sentiments for capturing power and were later responsible for rendering the mourning rituals soulless formalities. Shari'ati is justified in criticism of the Safawis to an extent, but his view that Iranians adopted many elements of the paraphernalia of the rituals by borrowing from Christian passion rituals during this period as a result of diplomatic and cultural contacts with the West, is controvertible. It is not yet established that the Shi'ah did not make use of certain symbols of mourning such as the 'alam, dari', the coffin etc. before coming into contact with the West. It may be conjectured contrarily as well that the Christians borrowed the idea of passion plays during crusades from the Shi'i 'Ashura' rituals of Aleppo and other Syrian towns. Whatever may be the case, the rituals played a vital role in the Shi'i milieu and psyche. Rituals are essential elements in every religion, but during the periods of decline of a community they are taken as substitutes for the true spirit of a faith and religion is reduced to mere ritualism. Shari'ati called the ritualized form of Shi'i faith tashayyu'-e siyah ('black-clad Shi'ism,' that is, a Shi'ism given to passive mourning) as against the true Shi'i creed which he called tashayyu'-e surkh ('red Shi'ism,' the red colour symbolizing blood, sacrifice, struggle and martyrdom), which stands for active struggle against all that is untrue and unjust. Shari'ati and Murtada Mutahhari used the 'Ashura' idiom for awakening and arousing Iranians to the political relevance of Muharram ceremonies, paving through their speeches and writings the ground for the overthrow of the vicious Pahlavi regime. But the main inspiration came from Imam Khumayni's interpretation of the true spirit of Karbala', which in his view, is not a battle limited to any particular period of time but a continuing struggle in the "Eternal Now." By the means of Muharram ceremonies he revitalized and re-energized the downtrodden Muslims to fight courageously, fearlessly, and selflessly unarmed against the most heavily armed regimes in the region which enjoyed total support of a superpower like the US. He brought about a metamorphosis of the Iranian ethos and, as a result, there emerged from the fire of Phoenix a revolutionary nation of free men and women. Freedom is at the core of Imam Husayn's message. The Imam fought for freedom of all humanity from hunger, poverty, tyranny, exploitation and injustice. He chose death for himself as a free being and by choosing death he chose God and His Will. In his speech delivered before his journey to Iraq he spoke of his choice in the following words: O God, You knows that we did not seek, in what we have done, acquisition of power, or ephemeral possessions. Rather, we seek to manifest the truths of Your religion and establish righteousness in Your lands, so that the wronged among Your servants may be vindicated, and that men may abide by the duties (fara'id), laws (sunan) and Your ordinances (ahkam). Imam Husayn ('a) recited some verses in answer to Farazdaq, whom he met soon after he started on his journey from Makkah, when he was informed by the poet that while the hearts of the Kufis were with the Imam (a), their swords were with Banu Umayyah. The gist of these verses is that "If bodies be made for death, then the death of a man by the sword in the way of God is the best choice." The choice of violent death in the way of God was not a better choice only in the eyes of the Imam ('a), but all men among his relatives and his companions chose death in the way of god of their own free will. Death was not forced on the them by the choice of Imam Husayn ('a) either, rather, several times, particularly on the night of tenth Muharram, the Imam advised and persuaded them to leave him alone with the enemy. The old and the young among his family members and companions declared that death in the way of God was a better choice in their view. The Imam ('a) blessed them with eternal freedom for their free choice. The responses of Muslim ibn 'Awsajah, 'Abbas ibn 'Ali, 'Ali Akbar ibn al-Husayn, al-Qasim ibn al-Hasan and others brought tears to the eyes of the Imam ('a). Not only men but the womenfolk of his family and those accompanying his companions offered their loyalty and exhorted their husbands and sons to make their own free choice for sacrificing their lives. They encouraged their men to welcome death on the day of 'Ashura'. Women played a very important role in the 'Ashura' movement of the Imam ('a), highlighting the role and freedom that Islam has bestowed upon them. Imam Khumayni was perhaps the first religious leader to have successfully brought women into the active ranks of his movement for the freedom of Muslims in particular and the oppressed people of the world in general. Hence it would not be an exaggeration to say that the spirit of Ashura' was re-incarnated in him. Dr. S. Wahid Akhtar, formerly Professor and Chairman, Dept. of Philosophy, Aligarh Muslim University, presented the paper at the conference on Imam Khumayni wa Farhange Ashura, (Imam Khumayni and the culture of Ashura), held on June 1-2, 1995 at Tehran. There is no god save God, i.e the spirit of rejection of all worldly powers that stand in the ways of man's submission to God.

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Collapse of an iconic conifer: long-term changes in the demography of Widdringtonia cedarbergensis using repeat photography © The Author(s) 2016 Received: 20 February 2016 Accepted: 4 November 2016 Published: 30 November 2016 Conifer populations appear disproportionately threatened by global change. Most examples are, however, drawn from the northern hemisphere and long-term rates of population decline are not well documented as historical data are often lacking. We use a large and long-term (1931–2013) repeat photography dataset together with environmental data and fire records to account for the decline of the critically endangered Widdringtonia cedarbergensis. Eighty-seven historical and repeat photo-pairs were analysed to establish 20th century changes in W. cedarbergensis demography. A generalized linear mixed-effects model was fitted to determine the relative importance of environmental factors and fire-return interval on mortality for the species. From an initial total of 1313 live trees in historical photographs, 74% had died and only 44 (3.4%) had recruited in the repeat photographs, leaving 387 live individuals. Juveniles (mature adults) had decreased (increased) from 27% (73%) to 8% (92%) over the intervening period. Our model demonstrates that mortality is related to greater fire frequency, higher temperatures, lower elevations, less rocky habitats and aspect (i.e. east-facing slopes had the least mortality). Our results show that W. cedarbergensis populations have declined significantly over the recorded period, with a pronounced decline in the last 30 years. Individuals that established in open habitats at lower, hotter elevations and experienced a greater fire frequency appear to be more vulnerable to mortality than individuals growing within protected, rocky environments at higher, cooler locations with less frequent fires. Climate models predict increasing temperatures for our study area (and likely increases in wildfires). If these predictions are realised, further declines in the species can be expected. Urgent management interventions, including seedling out-planting in fire-protected high elevation sites, reducing fire frequency in higher elevation populations, and assisted migration, should be considered. KeywordsTemperature Conifer Repeat photography Population change Climate change Fire Cederberg In a recent global review of forest tree species, climate-induced physiological stress driven by drought and high temperatures was found to be a major cause of mortality in the last 40 years . Affected trees were also more vulnerable to climate-mediated processes such as insect or pathogen attack and wildfires. Conifers represented more than 40% of the 88 reviewed cases of mortality and have recently been found to be particularly vulnerable to a warming climate . The particularly rapid decline of the charismatic southern African endemic, Widdringtonia cedarbergensis Marsh over the last century is representative of this global decline in conifers and has led the species to be listed as critically endangered under the current IUCN Red List of Plants . While the diminishing number of W. cedarbergensis individuals have been anecdotally noted since the early 1800 s and the focus of more systematic observation over the last 50 years (see ), there is as yet no quantitative evidence documenting the rate of decline and no plausible hypothesis for a cause. The prevailing causal theories for the decline in W. cedarbergensis are (a) 18th and 19th century over-exploitation of the tree as a timber source which reduced and fragmented populations, thereby increasing ‘edge-effects’ and the likelihood of succumbing to fire [6–8], (b) late Quaternary climate change with warmer temperatures and less winter precipitation leading to a shift in the composition of co-occurring species with consequent changes in the fire regime [9, 10], (c) recent anthropogenic climate change, leading to temperature increases and aridity in the north-western areas of the fynbos biome, thereby increasing W. cedarbergensis mortality , and (d) the negative influence of insects and pathogens on reproductive output and survival . The vegetation for the Cederberg Wilderness Area (CWA) is termed fynbos, a fire-prone vegetation type that includes many fire-adapted species with a fire return interval of approximately 11–15 years . Fire is an important disturbance mechanism in fynbos and is thought to have had a strong influence in shaping the ecology and evolution of fynbos species . W. cedarbergensis, however, is conspicuous in this environment in that it shows little or no adaptation to cope with fire. Mature trees are often killed by fire and display no re-sprouting ability, there is no canopy-stored seedbank, sapling growth rates are relatively slow, and the trees take much longer to reach reproductive maturity (ca. 40 years) than any co-occurring shrubs or trees . Given such sensitivity to fire, an unfavourable fire regime can be very detrimental to this species. More recently there has been an increase in fire frequency with as many as six fires occurring in some parts of the Cederberg between 1977 and 2003 . This suggests that the current fire return interval could be too short to allow for adequate establishment and reproductive output to maintain viable populations of the species [9, 13]. Widdringtonia cedarbergensis individuals are usually associated with rocky cliffs, outcrops and east facing slopes at high elevations and are rarely found at lower elevations, on flatter ground and deeper soils [3, 17]. This association with higher-lying rocky sites has not only been attributed to temperature amelioration and protection from fire , but has also been suggested to give trees reliable access to available water trapped between bedding planes . This water supply is reliant on regular rainfall, and therefore any change in the amount or seasonality of rainfall that may lead to a decline in plant available water will adversely affect the trees. Given that the CWA is projected to be one of the first areas in the Western Cape Province in South Africa to be affected by warming and drying due to anthropogenic climate change , the likely sensitivity of W. cedarbergensis to elevated temperatures and reduced moisture levels is concerning. This study draws on a large collection of historical photographs of W. cedarbergensis (ca. 1931–1951 and 1960–1987) which were relocated and retaken (2007–2013), and represent the longest visual record of change in W. cedarbergensis populations to date. Here we (a) describe the pattern of recruitment and mortality of the species for the last 80 years, (b) evaluate the relationship between the degree of observed mortality and several likely environmental contributors to this mortality, and (c) speculate on the extent to which short-versus long-term changes in rainfall, temperature and fire regimes have affected the current distribution and demography. We use our findings to make recommendations regarding the future conservation of the species. Study area and photograph sites Widdringtonia cedarbergensis, commonly known as the Clanwilliam cedar, is endemic to the Cederberg Mountains of the Western Cape Province in South Africa. It has a patchy distribution between 900 and 1500 metres above sea level over approximately 250 km2, and typically grows in quartz-derived sandstone soils . The Cederberg experiences a Mediterranean-type climate with the majority of frontally-derived rainfall received during the cooler winter months (April–September), while summers are hot and dry. Cederberg vegetation is comprised mainly of Cederberg Sandstone Fynbos, which is a sclerophyllous and fire-prone vegetation type [20, 21]. Population dynamics over time The available fire history for the CWA was accessed via the SANBI Biodiversity GIS portal (http://bgis.sanbi.org), and fire frequency computed for each of the 87 photo-sites and identified regions . Using GPS co-ordinates for each tree, mean annual temperature (°C) and annual precipitation (mm) values for the period 1950–2000 were extracted from the interpolated Worldclim climate surface . The spatial resolution (30 arc sec) of WorldClim data did not allow for quantifications of temperature and precipitation for each tree. This is similarly the case for fire frequency data, where the temporal resolution did not exactly match the date of all historical photographs, while the myriad micro-habitats that may shelter plants from fires could not be mapped within fire ‘polygons’. However, the model variables represent the best available spatial and temporal estimates for climatic conditions presently available. Google Earth was used to determine latitude, longitude and aspect value for each tree . Primary cardinal directions and intercardinal ranges were grouped for ease of analysis (for example: 315° < N ≤ 45°). Further information on the source, resolution and unit of measurement of modelled variables can be found in Additional file 2: Table S2. For climate trend analysis, historical climate data was obtained from the South African Weather Service for Clanwilliam (32°10′52.52″S, 18°53′37.64″E) and the Agricultural Research Council for the Cape Nature Offices at Algeria (32°22′28.65″S, 19° 3′38.34″E) (Fig. 1). Clanwilliam and Algeria were the closest stations with long-term precipitation records (1870–2010 and 1908–2008, respectively). No temperature records exist for Algeria while Clanwilliam has a temperature record from 1963 to 2010. We used the ‘segmented’ package in R to determine whether regression models of the precipitation and temperature records had unknown break-points [23, 27]. Regional W. cedarbergensis population dynamics All statistical analyses were performed in the R statistical programme . For each region, defined as discrete, geographically separate populations, probability of mortality (Model 1) or recruitment (Model 2) was determined by fitting a generalized linear mixed-effects model (GLMM) in the ‘MASS’ package . Habitat, aspect, mean annual temperature (°C) and fire frequency were fitted as fixed effects, while region and photograph site were fitted as random effects. This analysis included both plantations established at the end of the 19th century, as well as natural stands of trees. These models were simply used to describe regional differences in mortality and recruitment between W. cedarbergensis populations and not to infer abiotic correlates of population dynamics. Correlates of W. cedarbergensis tree mortality Only natural stands were used in the analysis to determine environmental and climatic correlates of W. cedarbergensis mortality (Model 3). This model exhibited significant positive spatial autocorrelation for spatial lags up to about 5 km (measured using spatial correlograms from the ‘ncf’ package ; see Additional file 3: Figure S1). To account for spatial autocorrelation we included a spatial autocovariate using an exponential correlation structure with latitude and longitude coordinates. The GLMM used to determine correlates of mortality included mortality as the binary response variable, habitat, aspect, mean annual temperature (°C) and fire frequency as fixed effects and region and photograph site as random effects with a binomial family link. We used Wald tests to determine overall significance of the fixed effects . A total of 1313 living trees were recorded when plantations and natural populations were combined across all historical photographs. Of these, 967 individuals (74%) had died and there were 44 new recruits (Heuningvlei: n = 2, Welbedacht: n = 9, Skerpioenspoort: n = 3 and Middelberg: n = 30), with 3 of these recruits having died in the intervening period, leaving a total of 387 individuals alive. When considering only natural populations at Welbedacht, Skerpioenspoort and Middelberg, 597 individuals (73%) out of 821 had died, leaving only 264 trees alive. For natural stands, there was no significant change in the average number of trees recorded in each photograph between early (8.65 ± 0.95, n = 51) and middle (6.86 ± 0.83, n = 28) (p = 0.787) periods. However, there was a significant decline (p < 0.001) in trees per photograph for the recent period (2.71 ± 0.34, n = 79). The early period had a significantly greater proportion of juveniles (27%) than the middle (5%) (Χ2 = 54.29, df = 1, p value < 0.001) and recent period (8%) (Χ2 = 36.68, df = 1, p value <0.001). However, no significant change was found in the proportion of juveniles between the middle and recent periods (Χ2 = 1.27, df = 1, p value = 0.259). Regional population dynamics Correlates of W. cedarbergensis tree mortality Fitted coefficients, the standard errors, P values of the generalized linear mixed-model for probability of W. cedarbergensis mortality across all regions (model 1) and in natural stands (model 3), probability of recruitment across all regions (model 2) and the Wald test of fixed effects Random effects (R.E.) The Cederberg was declared a Wilderness Area in 1973 giving it the highest conservation status in South Africa . Grounded in the perception that W. cedarbergensis is in decline [6, 7], one of the objectives for the reserve has been the conservation of this iconic tree. Palaeoecological evidence does indeed suggest that W. cedarbergensis trees were once more numerous, with a steady decline in fossil pollen deposits since the last glacial maximum . The suggestion is that the decline may be attributed to long-term warming and drying of the West Coast climate in the late Quaternary that may have contributed to elevated fire frequencies . It has also been proposed that prior to heavy 18th and 19th century logging [5, 6] the species may have occurred in denser communities. Harvesting and more frequent anthropogenic fires led to thinning and reductions in stand size, thereby establishing a positive feedback which promoted further penetration by fires, killing both seedlings and large seed-bearing adults . Without access to accurate demographic records it is very difficult to reconstruct population dynamics before the 20th Century. Our more recent results suggest, however, that population densities were much higher in the early part of last century than they are today and that the W. cedarbergensis decline has continued regardless of any management interventions [13, 32]. In addition, our results show that the greatest declines in trees took place between the periods 1960–1987 and 2007–2013, indicating that W. cedarbergensis mortality has increased in the late 20th and early 21st century. Current recruitment rates are also not keeping pace with mortality at any of our study sites. Importantly, the spatial consistency of high mortality and low recruitment across geographically isolated populations suggests that the factors driving the decline act over the entire range of the species. Our model identified increased fire frequency and possibly higher temperatures as the primary drivers for W. cedarbergensis mortality. There are more trees still alive at higher elevations with concomitant lower temperatures and greater rainfall. It has been demonstrated that a small increase in temperature can increase vapour pressure deficit (VPD) which increases tree water use resulting in an increase in mortality during severe drought due to xylem cavitation . This increased mortality with increased temperature is also demonstrated by our model showing a significant increase in mortality on warmer north facing slopes. Although our modelled results suggest W. cedarbergensis mortality is not associated with more open habitats, we found that W. cedarbergensis trees were positively associated with ‘rockier’ sites. This suggests a variable not considered in the analysis but weakly correlated to the degree of rockiness such as, for example, available ground water, may be important in W. cedarbergensis survival. Previous research has demonstrated that in rocky sites the trees source water from deep pockets between the rocks . This implies a possible affinity for available water. In addition, directed secondary dispersal and shadier, cooler microhabitats found in rockier environments which are beneficial in seedling establishment are also likely factors that have influenced recruitment and the presence of the trees in such sites. Temperature-induced mortality has been recognised as a global issue for many tree species [1, 2, 35, 36]. The association of W. cedarbergensis trees with sites of lower temperatures at higher elevations and historical trends of increasing temperatures in the Cederberg, should be recognised as possible contributors to mortality. Not even a significant increase in rainfall over the course of the 20th century at the more proximal climate station at Algeria appears to have halted or reversed the negative demographic trend. Climate models for the study area and globally show that temperatures will continue to increase through this century, suggesting that in future favourable habitat for the trees is only likely at higher elevations . Current populations of W. cedarbergensis are already at or near the highest locally attainable elevations. In addition, isolated peaks and ridges on which the trees typically occur are often separated from the nearest adjacent higher ground by lower-lying valleys dominated by fire-prone vegetation. Given the slow rate of W. cedarbergensis growth to reproductive maturity, the median fire frequencies at the sampled sites over the 68 year record for the Cederberg suggests that fire return intervals will likely be too short in most regions for the trees to naturally replace themselves . Indeed, in some regions fire return intervals are decreasing despite a management policy of a 15–20 year return interval. Our study did not, however, determine the relative impact of less frequent, large, high intensity fires (e.g. in 1959, 1985 and more recently in January 2013), on W. cedarbergensis demography and this remains an avenue for further research . Furthermore, future studies may benefit from the use of climatic and environmental variables with a more detailed temporal and spatial resolution, particularly in view of the myriad micro-habitats and refugia that are available in terrain such as exists in the CWA. Despite the Cederberg being declared a Wilderness Area in 1973 and one of the management foci being the conservation of the threatened W. cedarbergensis, our results show that there has been a significant decline in the number of trees since that time. We suggest that this continued decline is probably due to both natural and anthropogenically mediated increases in fire frequency and temperature. If modelled climate change predictions for increased warming and drying of the Cederberg Mountains are realised, the future survival of the W. cedarbergensis is at serious risk. The outlook for W. cedarbergensis remains a concern under the current climate and fire regime. Mortality rates are too high and recruitment rates too low to sustain viable populations in the long-term. The main drivers of mortality appear to be higher temperatures and shorter fire return intervals, while high elevation, rocky, east-facing environments represent refugia that provide fire protection, more reliable groundwater and cooler microhabitats conducive to seedling establishment. Projected drying and temperature increases in the 21st century suggest that the species will be under increasing pressure, both from the impacts on water balance and hydraulic failure under greater water stress, and from elevated fire frequencies. However, there are interventions that could help sustain current populations or the establishment of new ones. Already established annual seedling out-planting programmes could be improved to increase W. cedarbergensis seedling survival. This could be done by incorporating beneficial criteria for W. cedarbergensis survival, as outlined in this study, when selecting sites for out-planting . Of the populations which remain, a subset could be selected (based on current demographic profiles, elevation and temperature, degree of rockiness, etc.) for special protection from fire. Lastly, assisted migration to more southern high-lying protected areas should be a serious consideration given the time it would take for viable populations to establish in such areas. cederberg wilderness area generalized linear mixed-effects model mean annual temperature MTH conceived of the study. SLJ, JP, DB, JDMW and MTH carried out repeat photography data collection. JDMW and VV performed the statistical analysis. JDMW and SLJ drafted the manuscript. ECF critically revised the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. We would like to thank Cape Nature for allowing us to work in the CWA and for providing access to the fire records. In particular we would like to acknowledge the contribution that the late Patrick Lane made to the conservation of the Clanwilliam cedar and all the flora and fauna of the CWA. The South African Weather Service and Agricultural Research Council provided climate data for the area. The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Availability of data and materials The dataset supporting the results of this article is available in the PANGAEA® Data Publisher repository: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.866937. Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. - Allen C, Macalady A, Chenchouni H, Bachelet D, McDowell N, Vennetier M, Kitzberger T, Rigling A, Breshears D, Hogg E, Gonzalez P, Fensham R, Zhang Z, Castro J, Demidova N, Lim J-H, Allard G, Running S, Semerci A, Cobb N. A global overview of drought and heat-induced tree mortality reveals emerging climate change risks for forests. 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J Mt Club S Afr. 1971;74:33–9.Google Scholar - Andrag RH. Studies in die Sederberge (i) Die status van die Clanwilliam sedar (Widdringtonia cedarbergensis Marsh) (ii) Buitelugontspanning Unpublished MSc thesis. Stellenbosch: University of Stellenbosch; 1977. - Manders PT. A transition matrix model of the population dynamics of the Clanwilliam cedar (Widdringtomia cedarbergensis) in natural stands subject to fire. For Ecol Manag. 1987;20:171–86.View ArticleGoogle Scholar - Meadows M, Sugden J. The History of the Clanwilliam Cedar (Widdringtonia cedarbergensis): evidence from Pollen Analysis. S Afr For J. 1991;156:64–71.Google Scholar - February E, West A, Newton R. The relationship between rainfall, water source and growth for an endangered tree. Austral Ecol. 2007;32:397–402.View ArticleGoogle Scholar - Wingfield MJ, von Broembsen SL, Manders PT. A preliminary assessment of the threat of diseases and pests to Widdringtonia cedarbergensis. 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Final report to WWF-SA table mountain fund. 2001. - Midgley GF, Hannah L, Millar D, Rutherford MC, Powrie LW. Assessing the vulnerability of species richness to anthropogenic climate change in a biodiversity hotspot. Glob Ecol Biogeogr. 2002;11:445–51.View ArticleGoogle Scholar - Coates Palgrave K. Trees of Southern Africa. Cape Town: C. Struik; 1977. p. 59–60 - Taylor HC. Cederberg: vegetation and flora. Strelitzia 3, Pretoria: National Botanical Institute; 1996. - Mucina L, Rutherford MC. The vegetation of South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland. Strelitzia, 19. Pretoria: South African National Biodivesrity Institute; 2006. - Konietschke F, Placzek M, Schaarschmidt F, Hothorn LA. Nparcomp: an R software package for nonparametric multiple comparisons and simultaneous confidence intervals. J Stat Softw. 2015;64(9):1–17.View ArticleGoogle Scholar - R Core Team. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R foundation for statistical computing. http://www.R-project.org/. 2014. - ESRI. ArcGIS desktop: release 10. Redlands: Environ Sys Res Inst; 2011.Google Scholar - Hijmans RJ, Cameron SE, Parra JL, Jones PG, Jarvis A. Very high resolution interpolated global terrestrial climate surfaces. Int J Climatol. 2005;25:1965–78.View ArticleGoogle Scholar - Google Earth Version 18.104.22.1681. http://www.google.com/earth/index.html. Accessed 30 Nov 2015. - Muggeo VMR. Estimating regression models with unknown break-points. Stat Med. 2003;22:3055–71.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar - Venables WN, Ripley BD. Modern applied statistics with S. 4th ed. New York: Springer; 2002.View ArticleGoogle Scholar - Bjornstad ON. ncf: Spatial Nonparametric Covariance Functions. R package version 1.1–7. 2016. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ncf. Accessed 14 June 2016. - Lesnoff M, Lancelot R. aod: Analysis of Overdispersed Data. R package version 1.3. 2012. http://cran.r-project.org/package=aod. Accessed 14 June 2016. - Smith F. Governmental relations in the management of the Cederberg Wilderness Area: some organisational aspects. Politeia. 2002;21(3):58.Google Scholar - Mustart PJ, Makua C, Juritz J, Van der Merwe SW, Wessels N. Restoration of the Clanwilliam cedar, Widdringtonia cedarbergensis: the importance of monitoring seedlings planted in the Cederberg, South Africa. Biol Conserv. 1995;72:73–6.View ArticleGoogle Scholar - Will RE, Wilson SM, Zou CB, Hennessey TC. Increased vapor pressure deficit due to higher temperatures leads to greater transpiration and faster mortality during drought for tree seedlings common to the forest-grassland ecotone. N Phytol. 2013;200:366–74.View ArticleGoogle Scholar - Midgley JJ, Anderson B, Bok A, Fleming T. Scatter-hoarding of Cape Proteaceae nuts by rodents. Evolut Ecol Res. 2002;4:623–6.Google Scholar - Suarez ML, Ghermandi L, Kitzberger T. Factors predisposing episodic drought-induced tree mortality in Nothofagus—site, climatic sensitivity and growth trends. J Ecol. 2004;92:954–66.View ArticleGoogle Scholar - Williams AP, Allen CD, Macalady AK, Griffin D, Woodhouse CA, Meko DM, Swetnam TW, Rauscher SA, Seager R, Grissino-Mayer HD, Dean JS, Cook ER, Gangodagamage C, Cai M, McDowell NG. Temperature as a potent driver of regional forest drought stress and tree mortality. Nat Clim Change. 2013;3:292–7.View ArticleGoogle Scholar - IPCC. Climate change 2013. In: Stocker TF, et al., editors. The physical science basis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2013. - Parmesan C. Ecological and evolutionary responses to recent climate change. Ann Rev Ecol Evol Syst. 2006;37:637–69.View ArticleGoogle Scholar - McLachlan JS, Hellmann JJ, Schwartz MW. A framework for debate of assisted migration in an era of climate change. Conserv Policy. 2007;21(2):297–302.Google Scholar

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“[Kosovo] is probably the first war that has not been waged in the name of ‘national interests,’ but rather in the name of principles and values. If one can say of any war that it is ethical, or that it is being waged for ethical reasons, then it is true of this war.”1 - Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic During the 1990s, the concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’ rose to dominate much of the Western security discourse, and was used to legitimize the West’s decade-long series of interventions in the republics that once constituted Yugoslavia. The war in the Balkans typified the conflicts of the post-Cold War era, in that it occurred along ethnic divisions that had previously been suppressed by now-defunct socialist and colonialist political structures. The Balkan violence, which rose to genocidal proportions in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, captured the minds of Western civil society and politicians like no other post-Cold War conflict did, occurring as it did so close to the heart of Europe. However, the Western Powers’ response was disappointing at best, and often an abject failure. 250,000 people are estimated to have died in Bosnia and Croatia, with 2.5 million left homeless.2 In Kosovo, NATO’s air campaign did nothing to prevent, and in fact spurred, the displacement of 1.4 million Kosovar Albanians and the violent deaths of 10,000 people in the province.3 In both Bosnia and Kosovo, intervention was significantly limited and, in Bosnia’s case, disastrously delayed by the American government’s near-fanatical unwillingness, for domestic political reasons, to risk ‘friendly’ casualties. Once this paralysis was partially overcome, the Western powers acted in order to maintain or increase their international prestige, and not just to uphold moral principles as was claimed. At other times, the moral rhetoric was acknowledged in private as an outright scam, employed to conceal other strategic goals, the realignment of NATO being the most significant. Self-interest is inarguably an inherent part of the international system as it exists today, from which significant consequences result. This paper will argue that the political and military intervention undertaken by Western states in the Balkans during the 1990s, ostensibly to safeguard stability and human security in the region, consistently failed to meet these goals due to their incompatibility with other domestic and foreign policy goals of the states of Western Europe and the United States at the time. The use of force for purportedly humanitarian purposes is not an exclusive product of the post-Cold War era. Indeed, many at the time chose to justify Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 on humanitarian grounds.4 In the 1990s, humanitarian intervention came to hold in the United States a definition known as the Clinton Doctrine, which Michael Mandelbaum describes as having two parts: the use of force on behalf of universal values instead of the narrower national interests for which sovereign states have traditionally fought; and, in defense of these values, military intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states rather than mere opposition to cross-border aggression.5 Certainly the ideals of humanitarian intervention, in preventing a state engaged in widespread human rights abuses from hiding behind traditional conceptions of sovereignty , are hard to argue with. As Michael Walzer observes, “when a government turns savagely upon its own people, we must doubt the very existence of a political community to which the idea of self-determination However, the legal basis for these engagements, and especially for NATO’s war against Serbia in 1999, is tenuous at best. Article 2 of the United Nations Charter compels all members to refrain “from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state It is commonly accepted that the UN Security Council can choose to override this article in order to maintain international peace and security; however, no such authorization was granted to NATO in the case of the Kosovo crisis.8 Also of concern is the legitimacy of the humanitarian basis used to justify intervention. There is good reason to be skeptical of Western political rhetoric describing intervention as a “moral imperative for from a realist standpoint, a moral imperative alone would not generally constitute rational self-interest . As Walzer asserts, “states don’t send their soldiers into other states only to save lives. The lives of foreigners don’t weigh that heavily in the scales of domestic decision-making.”10 Clearly then, in order to understand the recent interventions undertaken in the Balkans, and their humanitarian failures, it is useful to recognize that intervention is not undertaken in a vacuum, that other strategic concerns generally provoke ‘humanitarian’ intervention in a conflict that might otherwise be left to play out on its own, and that they can also come to shape the decisions made during the course of the intervention. To characterize the Balkan interventions as failures admittedly contradicts the official visions presented by NATO member states. Madeleine Albright, U.S. Secretary of State during the Kosovo crisis, asserted afterwards that the Kosovo intervention was “simply the most important thing we have done in the world.”11 However, as previously noted, neither the Kosovo air campaign nor Western-led efforts in Bosnia were successful in preventing large-scale civilian casualties and massive internal and external displacements of people. The Dayton agreement that finally ended the violence in Bosnia did little more than “sanction the outcome”12 of the ethnic cleansing, partitioning the territory between the self-styled Republika Srpska and a brittle Muslim-Croat federation. In the case of Kosovo, intervention temporarily increased Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s domestic popularity13 and resulted in the occupation and administration of the province by NATO forces with no foreseeable exit strategy in the near-future. Once removed from the cloudy rhetoric spouted by Western politicians conveniently positioned astride the moral high ground, the facts tell a significantly different story regarding the outcomes of the West’s flirtation with humanitarian intervention. Criticism has been directed at the Western powers’, and specifically the United States’, unwillingness to intervene in Bosnia when the crisis first arose in 1992-1993 and when much of the human suffering could potentially have been averted.14 U.S. President Bill Clinton had campaigned for office in part on a promise to take firm action to halt genocide,15 yet his administration dithered for two years until finally drawn into intervening by its NATO obligations.16 Warren Zimmermann, former U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, estimates that the delay cost the lives of at least 100,000 people in Bosnia.17 Some measure of blame in this regard must be assigned to the states of Western Europe, who were resistant to any U.S. suggestion of employing air strikes in 1993.18 However, much of the blame centers on American paralysis in the face of the possibility that its own forces might take casualties, a factor in American foreign policy since the end of the Vietnam War and the primary impetus behind the premature withdrawal of American forces from Somalia in 1992.19 As John Chipman, the director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, notes, “in this world … military force is threatened without any corresponding willingness to accept the casualties that inevitably come with a serious military effort.”20 In the United States, this unwillingness to risk casualties has been particularly acute, driven by a widespread belief among the American political elite that the public would not support even moderate casualties among U.S. troops engaged in military operations not perceived as urgently vital to the country’s national interests. In fact, independent polling has shown that a majority of the American public would support humanitarian interventions that resulted in U.S. losses numbering in the hundreds. 21 In Bosnia, the perceived inability of the public to accept U.S. combat casualties deterred NATO from employing air strikes except in a few limited cases, and made the deployment of ground troops unthinkable until after the Dayton Agreement was reached. In Kosovo, a similar situation played out. No ground troops were deployed until after the Serbian army withdrew from the territory, and the effectiveness of air strikes was severely limited by the political necessity of ‘zero-risk.’ NATO air crews were required to fly above 15,000 feet to avoid Serbian defenses, minimizing their ability to hit any target with precision. As a result, in over 30,000 sorties, NATO planes destroyed a mere 13 Serbian tanks22 during a war ostensibly undertaken to defend Kosovar Albanians from rampaging Serbian troops. The vast majority of Kosovars fleeing the conflict did so after the commencement of the air war, fleeing both the Serbian ground offensive and NATO’s aerial bombardment, and the 10,000 killed violently during the campaign dwarfed the toll of previous Serb police crackdowns in the province.23 Robert Fisk of the Independent speculates, “Had we been prepared to intervene on land at the beginning – at the cost, no doubt, of NATO soldiers’ lives – countless murdered Albanians would still be alive.”24 The belief that combat losses would erode political support at home caused Western leaders time and time again to avoid taking the decisive action necessary to quickly end the Balkan conflicts. The politics of international prestige also played a role in the Balkans debacle. Morgenthau describes prestige as “the policy of demonstrating the power a nation has or thinks it has, or wants other nations to believe it has.”25 When the Clinton Administration proposed air strikes against Serbian forces in Bosnia in May 1993, European governments weren’t merely opposed to the offer because it might jeopardize the lives of European soldiers serving in a peacekeeping capacity at the time, but also in order to demonstrate Europe’s capacity for independent political action.26 Likewise, the American pursuit of the Dayton Agreement, and torpedoing of previous ‘made in Europe’ solutions such as the Vance-Owen Plan27, sought to assert America’s continued influence in European affairs. Justifying air strikes against Bosnian Serbs undertaken just prior to the Dayton conference, then-U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher “presented the strikes as a means of preserving American military credibility.”28 Finally, as will be explored in detail below, the Kosovo air campaign was a prestige endeavour on a massive scale, mounted to illustrate the continued power and relevance of NATO in the post-Cold War era, and especially in response to criticism that it had been to slow to act in Bosnia. In 1995, with the Soviet Union gone and no other credible threat apparent to the nations of Western Europe and North America, NATO’s future was open to serious doubt. Observers such as Christoph Bertram viewed the organization as one “in terminal decline,” and questioned whether it “might not see the end of this century.”29 The continued existence of NATO, a vital tool through which the United States exerts power and influence in Europe, depended on the identification of a new mission. To fill this hole, NATO directed itself towards ‘out of area’ operations, that is, operations undertaken outside the territories of its nineteen member nations. Kosovo represented an opportunity to mount a definitive out of area operation, one that would set precedents important both to international law and to NATO’s future operations.30 NATO launched the Kosovo air campaign after the Serbian government rejected the terms outlined in the Rambouillet accords31, an agreement which was presented by NATO as an ultimatum and which contained various provisions that Serbia could never have accepted. Rambouillet would have granted NATO an unrestricted and indefinite right to move, station and operate troops throughout the territory of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia32, and would have required that a final settlement regarding the independence of Kosovo be decided by an international conference within three years.33 Both provisions, among others, were dropped from the June settlement that ended NATO’s bombardment, casting doubt on Albright’s assertion that “before resorting to force, NATO went the extra mile to find a peaceful resolution.”34 In fact, NATO had designed the agreement to fail. A senior U.S. State Department official reportedly told journalists at the Rambouillet talks that the U.S. had “intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply,” and observed, “They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.”35 Had NATO not already decided to bomb Serbia prior to the Rambouillet conference, an agreement might have been reached and the massacres and displacements that resulted from the air bombardment likewise avoided. Instead, the United States went to war in order to demonstrate the continued relevance of NATO, the primary organization through which it projects power in Europe, and thus to refute calls urging its dissolution. The decision, taken primarily by the United States, to pursue a military intervention rather than negotiate a peaceful solution that minimized the loss of life on all sides represents a profound failure to uphold the humanitarian principles that Western leaders purported to be governed by. Alternately driven and hamstrung by great power interests and domestic political concerns, the interventions in the Balkans consistently failed to meet the humanitarian objectives iterated by NATO leaders. Humanitarianism in the context of the Balkan wars proved to be incompatible with the desire among Western nations, and specifically the United States, to demonstrate power while simultaneously avoiding the risk of military losses. The result was a decade of missed opportunities, ineffectual operations and, most importantly, the effective sanctioning of mass murder and displacement. While Western leaders, and especially those of smaller NATO members such as Canada and the Czech Republic, may have believed themselves to be acting exclusively out of concern for the well-being of Balkan civilians, strategic agendas drove NATO’s military engagements, and governed its previous inaction. If a lesson can be drawn from the rubble of the Balkans, it is that decision-making authority during humanitarian crises is a power that must remain solely in the hands of the United Nations. NATO’s engagements in the Balkans have demonstrated that regional alliances cannot be trusted to act on humanitarian objectives independent of the power objectives of their member states. Allowing regional alliances to construct a legal foundation for unsanctioned acts of ‘humanitarian’ intervention against other sovereign states can only encourage an increasingly militarized and unstable world. As A.J. Coates argues, “It is precisely the ‘altruistic’ pursuit of warfare that generates militarism and that leads to the systematic undermining of every limit placed upon war.”36 While the current U.S.-led ‘War on Terrorism’ has had the effect of shifting the focus away from humanitarianism, this shift is unlikely to be permanent. Humanitarianism will undoubtedly come to be used again to justify calls for military intervention, whether by NATO or another regional alliance. Clearly, responsible world leaders will have to resist the desire to accept the precedent of Kosovo, and its marginalization of the United Nations, and instead embrace multilateralism as the only global route to long-term peace, stability and security. 1 Address to the Canadian Senate and House of Commons (29 April 1999), reprinted as Vaclav Havel, “Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State,” New York Review of Books, 10 June 1999. 2 Jack Donnelly, International Human Rights (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998), 139. 3 Michael Mandelbaum, “A Perfect Failure: NATO’s War Against Yugoslavia,” Foreign Affairs 78, 5 (September-October 1999), 3. 4 J.A. Spender, "Munich - Before and After," Contemporary Review, 154 (November 1938), 514. Spender relates the report of a correspondent who indicated that the Germans in the Sudetenland were living in fear of being killed by the Czechs. 5 Mandelbaum, 5. 6 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 101. 7 Charter of the United Nations. Online Available at http://www.un.org/Overview/Charter/contents.html. Accessed 3 March 2002. 8 UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan describes the international community’s inability to reach consensus prior to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo as a “tragedy,” though he admits that the unilateral intervention may have been warranted. See Kofi Annan, “Two concepts of sovereignty,” The Economist, 18 September 1999, 82. 9 US President Bill Clinton, as quoted in Francis X. Clines, “NATO Opens Barrage against Serbs as Clinton Denounces Brutal Repression,” New York Times, 25 March 1999. 10 Walzer, 101. 11 Quoted in Mandelbaum, 8. 12 Andreas Behnke, “The Enemy Inside: The Western Involvement with Bosnia and the Problem of Security Identities,” Alternatives 23, 3 (July-September 1998), 386; Warren Bass, “The Triage of Dayton,” Foreign Affairs 77, 5 (September-October 1998), 106. 13 Mandelbaum, 4. 14 See for instance David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). 15 Bass, 96. 16 The Clinton administration had previously agreed to a NATO commitment, Op-plan 40104, to provide 20,000 U.S. troops as part of a 60,000-person evacuation force should the situation on the ground become too chaotic for the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia to function. As the situation worsened, the administration found itself caught between overseeing a humiliating withdrawal and intervening. Thus, NATO air strikes, the Dayton Agreement, and the deployment of NATO’s Implementation Force (IFOR) all resulted from what Bass describes as an “aimless” decision. Had the Clinton administration not committed itself to the evacuation force, it is doubtful that NATO would have intervened in Bosnia at all. Bass, 99-101. 17 Ibid, 97. 18 Ibid, 99. 19 On 3 October 1993, 18 American soldiers were killed during a botched raid intended to capture two senior commanders implicated in the continuing Somali civil war. See the node Battle of Mogadishu; also Walter S. Clarke and Jeffrey L. Herbst (eds.), Learning from Somalia: The Lessons of Armed Humanitarian Intervention (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1997). 20 Quoted in “Think-tank criticizes NATO’s ‘air only’ strategy,” The Irish Times, 5 May 1999. Online Available at http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/1999/0505/wor5.htm. Accessed 3 March 2002. 21 Based on polling data summarized by Steven Kull and Clay Ramsay, “The Myth of the Reactive Public: American public attitudes on military casualties in the post-Cold War period,” in Public Opinion and the Use of Force, Philip Everts and Pierangelo Isernia (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 2001), 205-224. 22 Paul Robinson, “Ready to kill but not to die: NATO strategy in Kosovo,” International Journal 54, 4 (Autumn 1999), 678. See also Carl Cavanagh Hodge, “Casual War: NATO’s Intervention in Kosovo,” Ethics & International Affairs 14 (2000), 39-54. 23 Based on figures reported by the International Crisis Group in Kosovo Spring Report, 20 March 1998, 23. 24 Robert Fisk, “Was it rescue or revenge?” Independent (London), 21 June 1999, 5. 25 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 5th Edition Revised (Toronto: Random House, 1978), 82. 26 Bass, 99. 27 Wayne Bert, The Reluctant Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 195; James Petras and Steve Vieux, “Bosnia and the Revival of US Hegemony,” New Left Review 218 (July-August 1996), 16-23. 28 Bert, 122. 29 Christoph Bertram, “NATO on Track for the 21st Century?” Security Dialogue 26, 1 (March 1995), 65-71. For a more thorough investigation of the quantity of material that was written on this question, see http://www.csis.org/ee/NatoMilitary.htm. Accessed 4 March 2002. 30 While the Bosnian intervention in 1995-1996 is considered the first such ‘out of area’ operation, it was, as has been previously shown, more of a damage control mission entered into almost by accident. The Kosovo operations, on the other hand, were the result of an intentional decision by American and British leaders to intervene militarily. 31 The proposed text of the accords is available at http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/dossiers/kosovo/rambouillet.html. Online Accessed 4 March 2002. 32 Ibid, Appendix B, Article 8. 33 Ibid, Chapter 8, Article 1 (3). 34 As quoted in Mandelbaum, 4. 35 According to multiple sources quoted in “What reporters knew about Kosovo talks – but didn’t tell: Was Rambouillet another Tonkin Gulf?” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) Media Advisory, 2 June 1999. Online Available at http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kosovo-talks.html. Accessed 4 March 2002. 36 A.J. Coates, The Ethics of War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 42.

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The recent Report of the Surgeon General on Mental Health emphasized that mental health is fundamental to overall health and well-being; that it is a concern for everyone, not only the people seriously affected and their families; that mental disorders are illnesses similar to somatic disorders in most ways; that science has advanced our understanding of the causes of mental illness, as well as the behavioral and sociocultural impact of mental disorders; and that effective services are available in a range of settings and can be tailored to individual preferences. However, there is a gap between what science recommends and usual practices. Many barriers exist to services access, including stigma, discrimination, and a limited supply of well-trained providers. 1 Mental health in childhood and adolescence is defined by the achievement of expected developmental, cognitive, social, and emotional milestones and by secure attachments, satisfying social relationships, and effective coping skills. Mentally healthy children and adolescents enjoy a positive quality of life, function well at home, in school, and in their communities, and are free of disabling symptoms of psychopathology. 2 At all levels of severity, mental and emotional disorders can affect school performance, employment, physical health, family structure, housing, and quality of life. 3 These key messages from Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General are fundamental to children living with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT OF ATTENTION-DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is characterized by two distinct sets of symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity or by one set of symptoms without the other. ADHD is the most commonly diagnosed behavioral disorder of childhood, occurring in 3% to 5% of school-aged children in a 6-month period. 4 There have been concerns linked to this rate of diagnosis around the possible overprescription of stimulant medications. However, recent reports found little evidence of overdiagnosis of ADHD or overprescription of stimulant medications. 5,6 Actually, fewer children (2–3% of school-aged children) are being treated for ADHD than suffer from it. Treatment rates are even lower for selected groups such as girls, minorities, and children receiving care through public service systems. 7,8 There have been major increases in the number of stimulant prescriptions since 1989;9 however, most researchers believe this is due to the better diagnosis and longer and more effective treatment of the prevalent disorder, with some exception. Medical and public awareness of ADHD has grown a great deal, leading to longer duration of treatment and fewer interruptions in treatment. Whereas great progress has been made in diagnosing and treating children with ADHD, scientists and physicians are still struggling to understand the disorder among preschoolers. In an attempt to close the knowledge gap that exists regarding the treatment of ADHD in young children, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) began a clinical trial in December 2000 that will study the effects of methylphenidate (MPH), a drug used to help older children function more appropriately, on preschoolers (ages 3–6 yr) diagnosed with ADHD. Scientists involved in this study, known as the Preschool ADHD Treatment Study (PATS), are concerned about the drug’s possible effect on the still developing personalities and brains of young children, as well as their inability to give informed consent. But they believe that such trials are the only way to answer concerns about the rising use of the drug to treat preschool-aged children. 10 As this public awareness grows, however, there needs to be a clear, shared picture as to what the treatments are and what they entail. Pharmacological treatments include the most commonly used psychostimulants to the less used antidepressants or neuroleptics. Psychostimulants have been found to be highly effective for 75% to 90% of children with ADHD. 11 Psychosocial treatment for the management of ADHD, particularly in the form of behavioral approaches for parents and teachers to use in working with children who have this disorder, are also effective. Behavioral interventions alone tend to improve targeted behaviors or skills, but they are not as helpful in reducing the core symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, or impulsivity as they are when coupled with psychostimulants or other medications prescribed for ADHD, often termed “multimodal treatment.” It is, however, necessary to note the importance of making appropriate and informed decisions when treating preschoolers with ADHD with these types of psychostimulants. Because of the current lack of knowledge among physicians of safety and dose information for treating very young children with medications such as Ritalin, many doctors have been prescribing the “off-label” use of several different drugs. One estimate suggests that 94% of drugs given to young children are prescribed in this disturbing manner. Among these drugs, Ritalin is high on the list, prescribed 226,000 times in 1994 for “off-label” uses. 12 Recent research has investigated medications and behavioral treatments and their combined effects on ADHD in community settings. The multimodal treatment assessment (MTA) study of ADHD was conducted by the NIMH to examine three experimental conditions: medication management alone, behavioral treatment alone, or a combination of medication and behavioral treatments. 13,14 The study, which included nearly 600 elementary school children between the ages of 7 and 9 years, compared the effectiveness of these three treatment modes with each other and with standard care provided in the community. 15 The MTA study was also designed to determine the relative benefits of these treatments over time by treating subjects for 14 months and then following samples for an additional 22 months. 16 The results of the MTA study indicate that long-term treatments of both medication plus psychosocial treatments, as well as medication management alone are both significantly superior to intensive behavioral treatments and routine community treatments in reducing ADHD symptoms. 14,17 The study shows that these differential benefits extend as long as 14 months. In other areas of functioning (i.e., academic functioning, oppositional behavior, anxiety symptoms, and parent-child relations) the combined treatment approach was consistently superior to routine community care, whereas single treatments (medication only or behavioral treatment only) were not. 14,18 BROADENING THE PERSPECTIVE ON CHILDREN’S MENTAL HEALTH AND ATTENTION-DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER IN PRESCHOOLERS There are a number of key concepts that help define the current understanding of children’s mental health and illness. These concepts come from the premise that psychopathology in childhood arises from the complex, multilayered interactions of specific characteristics (including biological, psychological, and genetic factors) of the child, his or her environment, and the manner in which these factors interact with and shape each other over the course of development. 19 These concepts as outlined by the Report of the Surgeon General include the following: understanding a child’s particular history and past experiences as essential to understanding a child’s behavior, both normal and abnormal; the importance of considering developmental discontinuities where qualitative shifts in the child’s biological, psychological, and social capacities may occur; the innate tendencies of the child to adapt to his or her environment; the importance of age and timing factors; the child’s context, such as the caretaking environment; and the fact that the normal and abnormal development processes are often separated only by differences of degree. 20 The virtue of these and other developmental considerations when applied to children is that (1) they enable a broader, more informed search for factors related to the onset of, maintenance of, and recovery from abnormal forms of child behavior; (2) they help move beyond static diagnostic terms that tend to reduce the behaviors of a complex, developing, adapting, and feeling child to an oversimplified diagnostic term; (3) they offer a new perspective on potential targets for intervention, whether child-focused or directed toward environmental or contextual factors; and (4) they highlight the possibility of important timing considerations in a child’s development when preventive or treatment interventions may be specifically effective. 20 A basic knowledge of social and emotional development of children enhances understanding of mental illness in children by reconciling the concept of mental disorder as a state or condition with the ongoing development of the child. 21 Inattention or attention deficit may not become apparent until a child enters the challenging environment of elementary school. Such children then have difficulty paying attention to details and are easily distracted by other events that are occurring at the same time; they find it difficult and unpleasant to finish schoolwork; they put off anything that requires a sustained mental effort; they are prone to make careless mistakes and are disorganized; and they appear not to listen when spoken to and often fail to follow through on tasks. 22,23 The symptoms of hyperactivity may appear in very young preschoolers and are nearly always present before the age of 7 years. 23,24 Some hyperactive symptoms include fidgeting, squirming around when seated, and having to get up frequently and walk around. Hyperactive preschoolers often behave in an inappropriate and uninhibited way. 23 Many of the symptoms just mentioned occur in normal children, however, in children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) they occur more frequently in several settings and they greatly interfere with the child’s functioning. 22 By the time children reach their sixth birthday, a great deal has been learned about the roles they are expected to play and how to behave in accordance with these rules, how to control anger and aggressive feelings, and how to respect the rights of others. 25 This learning takes place through the developmental elements of social identity, self-regulation, and aggression and prosocial behavior. Self-regulation that occurs by the end of infancy is understood by capturing the transition from helplessness to competence in terms of a child’s growing regulatory capacity. These capacities range from behaviorally conforming to the day-night rhythm of human existence to learning to soothe and settle once basic needs are met. Later, it means developing the capacity to manage powerful emotions constructively and keep one’s attention focused, thus gaining self-control. 26 Children are sensitive to society’s standards of good and bad and can begin to anticipate adults’ reactions and plan their own actions accordingly. 27 To do this, children must acquire the capacity to control their own behavior. Preschoolers usually lack a great deal of self-control and need a great deal of supervision. Learning to control aggression and develop other prosocial behaviors, such as helping others, are also a central process in preschool social development. It is important to note that the context-specific organization of the child’s environment is constantly interacting with the biological properties of the child, which develops at different rates among individuals. 27 There is a broad range of variability that characterizes development of the preschool child. 27 The period of early childhood ends at the age of 6 or 7 years when children pass through the next biobehavioral shift and assume the accompanying social roles and demands. 27 It is by this age that children’s brains have achieved a level of complexity similar to adults and formal schooling begins. These developments in childhood provide essential preparation for the new demands and opportunities in the future. 27 How can researchers find clinical features of ADHD that will enable them to diagnose children with the disorder below the age of 5 years? As discussed above, many of these features can be detected as early as 3 years of age, including developmentally inappropriate activity levels, low tolerance for frustration, impulsivity, poor organization of behavior, distractibility, and especially an inability to sustain attention and concentration. But the challenge lies first in diagnosing the condition because ADHD is not a well-defined psychiatric disorder in this age group. To date, physicians and researchers have been fairly unsuccessful in diagnosing and treating children under the age of 3 years with ADHD. The Preschool ADHD Treatment Study (PATS) trial should result in an agreed on set of criteria that will enable physicians to make an accurate diagnosis of ADHD for very young children. ATTENTION-DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER AND COMPREHENSIVE COMMUNITY-BASED MENTAL HEALTH CARE Although the preschool and early school-age years are important developmental periods for the emergence of symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and their accompanying diagnosis, it has been recognized that ADHD is a long-term disorder with possible ramifications into adulthood. 28 A large percentage of children diagnosed during the preschool period will continue to need ongoing care for ADHD and accompanying symptoms throughout their childhood and adolescence. This warrants comprehensive approaches to care that hold promise for preventing and effectively treating secondary disorders in what is likely to be a high-risk population given the early age of ADHD diagnosis. ADHD has been a prevalent problem for children and adolescents entering federally funded systems of care, a comprehensive approach to addressing the mental health needs of children with serious emotional disturbance in community settings. Although a substantial amount of literature has documented the efficacy of specific treatments for ADHD within randomized controlled trials, relatively little is known about the effects of community-based service initiatives such as systems of care on children with ADHD. An analysis of children receiving services in 22 federally funded systems of care was conducted for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Consensus Development Conference on ADHD in 1998. 29 Of the nearly 30,000 participants with reported DSM-IV Axis 1 diagnoses and descriptive data at intake into services, 13.5% had a primary diagnosis of ADHD. The primarily inattentive form of ADHD was diagnosed in 12.7% of these cases, mixed inattentive and hyperactive or primarily hyperactive diagnoses occurred in 76.3% of these cases, and 10.9% of these cases received a diagnosis of ADHD, not otherwise specified. Secondary diagnoses were reported for 1697 cases who had primary diagnoses of ADHD, resulting in an ADHD-specific comorbidity rate of 41.8%. Secondary diagnoses primarily included depression/dysthymia (17.7%), anxiety disorders (6.1 %), conduct/oppositional defiant disorders (39.8%), and learning disabilities (14.7%). ADHD was reported as a secondary diagnosis for 3% (n = 904) of all children receiving services within systems of care. The primarily inattentive form of ADHD was diagnosed in 17.7% of the cases; 69.1% of the cases received either mixed inattentive and hyperactive or primarily hyperactive diagnoses, and 13.2% of the cases were diagnosed with ADHD, not otherwise specified. The children with diagnoses of ADHD were primarily male (84.1%) with a mean age of approximately 10 years. Nearly two thirds of the children were white, with relatively equal percentages of black (17%) and Hispanic participants (14.7%). The families were, for the most part, poor, with nearly 60% reporting yearly family income levels below the national poverty level for a family of four. Approximately 50% of the children were residing in single-parent, mother-headed families. Almost 80% of the referrals into the systems of care were made by schools, mental health agencies, parents, and social services agencies. Less than 2% of the referrals for children with a primary diagnosis of ADHD were from the primary or specialty health care sector. To evaluate change across time in systems of care, a subsample of 415 children with primary diagnoses of ADHD who had valid Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale (CAFAS) and Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) scores at intake and 12 months were examined. Secondary diagnoses were reported for 173 cases of these cases, resulting in an overall comorbidity rate of 41.7%, which was comparable to the comorbidity rate reported for the larger sample. These children were slightly more likely to be females, white, living in families above the poverty level, and referred from mental health agencies than the larger set of children. Reliable change indices (RCI) were computed separately for CBCL and CAFAS scores using the intake to 12-month change interval and the formula proposed by Jacobson and Truax. 30 RCI’s control for fluctuations associated with imprecise measurement and establish a relatively stringent criterion for determining the amount of change necessary to be confident that change has actually occurred from one measurement point to a second measurement point. This provides a more exact and individualized measure of change as compared with traditional statistical approaches to evaluating change. 31 Twelve percent of the subsample displayed reliable positive change (i.e., symptom reduction) on both the CBCL and CAFAS. However, when each measure was examined independently, 34.5% of the sample displayed reliable change on the CBCL and 27.7% of the participants displayed reliable positive change on the CAFAS. Almost 50% of the sample displayed reliable positive change when the measures were combined and the criterion of obtaining an RCI above the threshold for reliable positive change on one of the two measures was used. It is apparent from these data that a large number of children with a diagnosis of ADHD are receiving services within systems of care, with over 40% with comorbid presentations. The diagnostic rates reported above have been consistent with and even somewhat higher in subsequent analyses of diagnostic and descriptive data collected since 1998 (Center for Mental Health Services: Annual Report to Congress on the Evaluation of the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services for Children and Their Families Program, in press, 1999; Center for Mental Health Services: Annual Report to Congress on the Evaluation of the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services for Children and Their Families Program, manuscript under review, 2000; Center for Mental Health Services: Annual Report to Congress on the Evaluation of the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services for Children and Their Families Program, manuscript under review, 2001; Manteuffel B, Stephens RL, and Santiago R: Overview of the national evaluation of the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services for Children and Their Families Program and summary of current findings. Children’s Services: Social Policy, Research and Practice, in press; Walrath CM, Mandell DS, Liao Q, et al: Suicide attempts in the “Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services for Children and Their Families” Program. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry, in press). 32 It is also important to note that information on pharmacological interventions has been collected over the last several years with a history of stimulant medication use reported for 47% of children as they enter systems of care. A more in-depth description of the utility of the systems of care approach for children with a primary diagnosis of ADHD follows. COMPONENTS OF THE SYSTEMS OF CARE APPROACH AND THEIR UTILITY FOR ATTENTION-DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER From the time of the Joint Commission on the Mental Health of Children in 1969, there has been discussion about the need for a system of care for children with mental health needs and their families. However, until recently there was little clarity about such systems of care—how they might be organized, which agencies should be involved, what services should be provided, and what values and principles should guide service delivery. The Child and Adolescent Service System Program (CASSP) of the United States Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS) was undertaken in the early 1980s to define the system of care concept and philosophy to provide states and communities with a conceptual framework and model for planning and developing service systems. 33 The first value described by Stroul and Friedman for the system of care is that it must be driven by the needs of the child and his or her family. 33 In other words, the system of care must be child centered and family focused, with the needs of the child and family dictating the type and mix of services provided. 34 Implicit in this value is a commitment to serving the child in the context of the family. In most cases, parents are the primary caregivers for their children, and a central tenet of the system of care requires that it support and assist parents in their caregiving role, as well as involve parents in all decisions regarding service delivery. The system of care, as developed under CASSP and as now implemented through the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services for Children and their Families Program sponsored by the United States CMHS, has a strong and explicit commitment to preserve the integrity of the family unit whenever possible. The importance of tailoring services to the specific needs of the child and family is further emphasized in one of the 10 guiding principles for the system of care, namely that “children should receive individualized services in accordance with the unique needs and potentials of each child and guided by an individualized service plan.”34 The philosophy and values underlying individualized services are very similar to the philosophy for a system of care and include a focus on an individual child and family, provision of services within the most normalized environment; partnership with families, and use of a strengths-based ecological orientation and cultural competence. For the purpose of this article, the authors focus on the strengths-based ecological orientation. A thorough assessment of the child’s and family’s strengths, needs, and desires forms a basis for the development of an individualized intervention plan. Rather than emphasize pathology and service needs, assessments for individualized care need to emphasize the child’s and family’s assets as well as their deficits. 35 As stated by Olson, Whitbeck, and Robinson, 36 the strengths-based orientation allows the child and family to be seen as individuals with unique talents, skills, and life histories, as well as specific unmet needs. This orientation recognizes the fact that even the most troubled youngsters and multi-stressed families have strengths, assets, and coping skills that can be built on when creating an intervention approach. Furthermore, the strengths-based assessment is not limited narrowly to the mental health domain but takes an ecological approach to consider the child and family across all environments and life domains, including family, social, educational, vocational, medical, psychological, legal, safety, and others. This strengths-based ecological perspective not only drives the assessment but becomes the key factor in the development of the individualized service plan for the child and family. Thus a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in a young child need not be regarded as a “life sentence” or as a predictor of school failure if managed appropriately. This is a condition that a child can live with. By using the system of care approach and working in a holistic manner across service sectors (including early childcare and educational settings as well as primary health care venues), children can be identified and treated earlier, providing them the best opportunity to succeed in their homes, schools, and neighborhoods. Similarly, families, if treated with dignity and respect, become effective and valued partners. IDENTIFICATION OF CHILDHOOD MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS WITHIN PRIMARY CARE AND PRESCHOOLS Unfortunately, mental health problems of children often go unrecognized by primary care providers and preschool teachers, including Head Start programs. For example, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has just reported that the identification of mental health problems in children in primary care settings has consistently remained a significant problem. Roughly one in five children evaluated in primary care offices have significant psychosocial problems requiring some type of intervention, yet 60% of them do not receive the services that they need. 37 Underidentification of mental health needs in young children is a critical problem in nonmedical settings as well. Thus, in national data compiled by the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families concerning Head Start programs, 13% of children are identified by their local Head Start programs as having some form of “disability,” with over half of these children being identified as having a speech and language disability. However, Head Start program staff and national leaders have noted that the “speech and language” disability category is frequently misapplied rather than identifying the child as having a mental health problem. Thus, “mental health problems” are formally identified in less than 1% of Head Start children, a severe underestimate according to all other sources of evidence. 38 These problems are further compounded by the fact that although an estimated 3 million children ages 0 to 3 years are eligible for early Head Start, only 45,000 are currently enrolled by this program, thus diminishing opportunities for early identification and appropriate intervention. 39 These problems with underidentification pose difficult questions for policymakers and the public. What kinds of screening programs should be instituted to identify children in need? What educational efforts are needed to assist teachers, child development workers, and even primary care providers to identify children at risk without the accompanying fear that “labels” will unnecessarily stigmatize a child? What kinds of additional resources should be put in place to assist these children and families, and how should they be financed? Failing to identify children in need caused by lack of assessment and treatment capacity becomes a self-perpetuating problem; when too few children are identified, policymakers and planners may not devote sufficient resources to meet the underlying, unspoken needs. The results of such inattention may be far more costly for society later as these children grow older, experience difficulties entering the workforce, and confront their own problems in providing optimal environments for the next generation of children. FEDERAL INITIATIVES THAT IMPACT THE CARE OF CHILDREN WITH ATTENTION-DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER To begin to address some of these policy and service delivery concerns, the federal government has initiated a number of activities. To disseminate the results of the multimodal treatment assessment (MTA) study of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as well as other research in this area, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), along with the National Institute on Drug Abuse, other NIH institutes, and the Department of Education sponsored a consensus development conference in November 1998. The goal of the conference was to dispel misconceptions, present even representation of the evidence, and to ensure that children with significant disorders of behavior, emotion, and learning are identified early and treated appropriately. 40 On March 20, 2000, a White House meeting, chaired by then First Lady Hillary Clinton, launched a new public-private effort to improve the appropriate diagnosis and treatment of children with emotional and behavioral conditions. Serious concerns were raised about the appropriate diagnosis and treatment of emotional and behavioral difficulties in children (particularly young children) and the need to take steps to address this issue. On June 26, 2000, Surgeon General David Satcher, M.D., hosted a listening session on children’s mental health. Input on critical issues in children’s mental health was solicited from the public through the World Wide Web and by mailing requests to over 500 individuals. On September 18 and 19, 2000, the Surgeon General’s Conference on Children’s Mental Health: Developing a National Action Agenda was held in Washington, D.C. Three hundred participants were invited, representing a broad cross-section of mental health stakeholders, including youth and family members, professional organizations and associations, advocacy groups, faith-based practitioners, clinicians, educators, health care providers, and members of the scientific community and the health care industry. This conference enlisted the help of the participants in developing specific recommendations for a national action agenda on children’s mental health. Together with recommendations developed in a related meeting on Psychopharmacology for Young Children: Clinical Needs and Research Opportunities, held by the NIMH and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on October 2 and 3, 2000, these recommendations formed the basis of a national action agenda designed to meet the following goals: 1. Promote public awareness of children’s mental health issues and reduce stigma associated with mental illness. 2. Continue to develop, disseminate, and implement scientifically proven mental health prevention and treatment services. 3. Improve the assessment and recognition of mental health needs in children. 4. Eliminate racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in access to mental health care. 5. Improve the infrastructure for mental health services including support for scientifically proven interventions across professions. 6. Increase the access to and coordination of quality mental health care services. 7. Train front-line providers to recognize mental health issues and educate mental health providers in scientifically proven prevention and treatment services. 8. Monitor the access and coordination of quality mental health care services. 41 Behavioral and developmental pediatricians play an important role in the diagnosis and management of children with ADHD, among other childhood mental health disorders. Many of these children are referred to specialty care because standard care protocols within pediatric primary care settings have failed or symptom severity, including high rates of comorbidity, warrants more intensive and specialized treatment. Health care professionals from behavioral and developmental pediatrics, however, have not been effectively linked with systems of care to participate as members of treatment teams who are providing services to children with serious emotional disturbance in community settings. For those large numbers of children with ADHD needing intensive community-based services, this may result in fragmented care that does not effectively support the development of strengths or reduce functional impairment at school or in the community. Closer collaboration between behavioral and developmental pediatricians and systems of care is needed to provide the integrated services that are needed to ensure developmental success for children with ADHD, particularly those young children who are in transition from preschool to school age. Too young for ADHD? The answer would be “yes” if the consequence of a diagnosis is an inadequate assessment, hurried use of medication, lack of follow-up, and failure to use a comprehensive, family-centered, integrated approach to management. If, however, we develop early identification techniques—thorough and complete assessment approaches, involvement of family, child, school, and community in the decision making and management, careful evaluation of effectiveness of treatment interventions, and integration of treatment modalities—then the answer should be “no.” The younger the better for attention to the needs of young children can prevent adverse consequences in their growth and development. 1. US Department of Health and Human Services: Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General. Rockville, MD, Department of Health and Human Services, US Public Health Service, 1999 2. Hoagwood K, Jensen PS, Petti T, et al: Outcomes of mental health care for children and adolescents. I. A comprehensive conceptual model. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 35:1055–1063, 1996 3. US Department of Health and Human Services: Children and Mental Health, in Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General, ch 3. Rockville, MD, Department of Health and Human Services, US Public Health Service, 1999, p 124 4. US Department of Health and Human Services: Children and Mental Health, in Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General, ch 3. Rockville, MD, Department of Health and Human Services, US Public Health Service, 1999, pp 142, 144 5. Goldman LS, Gene M, Bezman RJ, et al: Diagnosis and treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children and adolescents. JAMA 279:1100–1107, 1998 6. Jensen PS, Bharta VS, Vitiello B, et al: Psychoactive medication prescribing practices for US children: Gaps between research and clinical practice. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 38:557–565, 1999 7. Bussing R, Zima BT, Belin TR, et al: Children who qualify for LD and SED programs: Do they differ in level of ADHD symptoms and comorbid psychiatric conditions? Behav Disord 23:85–97, 1998 8. Bussing R, Zima BT, Perwien A, et al: Children in special education programs: Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, use of services, and unmet needs. Am J Public Health 88:880–886, 1998 9. Hoagwood K, Kelleher K, Feil M, et al: NIH Consensus Development Conference on the Assessment and Treatment of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Washington, DC, November 16–18, 1998 11. US Department of Health and Human Services: Children and Mental Health, in Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General, ch 3. Pittsburgh, PA, Department of Health and Human Services, US Public Health Service, 1999, p 146 13. The MTA Cooperative Group: A 14-month randomized clinical trial of treatment strategies for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Arch Gen Psychiatry 56:1073–1087, 1999 14. The MTA Cooperative Group: Moderators and mediators of treatment response for children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: The multimodal treatment study of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Arch Gen Psychiatry 56:1088–1099, 1999 16. Richters JE, Arnold LE, Jensen PS, et al: NIMH collaborative multisite multimodal treatment study of children with ADHD. I. Background and rationale. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 34:987–1000, 1995 17. The MTA Cooperative Group: A 14-month randomized clinical trial of treatment strategies for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Arch Gen Psychiatry 56:1073–1087, 1999 18. The MTA Cooperative Group: A 14-month randomized clinical trial of treatment strategies for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Arch Gen Psychiatry 56:1073–1087, 1999 19. US Department of Health and Human Services: Children and Mental Health, in Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General, ch 3. Rockville, MD, Department of Health and Human Services, US Public Health Service, 1999, pp 127, 129 20. US Department of Health and Human Services: Children and Mental Health, in Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General, ch 3. Rockville, MD, Department of Health and Human Services, US Public Health Service, 1999, p 128 21. US Department of Health and Human Services: Children and Mental Health, in Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General, ch 3. Rockville, MD, Department of Health and Human Services, US Public Health Service, 1999, p 36 22. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed, Washington, DC, American Psychiatric Association, 1994 23. Waslick B, Greenhill L: Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, in Weiner JM (ed): Textbook of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 2nd ed. Washington, DC, American Psychiatric Press, 1997, pp 389–410 24. Halperin JM, Newcorn JH, Matier K, et al: Discriminant validity of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 16:1038–1043, 1993 26. Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development. From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development. Washington, DC, National Academy Press, 2000, p 93 28. Barkley RA: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, self-regulation, and time: Toward a more comprehensive theory. J Dev Behav Pediatr 18:271–279, 1997 29. Holden EW: Children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in systems of care: A preliminary report. Presented at the NIH Consensus Development Conference on the Assessment and Treatment of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Washington, DC, November 16–18, 1998 30. Jacobson NS, Truax P: Clinical significance: A statistical approach to defining meaningful change in psychotherapy research. J Consult Clin Psychol 59:12–19, 1991 31. Speer DC, Greenbaum PE: Five methods for computing significant individual client change and improvement rates: Support for an individual growth curve approach. J Consult Clin Psychol 63:1044–1048, 1995 32. Liao Q, Manteuffel B, Paulic C, et al: Describing the population of adolescents served in systems of care. J Emotional and Behav Disord 9:13–29, 2001 33. Stroul B, Friedman R: The system of care concept and philosophy, in Stroul B (ed): Children’s Mental Health: Creating Systems of Care in a Changing Society. Baltimore, MD, Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co, 1996, pp 3–39 34. Lourie I, Katz-Leavy J, Stroul B: Individualized services in a system of care, in Stroul B (ed): Children’s Mental Health: Creating Systems of Care in a Changing Society. Baltimore, MD, Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co, 1996, pp 420–452 35. Department of Health and Human Services, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality: Children’s Mental Health: The Changing Interface between Primary Care and Specialty Care, US Department of Health and Human Services. Rockville, MD, 1999, pp 9–20 36. Olson DG, Whitbeck J, and Robinson R: The Washington experience: Research on community efforts to provide individualized tailored care. Presented at the 4th annual research conference, A System of Care for Children’s Mental Heath: Expanding the Research Base. Tampa, FL, Feb 18–20, 1991 37. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Department of Health and Human Services. Washington, DC 38. Lopez ML, Tarullo LB, Forness SR, et al: Early identification and intervention: Head Start’s response to mental health challenges. J Early Educ Dev 11:210, 2000 39. Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Head Start Bureau: National Summary: Head Start Program Information Report for 1999–2000. Washington, DC, 2000 40. Office of the Director, National Institutes of Health: Diagnosis and treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. From the NIH Consensus Development Conference, Bethesda, MD, November 16–18, 1998 41. US Public Health Service: Report of the Surgeon General’s Conference on Children’s Mental Health: A National Agenda. Washington, DC, 2000 Index terms: attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder; young children; early identification; preschool behavioral problems

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Repressed memory is a condition where a memory has been unconsciously blocked by an individual due to the high level of stress or trauma contained in that memory. Even though the individual cannot recall the memory, it may still be affecting them consciously. The existence of repressed memories is a controversial topic in psychology; some studies have concluded that it can occur in victims of trauma while others dispute it. According to some psychologists, repressed memories can be recovered through therapy. Other psychologists argue that this is in fact rather a process through which false memories are created by blending actual memories and outside influences. Furthermore, some psychologists believe that repressed memories are a cultural symptom because there is no written proof of their existence before the nineteenth century. According to the American Psychological Association, it is not currently possible to distinguish a true repressed memory from a false one without corroborating evidence. The term repressed memory is derived from the term dissociative amnesia, which is defined in the DSM-IV as “an inability to recall important personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness”. Amnesia is referred to any instance in which memories stored in the long-term memory are completely or partially forgotten, usually due to brain injury. According to proponents of the existence of repressed memories, they may sometimes be recovered years or decades after the event, most often spontaneously, triggered by a particular smell, taste, or other identifier related to the lost memory, or via suggestion during psychotherapy. There is no documented writing about repressed memories or dissociative amnesia (as it is sometimes referred to), before the 1800s. The concept of repressed memory originated with Sigmund Freud in his 1896 essay Zur Ätiologie der Hysterie ("On the etiology of hysteria"). One of the studies published in his essay involved a young woman by the name of Anna O. Among her many ailments, she suffered from stiff paralysis on the right side of her body. Freud stated her symptoms to be attached to psychological traumas. The painful memories had separated from her consciousness and brought harm to her body. Freud used hypnosis to treat Anna O. She is reported to have gained slight mobility on her right side. Freud's repressed memory theory joined his philosophy of psychoanalysis. Repressed memory has remained a heavily debated topic inside of Freud's psychoanalysis philosophy. Some research indicates that memories of child sexual abuse and other traumatic incidents may be forgotten. Evidence of the spontaneous recovery of traumatic memories has been shown, and recovered memories of traumatic childhood abuse have been corroborated. Van der Kolk and Fisler's research shows that traumatic memories are retrieved, at least at first, in the form of mental imprints that are dissociated. These imprints are of the affective and sensory elements of the traumatic experience. Clients have reported the slow emergence of a personal narrative that can be considered explicit (conscious) memory. The level of emotional significance of a memory correlates directly with the memory's veracity. Studies of subjective reports of memory show that memories of highly significant events are unusually accurate and stable over time. The imprints of traumatic experiences appear to be qualitatively different from those of nontraumatic events. Traumatic memories may be coded differently than ordinary event memories, possibly because of alterations in attentional focusing or the fact that extreme emotional arousal interferes with the memory functions of the hippocampus. Although research on repressed memory is limited, a few studies have suggested that memories of trauma that are forgotten and later recalled have a similar accuracy rate as trauma memories that had not been forgotten. One prominent proponent of the theory of repressed memory, and the usage of repressed memory in legal actions brought against alleged abusers, is Lenore Terr, a controversial California psychiatrist who championed the notion that repressed memories can be suddenly resurrected by victims of abuse (such as childhood physical or sexual abuse) through exposure to visual or auditory stimuli. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals challenged Terr's theory, when applied to legal actions and remedies, as unreliable and inconsistent, and ultimately denied the admissibility of repressed memory as evidence in a judicial proceeding (Franklin v. Duncan, 1995). There has also been significant questioning of the reality of repressed memories. There is considerable evidence that rather than being pushed out of consciousness, the difficulty with traumatic memories for most people are their intrusiveness and inability to forget. One case that is held up as definitive proof of the reality of repressed memories, recorded by David Corwin has been criticized by Elizabeth Loftus and Melvin Guyer for ignoring the context of the original complaint and falsely presenting the sexual abuse as unequivocal and true when in reality there was no definitive proof. Psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham are authors of the seminal work on the fallacy of repressed memory, The Myth of Repressed Memory (St. Martin's Press, 1994). For years Loftus was criticized and marginalized by her colleagues in psychology and psychiatry for her criticism and skepticism of repressed memory. In recent years her research is regarded as the most responsible approach to the controversy of repressed memory. It has been speculated that repression may be one method used by individuals to cope with traumatic memories, by pushing them out of awareness (perhaps as an adaptation via psychogenic amnesia) to allow a child to maintain attachment to a person on whom they are dependent for survival. Researchers have proposed that repression can operate on a social level as well. Memories can be accurate, but they are not always accurate. For example, eyewitness testimony even of relatively recent dramatic events is notoriously unreliable. Misremembering results from confusion between memories for perceived and imagined events, which may result from overlap between particular features of the stored information comprising memories for perceived and imagined events. Memories of events are always a mix of factual traces of sensory information overlaid with emotions, mingled with interpretation and "filled in" with imaginings. Thus there is always skepticism about how valid a memory is as evidence of factual detail. Some believe that accurate memories of traumatic events are often repressed, but remain in the subconscious mind, from where they can be recovered by appropriate therapy. Others believe that truly traumatic events are never forgotten in this way, although often people may not disclose their memories to others. This is a difficult area to study, and unambiguous conclusions are hard to draw, hence there continue to be very divergent opinions. In one study where victims of documented child abuse were reinterviewed many years later as adults, a high proportion of the women denied any memory of the abuse. Those who doubt the existence of "traumatic amnesia" note that various manipulations can be used to implant false memories (sometimes called "pseudomemories"). These can be quite compelling for those who develop them, and can include details that make them seem credible to others. A classic experiment in memory research, conducted by Elizabeth Loftus, became widely known as "Lost in the Mall"; in this, subjects were given a booklet containing three accounts of real childhood events written by family members and a fourth account of a wholly fictitious event of being lost in a shopping mall. A quarter of the subjects reported remembering the fictitious event, and elaborated on it with extensive circumstantial detail. This experiment inspired many others, and in one of these, Porter et al. could convince about half of his subjects that they had survived a vicious animal attack in childhood. Such experimental studies have been criticized in particular about whether the findings are really relevant to trauma memories and psychotherapeutic situations. Nevertheless, these studies prompted public and professional concern about recovered memory therapy for past sexual abuse. When memories are 'recovered' after long periods of amnesia, particularly when extraordinary means were used to secure the recovery of memory, it is now widely (but not universally) accepted that the memories are quite likely to be false, i.e. of incidents that had not occurred. It is thus recognised by professional organizations that a risk of implanting false memories is associated with some types of therapy. The American Psychiatric Association advises that "...most leaders in the field agree that although it is a rare occurrence, a memory of early childhood abuse that has been forgotten can be remembered later. However, these leaders also agree that it is possible to construct convincing pseudomemories for events that never occurred. The mechanism(s) by which both of these phenomena happen are not well understood and, at this point it is impossible, without other corroborative evidence, to distinguish a true memory from a false one." Obviously, not all therapists agree that false memories are a major risk with psychotherapy and they argue that this idea overstates the data and is untested. Several studies have reported high percentages of the corroboration of recovered memories, and some authors have claimed that the false memory movement has tended to conceal or omit evidence of (the) corroboration" of recovered memories. Herman in her theory of recovery from chronic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder writes that one of the major recovery stages is the remembering and mourning of the repressed material of traumatic events. Both true and false 'memories' can be recovered using memory work techniques, but there is no evidence that reliable discriminations can be made between them. Some believe that memories "recovered" under hypnosis are particularly likely to be false. According to The Council on Scientific Affairs for the American Medical Association, recollections obtained during hypnosis can involve confabulations and pseudomemories and appear to be less reliable than nonhypnotic recall. Brown et al. estimate that 3 to 5% of laboratory subjects are vulnerable to post-event misinformation suggestions. They state that 5 - 8% of the general population is the range of high-hypnotizability. Twenty-five percent of those in this range are vulnerable to suggestion of pseudomemories for peripheral details, which can rise to 80% with a combination of other social influence factors. They conclude that the rates of memory errors run 0 - 5% in adult studies, 3 - 5% in children's studies and that the rates of false allegations of child abuse allegations run 4 - 8% in the general population. Neurological basis of memory The neuroscientist Donald Hebb (1904–1985) was the first to distinguish between short-term memory and long-term memory. According to current theories in neuroscience, things that we "notice" are stored in short-term memory for up to a few minutes; this memory depends on 'reverberating' electrical activity in neuronal circuits, and is very easily destroyed by interruption or interference. Memories stored for longer than this are stored in long-term memory. Whether information is stored in long-term memory depends on its 'importance'; for any animal, memories of traumatic events are potentially important for the adaptive value that they have for future avoidance behaviour, and hormones that are released during stress have a role in determining what memories are preserved. In humans, traumatic stress is associated with acute secretion of epinephrine and norepinephrine (adrenaline and noradrenaline) from the adrenal medulla and cortisol from the adrenal cortex. Increases in these facilitate memory, but chronic stress associated with prolonged hypersecretion of cortisol may have the opposite effect. The limbic system is involved in memory storage and retrieval as well as giving emotional significance to sensory inputs. Within the limbic system, the hippocampus is important for explicit memory, and for memory consolidation; it is also sensitive to stress hormones, and has a role in recording the emotions of a stressful event. The amygdala may be particularly important in assigning emotional values to sensory inputs. Although memory distortion occurs in everyday life, the brain mechanisms involved are not easy to study in the laboratory, but neuroimaging techniques have recently been applied to this subject. In particular, there have recently been studies of false recognition, where individuals incorrectly claim to have encountered a novel object or event, and the results suggest that the hippocampus and several cortical regions may contribute to such false recognition, while the prefrontal cortex may be involved in retrieval monitoring that can limit the rate of false recognition. Amnesia is partial or complete loss of memory that goes beyond mere forgetting. Often it is temporary and involves only part of a person's experience. Amnesia is often caused by an injury to the brain, for instance after a blow to the head, and sometimes by psychological trauma. Anterograde amnesia is a failure to remember new experiences that occur after damage to the brain; retrograde amnesia is the loss of memories of events that occurred before a trauma or injury. For a memory to become permanent (consolidated), there must be a persistent change in the strength of connections between particular neurons in the brain. Anterograde amnesia can occur because this consolidation process is disrupted; retrograde amnesia can result either from damage to the site of memory storage or from a disruption in the mechanisms by which memories can be retrieved from their stores. Many specific types of amnesia are recognized, including: - Childhood amnesia is the normal inability to recall memories from the first three years of life. Sigmund Freud was the first to observe this phenomenon and realized that not only do humans not remember anything from birth to three years, but they also have “spotty” recollection of anything occurring from three to seven years of age. There are various theories as to why this occurs: some believe that language development is important for efficient storage of long-term memories; others believe that early memories do not persist because the brain is still developing. - A fugue state, formally dissociative fugue, is a rare condition precipitated by a stressful episode. It is characterized by episode(s) of traveling away from home and creating a new identity. The form of amnesia that is linked with recovered memories is dissociative amnesia (formerly known as psychogenic amnesia). This results from a psychological cause, not by direct damage to the brain, and is a loss of memory of significant personal information, usually about traumatic or extremely stressful events. Usually this is seen as a gap or gaps in recall for aspects of someone's life history, but with severe acute trauma, such as during wartime, there can be a sudden acute onset of symptoms. Effects of trauma on memory 'Betrayal Trauma Theory' proposes that in cases of childhood abuse, dissociative amnesia is an adaptive response, and that “victims may need to remain unaware of the trauma not to reduce suffering but rather to promote survival.” When stress interferes with memory, it is possible that some of the memory is kept by a system that records emotional experience, but there is no symbolic placement of it in time or space. Traumatic memories are retrieved, at least at first, in the form of dissociated mental imprints of the affective and sensory elements of the traumatic experience. Clients have reported the slow emergence of a personal narrative that can be considered explicit (conscious) memory. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk divided the effects of traumas on memory functions into four sets - traumatic amnesia; this involves the loss of memories of traumatic experiences. The younger the subject and the longer the traumatic event is, the greater the chance of significant amnesia. He stated that subsequent retrieval of memories after traumatic amnesia is well documented in the literature, with documented examples following natural disasters and accidents, in combat soldiers, in victims of kidnapping, torture and concentration camp experiences, in victims of physical and sexual abuse, and in people who have committed murder. - global memory impairment; this makes it difficult for subjects to construct an accurate account of their present and past history. "The combination of lack of autobiographical memory, continued dissociation and of meaning schemes that include victimization, helplessness and betrayal, is likely to make these individuals vulnerable to suggestion and to the construction of explanations for their trauma-related affects that may bear little relationship to the actual realities of their lives" - dissociative processes; this refers to memories being stored as fragments and not as unitary wholes. - traumatic memories’ sensorimotor organization. Not being able to integrate traumatic memories seems to be linked to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). According to van der Kolk, memories of highly significant events are usually accurate and stable over time; aspects of traumatic experiences appear to get stuck in the mind, unaltered by time passing or experiences that may follow. The imprints of traumatic experiences appear to be different from those of nontraumatic events, perhaps because of alterations in attentional focusing or the fact that extreme emotional arousal interferes with memory. van der Kolk and Fisler's hypothesis is that under extreme stress, the memory categorization system based in the hippocampus fails, with these memories kept as emotional and sensory states. When these traces are remembered and put into a personal narrative, they are subject to being condensed, contaminated and embellished upon. When there is inadequate recovery time between stressful situations, alterations may occur to the stress response system, some of which may be irreversible, and cause pathological responses, which may include memory loss, learning deficits and other maladaptive symptoms. In animal studies, high levels of cortisol can cause hippocampal damage, which may cause short-term memory deficits; in humans, MRI studies have shown reduced hippocampal volumes in combat veterans with PTSD, adults with posttraumatic symptoms and survivors of repeated childhood sexual or physical abuse. Trauma may also interfere with implicit memory, where periods of avoidance may be interrupted by intrusive emotional occurrences with no story to guide them. A difficult issue is whether those presumably abused accurately recall their experiences. The existence of repressed memory recovery has not been accepted by mainstream psychology, nor unequivocally proven to exist, and some experts in the field of human memory feel that no credible scientific support exists for the notions of repressed/recovered memories. One research report states that a distinction should be made between spontaneously recovered memories and memories recovered during suggestions in therapy. A common criticism is that a recovered memory is tainted by, or a product of, the process of recovery or the suggestions used in that process. Many critics believe that memories may be distorted and false. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus questions the concept of repressed memories and their possibility of them being accurate. Loftus focuses on techniques that therapists use in order to help the patients recover their memory. Such techniques include age regression, guided visualization, trance writing, dream work, body work, and hypnosis. Loftus' research indicates that repressed memory faces problems, such as memory alteration. In one case a teenage boy was able to “conjure a memory of an event that never occurred.” According to Loftus, if a stable person could be influenced to remember an event that never occurred, an emotionally stressed person would be even more susceptible. Serious issues arise when recovered but false memories result in public allegations; false complaints carry serious consequences for the accused. Many of those who make false claims sincerely believe the truth of what they report. A special type of false allegation, the false memory syndrome, arises typically within therapy, when people report the 'recovery' of childhood memories of previously unknown abuse. The influence of practitioners' beliefs and practices in the eliciting of false 'memories' and of false complaints has come under particular criticism. Sometimes these memories are used as evidence in criminal prosecutions. It is generally accepted that people sometimes are unable to recall traumatic experiences. The current version (DSM-IV) of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, states that "Dissociative amnesia is characterized by an inability to recall important personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness." The term "recovered memory", however, is not listed in DSM-IV or used by any mainstream formal psychotherapy modality. Some criminal cases have been based on a witness's testimony of recovered repressed memories, often of alleged childhood sexual abuse. In some jurisdictions, the statute of limitations for child abuse cases has been extended to accommodate the phenomena of repressed memories as well as other factors. The repressed memory concept came into wider public awareness in the 1980s and 1990s followed by a reduction of public attention after a series of scandals, lawsuits, and license revocations. Alan Scheflin, a law professor, stated in 1999, "Both those who argue that repressed memories are always false and those who argue that repressed memories are always true [...] appear to be mistaken. Although the science is limited on this issue, the only three relevant studies conclude that repressed memories are no more and no less accurate than continuous memories....” A U.S. District Court accepted repressed memories as admissible evidence in a specific case. Dalenberg argues that the evidence shows that recovered memory cases should be allowed to be prosecuted in court. The apparent willingness of courts to credit the recovered memories of complainants but not the absence of memories by defendants has been commented on: "It seems apparent that the courts need better guidelines around the issue of dissociative amnesia in both populations." In 1995, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, ruled in Franklin v. Duncan and Franklin v. Fox, Murray et al., (312 F3d. 423, see also 884 FSupp 1435, N.D. Calif.) that repressed memory is not admissible as evidence in a legal action because of its unreliability, inconsistency, unscientific nature, tendency to be therapeutically induced evidence, and subject to influence by hearsay and suggestibility. The court overturned the conviction of a man accused of murdering a nine-year-old girl purely based upon the evidence of a 21-year-old repressed memory by a lone witness, who also held a complex personal grudge against the defendant. In a 1996 ruling, a U.S. District Court allowed repressed memories entered into evidence in court cases. Jennifer Freyd writes that Ross Cheit's case of suddenly remembered sexual abuse is one of the most well-documented cases available for the public to see. Cheit prevailed in two lawsuits, located five additional victims and tape-recorded a confession. On 16 December 2005 the Irish Court of Criminal Appeal issued a certificate confirming a Miscarriage of Justice to a former nun Nora Wall whose 1999 conviction for child rape was partly based on Repressed Memory evidence. The judgement stated that: "There was no scientific evidence of any sort adduced to explain the phenomenon of ‘flashbacks’ and/or ‘retrieved memory’, nor was the applicant in any position to meet such a case in the absence of prior notification thereof." Recovered memory therapy Recovered memory therapy is a range of psychotherapy methods based on recalling memories of abuse that had previously been forgotten by the patient. The term recovered memory therapy is not listed in DSM-IV or used by mainstream formal psychotherapy modality. Opponents of the therapy advance the explanation that therapy can create false memories through suggestion techniques; this has not been corroborated, though some research has shown supportive evidence. Nevertheless, the evidence is questioned by some researchers. It is possible for patients who retract their claims—after deciding their recovered memories are false—to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder due to the trauma of illusory memories. According to a book written in 1995, the number of reported retractions is small when compared to the large number of actual child sexual abuse cases. The Working Group on Investigation of Memories of Child Abuse of the American Psychological Association presented findings mirroring those of the other professional organizations (see External Links subpage for references to various statements made independently by these organisations). The Working Group made five key conclusions: - Controversies regarding adult recollections should not be allowed to obscure the fact that child sexual abuse is a complex and pervasive problem in America that has historically gone unacknowledged; - Most people who were sexually abused as children remember all or part of what happened to them; - It is possible for memories of abuse that have been forgotten for a long time to be remembered; - It is also possible to construct convincing pseudo-memories for events that never occurred; and - There are gaps in our knowledge about the processes that lead to accurate and inaccurate recollections of childhood abuse.

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VIBRATION, AND RESONANT FREQUENCY Sang Whang (Scientist, Inventor, Engineer) since the Big Bang, everything in the universe vibrates. All matters, atoms, molecules and all kinds of substances vibrate when energy is applied. We can not see energy but we can see the effects of energy by observing different kinds of vibrations. Through these vibrations, energy is transferred from one substance to another. zero temperature (-273.15 'C or -459.67'F), all matters cease to vibrate. As temperature increases, they vibrate. The velocity and frequency of vibration depend on the substance: molecular weight, molecular structure, the size of mechanical structure, etc. When a tuning fork is banged, it vibrates with a particular pitch which is its own resonant frequency. The banging energy is transferred into a sustaining tone, although the banging energy does not vibrate at that frequency. The banging energy is an impulse energy that contains a wide range of frequencies, each with a very small amount of energy. The tuning fork converts the entire banging energy into a single tone of vibration. we pass 60Hz (cycles per second) electrical current through a substance, tungsten, it converts the energy into very high frequency vibration, namely the visible light frequency. The resonant frequency of tungsten is the visible light frequency. That's how the electric light bulb works. The natural resonant frequencies of molecules of water and organic substances are within the far-infrared (FIR) wave frequencies (wavelength of 5 to 15 microns); therefore, water and organic substances absorb energy easily from this radiated FIR wave. Since it is their resonant frequency, they vibrate vigorously at that frequency and become the radiator of the frequency as well as its receiver. is more water inside of our body than on the skin surface; therefore, FIR wave deeply penetrates the body (2 to 4 inches). If organic substances are heated by near-infrared (NIR) waves (wavelength of 0.76 to 5 microns), the surface gets hotter than the interior, and interior gets heated by means of conduction from nutrients to maintain warm body temperature. Our body temperature is higher than the surrounding; therefore, we radiate heat away from us. Sleeping with another person, we receive and transmit FIR energy from and to each other, thus our body burns fewer nutrients to maintain body temperature. Burning fewer nutrients means that we create fewer waste products. oxides such as silica (SiO2), alumina (Al2O3) can convert any normal energy into FIR waves in a most efficient manner so that, in room temperature, most of the ambient energy will be converted into FIR wave energy. Most of us have seen an aluminum plate that melts ice right in front of our eyes. This plate is made of FIR resonant frequency material that changes the ambient energy to FIR energy which, in turn, resonates water molecules in the ice to melt it. metallic or ceramic surface is coated with this type of FIR radiating material and the surface is heated by conventional heating method such as oil or electricity, the surface will generate strong FIR wave. If this type of heater is used in a big hall such as a basketball stadium, the air temperature will not be high but people inside will feel warm. In winter, we notice that the air may be cold outside but we feel warm under sun light. It is the same principle. Since we don't have to warm the air inside the stadium, we save energy. Not only that, there is no need to turn the heaters on hours before the game. kind of germs and viruses has its own unique molecular formula; that means they all have different resonant frequencies. Organic substances may have more than one resonant frequency. The sum of these frequencies form a unique compound frequency. Suppose person "A" has XYZ germs in his body. If a doctor, with samples of XYZ germs, uses a measuring device that picks up the compound frequency of the samples, and amplifies that signal and let it pass through "A", XYZ germs in "A" will resonate to make him feel worse. His body cringes and restricts the passage of that signal. In this way, a doctor can find out what is bothering him without x-ray or blood test. A doctor can also find out all the substances that "A" is allergic to without lengthy and painful tests. like science fiction? Such test equipment that does all that is already on the market. Doctors can use it to find out which of the homeopathic medicine is better for a particular person. The medical industry will face drastic changes in the 21st century if drug companies, FDA and AMA will not interfere. IS FAR INFRARED RAYS (FIR) Professor Li Dong Qi complete spectrum of sunlight consists of visible and invisible rays. The visible rays are red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, blue and violet in colors (Known as rainbow colors). The invisible rays are Ultra Violet, X-rays, Gamma, Cosmic, Microwave, Long Wave, Electrical Wave and Infrared waves between visible light and the microwave are called infrared waves. The wave length of infrared waves range from 0.76 micron to 1,000 microns. The ranges of Near, Medium and Far Infrared Rays are 0.76 to 1.5micron, 1.5 to 4 micron, and 4 to 1,000 micron Characteristic of FIR are : a. Invisibility b. Linearity, refractivity and reflectivity c. Upon being absorbed by various objects, the ability to produce warmth and harmonize with the natural life-force released by human body to enhance resonance absorption. The ability to penetrate deep into the human body. of course, emits the visible rays with which we can discriminate colors in the spectrum and also emits various invisible rays. One of the invisible rays is the ultra-violet which is beyond the violet in rays (FIR) are also invisible and contiguous to the red and of the visible spectrum. There are other invisible rays such as X-rays, gamma rays and cosmic rays. They have wavelengths shorter than that of ultra violet rays and are harmful to human being and other living are invisible rays having wavelength longer than the infrared rays, such as micro waves and long waves. They do not effect human being and other living things and are generally called 'radio waves'. said that about 80% of sunlight is infrared rays. Because of its wide range of wavelength, the infrared rays are usually divided into three zones studies on biotechnology revealed that the far-infrared rays having wavelength ranging from 6 microns to 14 microns played an important role for formation and growing of living things. reason, this specific far-infrared rays are called "biogenetic rays". All living things on the earth have, as integral parts of them, water and proteins. Water molecules are always oscillating. If water molecules are expose to oscillating action 0f 8-10 micron wavelength (some as wavelength of water molecular oscillation), the "resonance" occurs between the two oscillations. causes ionization of water into hydrogen ion and hydroxide ion at extremely high speed (10/12 sec.). This ionization is called "activation of water". If such activation of water occurs in human cellular tissues, the metabolism of cells and excretion of residues from cells or nutrition are enhanced …… promoted growing of living things. The infrared rays from the sun are peak at 3.5 to 10 microns of wavelength. Therefore it can be easily understood that the infrared rays 0f 6 to 14 microns are particularly important for a living things. ARE BIOGENETIC RAYS? RAYS ARE PARTS OF THE SUNLIGHT - Beside the visible rays with which we can discriminate colors in spectrum, the sun also emits the invisible rays. One of the invisible rays is the far-infrared ray which is beyond the red in the spectrum. - The far-infrared have attracted researchers attention because of their marvelous effect to human being EMITS THE FAR-INFRA RED RAYS heat an earthen pot, stone pot, or unglazed port fill with chestnuts, you will find that the chestnuts are baked softer than you baked than in you iron pot. This "soft baking" is an effect of the far infrared rays produced when ceramics, stone or the like is FAR-INFRARED RAYS EMITTING being itself also emits far infrared rays to body tissues, whereby circulation of blood is enforced. The good circulation of bloods and body liquids enhances distribution of oxygen and nutrition to every part of human body, thus promoting metabolism in the organism. In short, the use of bedding made Bio Ceramics provides you with better and sound sleep and faster recovery far-infra red rays having specific wavelength are effective to living things. The recent biological and biophysical researchers revealed that the far-infrared rays are effective to human body when their wavelength is with in the range from 6 microns to 14 microns (the far- infrared rays have wavelength ranging from 4 microns to 1,000 microns). Within this range of wavelength, the far-infrared rays cause resonance with molecular oscillation of water involved in cellular tissues of human being end can penetrate the body of human being. MOLECULES ARE QUITE SENSITIVE TO FAR-INFRARED RAYS All living things have water molecules. body consists of 70% or more water. For all other animals, fishes, birds, insects and plants, water is indispensable part of body. For vegetables and fruits, overwhelmingly large part is water. You will often experience that some water is tasty but other is not so tasty though there is no difference in appearance and that good water makes tea, coffee, etc. tastier. In fact, quality of processed of food depends on quality of water used in processing. always necessary for manufacture of beers, wines, juices and other liquors or beverages. You will be astonished if you hear that water itself can be made -------- without use of sugar or other additives or without purification, only by exposing it to the far-infrared water is exposed to the far-infrared rays, its molecules are activated. When you drink activated water, you will taste it "fresh". Although human being and other living things are fresh if they are exposed to the far-infrared rays, they do not absorb all infrared rays, it can absorb the far infrared rays having specific wavelengths ranging from 6 to 14 microns. lemon, apple or other fruit is exposed to the far-infrared rays having these wavelength, it ripens and becomes sweeter to tastier due to increase the sugar content in that fruit. This fact testifies to the marvelous effect of the far-infrared rays. and how far-infrared rays do to our bodies? radiation penetrates into our body and\d heats up from the inside. is spread outwards by conduction in bones, convection in tissues fluids and far infra radiation. growing warmth (conduction and convection) - dilates blood vessels & fine capillaries - improve circulation - facilitates removal of impurities and influx of examples of vital organic compounds Organic Structures - enzymes - vitamins - antibodies/antigens - natural antibodies - complex proteins & Carbohydrates - simple sugars - red & white blood corpuscles - vital organs (brain hearts, liver and kidney) - endocrine glands (adrenaline gland) - tissues (muscles, rays works on two principles; from inside to outside of organic/water molecules materials most effective yet are: chrome with finely divided porcelain chrome with stainless steel of oxidized chrome with stainless steel however is found to fade in the long run. Certain alloys of Nickel are introduced as radiation generators. Such alloys absorb and radiate all wavelength or frequency of light (E.M Wave). Of these, only far infra is selectively absorbed by the oxidized chrome and porcelain. The rest is reflected away. Bio-Ceramic fibers is at present the ultimate material used to store far-infra rays. that energy can never be created or destroyed, but is transformed from one form to another. - The total energy in the universe in constant. heat energy is injected to an object, it is transferred to the surrounding region through 3 ways via a temperature - Heat energy is passed of transferred by the vibration of solid molecules about a fixed axis - Occurs only in solid e.g. Metals, glass or wood. - Heat energy transferred by the actual movement of the medium's molecules. - Occurs in liquids and gas e.g. water or air - Heat energy is transferred from one region to another without heating the intervening space. - Energy is in the form of electromagnetic waves with wavelength belonging to the infrared spectrum - Travels at 3 x 10.8 m/s e.g. In outer space. Infrared Wave Clinical Treatments in Japan Yamazaki, MD, owns a clinic in Japan where she continues her medical research. In her book "The Science of Far Infrared Wave Therapies", she discusses the scientific principles of FIR treatment and she lists many interesting clinical case histories. Since the book is in Japanese, I am going to translate a couple of interesting cases for your information. "I" is 63 years old with cancer of the esophageal orifice. Ever since he was young, he enjoyed all sorts of gourmet food and alcohol. Furthermore, he was a heavy smoker. He lived the kind of life that would eventually lead him into this type of illness. On April 5th, 1979, he came to my clinic complaining about chest pains on both sides. He said that he had an X-ray examination on his stomach by a previous physician and was told that it was normal. However, from listening to his symptoms, l doubted the so-called "normal" diagnosis. Upon examining him in our clinic, we noticed slight abnormalities and disorders in his neck and spinal bones around the waist. At the same time, from a blood test, we detected cirrhosis of the liver and chronic liver inflammation. We thought that it probably was the result of alcohol consumption. the response to cancer was positive and based upon the test results of the "alpha-phosphate-protein", his liver condition seemed to be the result of problems occurring in other organs. We recommended a more detailed examination of his stomach, but we were refused. Then we sent him to a nearby radiology specialist for several X-ray shots of his spine. We explained the situation to the radiologist and requested him to some how take X-rays of his stomach. Taking pictures of his spine, neck, and waist, the doctor was successful in obtaining the X-ray pictures of his esophagus and stomach. The doctor called me immediately over the phone to inform me of the cancer of the esophageal orifice. Not only that, he told me that Mr. "I" would probably only have about one and a half months to live. thought that Mr. "l" had left already, so he was rather frank and straight forward over the phone. Importantly, Mr. "I" was still in the waiting room waiting for his cab to arrive. So he heard everything! He came straight back to my office with the copies of the X-rays, completely depressed, and reported what he him of a similar case where a patient with cancer of the esophagus was completely cured by tenaciously following the treatment procedure. And I was able to convince Mr. "I" to follow through with the treatment days, for his chest pain, Mr. "I" was taking aspirin family pain killers which were later taken off the market by the Ministry of Public Welfare because of their cancer causing side effects. Our conclusion was that Mr. "l" was suffering from the toxins produced by this aspirin family pain killer, and his cancer was caused directly by this medicine first steps were to excrete the poison that was the cause of the intoxication, to destroy the cancer cells, and to help him manage the pain. We employed a far infrared wave sauna to excrete the accumulated poison. The sauna method was selected for its ability to excrete poison and to suppress the growth of cancer cells through high temperature treatment by penetrating far infrared wave heat. had tremendous effects on the chest pains. Perhaps because of the great amount of perspiration and the excretion of the accumulated harmful substances and the old wastes, he felt better every day. Since a high amount of perspiration also excretes valuable body minerals such as potassium, we paid special attention to his diet. The human body has to maintain a proper balance of potassium and sodium. who was diagnosed to live approximately one and a half months more, was discharged from the clinic after a 3 month stay. is a former wrestler. He weighed in over 220 pounds with a beautiful pot belly. he came to my clinic, he had a fist-sized bulge in the middle of his belly from stomach cancer. Moreover, since he was over 70 years old, he was told that they could not operate on him. He came to my clinic after he was told that he had only 3 more months to live. of his obesity, we considered weight reduction. While watching a balanced diet, he underwent far infrared sauna treatment, losing about 45 pounds in two months. Furthermore, through the heat treatment effect of the far infrared sauna, the tumor got smaller in two month, and his stomach pains were reduced within a few days. Since his body strength was not down at this point, we gave him cancer suppressing pills and continued the daily heat therapy by far infrared waves. Originally stiff and hard belly walls gradually became soft and his appetite increased. With improved results, the cancer suppressing pills were stopped, fearing any side effects. result of continued treatment in the clinic for one year, he was well enough to be discharged. that these kinds of serious patients could save their lives with virtually no symptoms can support the effectiveness of the heat treatment by far infrared waves. of other diseases cancer, Dr. Yamazaki reports successful treatments of many other diseases by use of FIR waves, treatments not only by her but also by many other doctors. The list of diseases includes: stress induced chronic diarrhea; numbness; shoulder, back, and knee pain; rheumatism; low blood pressure; diabetes; radiation exposure related diseases; asthma; etc. attributes the successes of the FIR wave treatments to the capability of FIR waves to remove toxins from the body. This may be an oversimplification, but in general, toxins in our body are acidic. Where the toxins are accumulated, blood circulation Is blocked. Therefore FIR wave treatment Is effective in expanding clogged up capillary vessels and successfully dissolving the hidden toxins into the blood and eventually out of the body via urine and perspiration. not recommending people to buy FIR saunas or sleeping pads to cure their own diseases. What I am hoping is that more American doctors will experiment with new ideas, and treat their patients in the direction of helping their own body to heal their diseases by strengthening their immune system or by removing acidic toxins. Too much emphasis is on the conventional treatment, which uses drugs to 'destroy' the unwanted elements at any cost. Usually the cost is our own immune system meantime, wise people can use these devices such as alkaline water makers, FIR saunas, FIR sleeping pads, etc., to prevent the accumulation of toxins and acidic wastes for the purpose of staying young and healthy heat is not conduction heat but rather radiation heat; therefore, it can penetrate the skin. Since it has the characteristics of drying substances, it has been used for some time as a warming and /or drying treatment device. Recently they have been used as under the blanket warming devices. Unless it is used at an uncomfortably high temperature, it is safe to use for any extended time. Its main effect is deep heating. It is good for rejuvenation, improved blood circulation, relieving stiff and tired muscles, neuralgia, activating digestive article is taken from the book "Reverse Aging" by Mr. Sang Whang. Mr. Sang Whang is an engineer, scientist and inventor with many U.S. patents. USAGE OF FAR INFRARED RAYS AS AN ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE Zhang Jian Dong Are Far Infrared Rays (FIR)? commonly known as the "Light of Life". It is an invisible part of the spectrum of sunlight and as such is also known as the "invisible light". known as the "Light of Life" because it has brought life to the earth. Up till today, the development and reproduction of all life-forms on earth depends upon FIR found in sunlight. laying their eggs, all insects depend on sunlight to hatch them and propagate. This is all done by FIR. lay their eggs on the sandy beaches and bury them in the sand. Under the heat of the sun, especially the effects of FIR acting on the eggs for a period of time, tiny turtles are hatched. This is one of the forms which FIR has contributed. If there were no sunlight, all those would not have taken place. As such, we call FIR in sunlight the "Light of Life" FIR do not only originate from the sun itself. Many living things on Earth such as human body, the bodies of animals, soil and minerals are able to produce FIR under specific conditions and such rays are similar in nature to the "Light of Life". and many other birds embrace their eggs and use the heat produced by their bodies to hatch them. They are in fact using FIR produced by their bodies to do the hatching, thus producing life. this simple reproductive process, the eggs of insects, sea turtles, hens and birds have developed tremendously under the influence of FIR. These changes have caused the albumen and the yolk to develop into blood vessels, nerves, skeletons, hearts, etc. and give life to young which live together with their mothers in this world. That is why the effects of FIR are so great. Our bodies too can produce FIR . The intensity of FIR produced by the human. However, when it begins to decline, the human body will be subjected to attacks by ailments and diseases, age quickly and become old and there be a decline in the state of health. And when we are about to face death, FIR radiation of the human body will be near to zero. people are able to cure ailments of others as their personal emission of FIR are very strong. This is what is known "Qi-gong" and "The Healing Powers of the human body requires a continuous supply of FIR from mother nature to boost the powers of the Far Infra Rays found in our bodies. Constant exposure to sunlight will make our body feel healthier. Because of this we well feel energetic and stronger after having a sun -bath. From the physics point of view, FIR is a form of light. It is a form of light invisible to our eyes and as such is known as the ." 'invisible light It possesses properties similar to light. It has a fixed wave-length range ,is a transverse wave which is a component of the electromagnetic spectrum. It travels in straight lines and also experiences refraction and reflection. When it comes in contact with bodies of similar resonance thus causing both of them to vibrate at the same frequency and eventually the FIR are absorbed by the body itself. It also possesses a form of "Natural Energy". Heat which we experience everyday is all due to the presence of FIR. Effects of FIR On The Human Body: FIR (FIR) are able to hatch the eggs of insects, sea turtles, chickens and other animals, causing them to develop blood vessels, nerves, skeleton, skin and feathers, it can similarly cause changes to the human are made up of cells, and the most important ingredient in cells is water. Water makes up 65% to 70% of mass of the human body. The cells in the body in turn forms the various organs such as the heart, liver, kidneys, digestive organs, blood vessels, nerves, bones and skin. Just as FIR are able to cause the albumen and egg yolk to develop into various organs, it is able to activate, revitalize, reactivate, develop and strengthen the various organs in our bodies when it is absorbed. various organs of the human body, the circulatory system plays an important role, especially the micro-circulatory system. It is basis of the sustenance of life because if it deteriorates, death is likely to follow. When there are problems with the micro-circulatory system, various ailments will occur. FIR vibrating at a frequency similar to that of the human body is able to penetrate to the body, activate the cells and reactivate as well as strengthen the micro-circulatory systems. It regulates the blood flow and blood in blood vessels which have been blocked due to blood clots and at the same time reactivate the vital energy in the body. That is why we say that FIR are able to regulate the blood circulatory systems of the body, especially that of the micro-circulatory system. activities of the human body depends on the supply of nutrients. Nutrients ingested into our bodies provide us energy and help sustain our lives. At the same time, waste matters which are produced after the nutrients have been absorbed have to be removed from the body. The process is known as metabolism. The metabolic rate of each individual is an indicator of his/her health. If we wish to have a healthy life, we must maintain a good and strong metabolic rate. FIR area able to improve blood circulation and continuously uplift the metabolic rate of the body. As the transport of the nutrients in the body depends on blood circulation, the removal of metabolic waste matters from the various activities in the body is also dependent on the circulatory system. When the circulatory system is improved under the influence of FIR, it will naturally improve our metabolism. As such, the second benefit that FIR provides for the human body is the elevation of metabolism thus improving energy and vitality. benefit is elevation of the immunity of our bodies against diseases. This is part of the effects of the improvement in the micro-circulatory system and metabolism of the body. It helps to slow down the aging process, increase resistance against diseases and increases Benefits Of FIR Health Products: with the continuous advance in science and technology, we have further understood the effects of FIR and through research, we have discovered bio-ceramic which can be used in the manufacture of various health products. This has been great leap forward by modern science and technology and such products are hi-tech products. is raw material which is capable of emitting large amounts of FIR. Under specific conditions and influence of the temperature of the human body, and due to unique molecular structure, it continuously emits FIR of a specific range of wavelength ( 6 -14 micron). This exactly the type of FIR with the right wave length range required by the human body. It is type of FIR that activates the various biological functions of the human body. We call this type of raw material only this type of FIR, it does not cause any harmful effects to the human body. FIR health products produce two different effects on the human body. effect is that of strengthening the body and up keeping health, thus preventing diseases. The other effect is its therapeutic effect on the human body which is capable of treating various common ailments. This form of therapy is based upon strengthening the resistance of the human body against diseases, this reducing suffering and accelerating recuperation. Its is a form of therapy based on health-keeping principles. It is different from chemotherapy and surgery. It is common for doctors in various hospitals to use FIR as a form of physiotherapy. effect is in the treatment of common ailments. faced with various ailments in our daily lives, FIR health products are able to provide therapeutic effects for such ailments. The following are a few examples of common ailments : common for men to suffer from swollen Prostate Gland, especially men in their forties. It has become an inconvenience to them and common symptoms include weakness and difficulty in the excretion of urine, nutria and in serious cases, inability to urinate. At the same time, it may lead to a decline in sexual who suffer from the swelling of the Prostate Gland normally also suffer from Prostatitis or even cancer of the Prostate Gland and is one of the common killer gland is the organ responsible for the production of male hormones and sperm and is very important to for occurrence of disorders of the Prostate Gland is normally related to excessive sexual activity and hygienic reasons. During sexual intercourse, the Prostate Gland expands due to an increase in the supply of blood before ejaculation can occur. If the blood supply to the Prostate Gland is always high, it will lead to clotting of the in the blood vessels that supply blood to the Prostate Gland thus causing it to swell permanently. When the swollen Prostate Gland presses against the urethra, various symptoms of difficulty in urination will occur. Unclean sex life will cause inflammation of the Prostate Gland which will result in swelling of the Prostate Gland. using medicine and surgery will of course be very effective. However, such methods of treatment will harm the Prostate Gland itself and this will cause problem to men. in FIR underwear are embedded with bio-ceramic materials. It is able to emit FIR which directly penetrates the body through the skin. Under the influence of FIR, blood circulation to the lower part of the body will be improved. Prostate Glands which are swollen and filled with blood clots will be normalized again and blood circulation to such areas will be improved, thus restoring their flexibility and their natural functions. As such, the swelling will be reduced gradually until it normalize, improving health conditions and reducing suffering. At the same time, it also revives and elevates the sexual function of men. In this respect, FIR underwear is unique for those suffering from ailments of the Prostate Gland and is also the best way of maintaining health. There is no need for injections or medicines. It treats and relieves suffering in for the prevention of ailments of the Prostate Gland, then FIR underwear should be used a very early stage. It is capable of maintaining the normal functioning of the Prostate Gland and prevents ailments. are various types of FIR health care products. As stated above, there are many uses in wearing FIR .Actually, with the different products and applications, they offer many other health keeping effects. from various types of ailments. No matter what the ailments are, they are directly connected with internal disorders of our body. Blood circulation, especially the condition of the micro-circulatory system directly affects the health condition of our bodies. This is in line with the traditional Chinese medical principle that "If it is unblocked, then it is not painful; and if it is painful, then it must be blocked". can fully understand the properties and applications of FIR and fully utilize the FIR health keeping products it will definitely bring about better health to more of BIO-Ceramics which are capable of emitting FIR has been the subject of research of medical personnel and scientists from China, Japan and Korea who have been continuously researching into various fields of application of such material for the sake of human leader in the introduction of FIR health products, the essential knowledge of various countries and in accordance with the weather, geographical conditions and culture of this region has introduced FIR health products into our daily lives. It has brought about a sharing of knowledge without considerations of national boundaries with only one common objective; to bring about a better and healthier lifestyle for mankind through the usage of FIR products as an alternative that our health and wellness products may be able to help you to rectify certain health problems you may have or to enable you to enhance your health for

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Popular Science Monthly/Volume 19/October 1881/Literary Notices The Sun. By C. A. Young, Ph. D., LL. D. With numerous Illustrations. D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 321. Price, $2. The first thing we have to say about this attractive and admirable little volume is, that it was sorely needed. It was wanted, not only because of the great interest of the subject, but because we have no work in English that deals with it in any satisfactory shape for general use. Proctor's book on the sun, notwithstanding its author's astronomical reputation, is, after all, little more than the compilation of a professional book-maker. He has used his copious materials freely, and made his book too large and expensive, and too crowded with matter of secondary interest, to meet the popular requirement. It has, therefore, not been held as even worth stealing. The great treatise on the sun, of the late Father Secchi, of Rome, though written by an eminent astronomer who has worked at the subject extensively himself, is likewise too voluminous, and also too scientific, for general purposes, and it has accordingly not been thought worth translating into English. The book of the Frenchman, Guillemin, though small enough, is all too popular, and is so variously deficient as to have no true standing. A new book, compact inform, and thoroughly trustworthy for reading and reference, was greatly needed, because the knowledge that has grown up in recent years concerning the great central body of the solar system is not only of exceeding interest, but is such as well-instructed people can not afford to be without. But it was no easy thing to get the book required. First-class scientific men are always pressingly occupied, and they very rarely take to book-making unless for the promulgation of their own views. The managers of the International Scientific Series have, therefore, been fortunate in securing a strong book on this subject, although they have had to wait a good while for it. Yet those who have been long and impatiently expecting it will now be rewarded for their waiting. Professor Young is an authority on "The Sun," and writes from intimate knowledge. He has studied that great luminary all his life, invented and improved instruments for observing it, gone to all quarters of the world in search of the best places and opportunities to watch it, and has contributed important discoveries that have extended our knowledge of it. The reader who glances at the summary of his life-work, given in an accompanying biographical sketch, will see why, of all men, he was perhaps the best prepared to report on the present state of solar knowledge. He, at all events, had the first qualification for the task, because he knew whereof he affirmed. And he has executed the work in a manner worthy of the subject, and of his reputation. He has stated what is known about the sun in a form excellently suited for general apprehension. It would take a cyclopedia to represent all that has been done toward clearing up the solar mysteries. Professor Young has summarized the information, and presented it in a form completely available for general readers. There is no rhetoric in his book; he trusts the grandeur of his theme to kindle interest and impress the feelings. His statements are plain, direct, clear, and condensed, though ample enough for his purpose, and the substance of what is generally wanted will be found accurately given in his pages. The key to his treatment is contained in the following passage from the preface: "It is my purpose, in this little book, to present a general view of what is known and believed about the sun, in language and manner as unprofessional as is consistent with precision. I write neither for scientific readers as such, nor, on the other hand, for the masses, but for that large class in the community who, without being themselves engaged in scientific pursuits, yet have sufficient education and intelligence to be interested in scientific subjects when presented in an untechnical manner; who desire, and are perfectly competent, not only to know the results obtained, but to understand the principles and methods on which they depend without caring to master all the details of the investigation. I have tried to keep distinct the line between the certain and the conjectural, and to indicate as far as possible the degree of confidence to be placed in data and conclusions." It is unnecessary further to dilate on the merits of this volume, especially as the readers of "The Popular Science Monthly" are not unacquainted with Professor Young's skill in scientific exposition; nor will it be possible, in any notice, to illustrate the richness of these pages in striking facts, felicitous illustrations, and lucid explanations, concerning the constitution, astronomical relations, and stupendous influence, of the solar body. There is an introduction on "The Sun's Relation to Life and Activity upon the Earth." This is followed by a systematic discussion of the main problems of solar phenomena, in a succession of chapters treating of "The Distance and Dimensions of the Sun," the "Methods and Apparatus for studying the Surface of the Sun," "The Spectroscope and the Solar Spectrum," "Sun-spots on the Solar Surface," "Periodicity of Sun-spots, their Effects upon the Earth, and Theories as to their Cause and Nature," "The Chromosphere and its Prominences," "The Corona," and "The Sun's Light and Heat." The concluding chapter is an excellent "Summary of Facts and Discussion of the Constitution of the Sun." An appendix is added, which has been contributed by Professor Langley, one of the most zealous and successful American cultivators of solar astronomy. It presents certain important views, which this investigator has reached, with regard to the light and heat of the sun. Professor Young's book is not written in rhyme, and does not profess to be "poetry." Perhaps it is inimical to poetry, as it deals with hard scientific material facts, and, if these are truly incompatible with poetic thought, the book will be open to the maledictions of all who consider error better than truth for the purposes of the poetic mind. But this, at any rate, may be said: no one can read Professor Young's book without recognizing very clearly that the sun, as interpreted by the science of to-day, is a far grander and more impressive object of thought than was the sun of a century or two ago. Milton traversed the universe of his time with intrepid imagination, but what was his conception of the "powerful king of day," compared with the conception of the sun which science has now shown to be true? The poetic imagination has never pictured anything to be compared with the sublimity and unspeakable grandeur of the all-regulating, life-giving star round which we are revolving, and which, so far as the human mind is concerned, science may be said to have created. Has not science, in this and kindred exploits, given a transcendent enlargement to the sphere of the imagination? We do not believe that ignorance is the mother of legitimate devotion or of genuine poetry; and those who think that the truth-seeking faculty in man, which, in a certain aspect, is simply occupied in extending the realm of wonder, and disclosing the beauty, the harmony, and the magnificence of Nature's operations, is the enemy of real poetry, have a good deal yet to learn about the subject. It will damage no sound poet to absorb the contents of Professor Young's book. Chinese Immigration in its Social and Economical Aspects. By George F. Seward, late United States Minister to China. New York: Scribners. 1881. 8vo. Pp. xv-421. Price, $2.50. Reserving for a possible future volume the question of "the political and commercial issues" involved in the Chinese question, Mr. Seward limits himself in the present work to its social and economical aspects, as those which are likely to determine the legislative action of the country. These aspects he considers under the following heads: 1. The number of Chinese in the United States; 2. The material results of Chinese labor in California; 3. Objections to Chinese immigration; and, 4. Fears of an overflowing immigration. And—1. The number of Chinese in this country has been habitually over-estimated by the anti-Chinese partisans. In California it was common to hear it said, a few years ago, that there were "more Chinamen than voters" in that State The facts have been carefully studied by Mr. Seward from the customs statistics of arrivals and departures, and from the recent census; and it turns out that there are no more than ninety-seven thousand Chinamen in the United States, of whom one half live in California, where they form about one in seventeen of the population, and enjoying such provisional security of life and property as the other sixteen see fit to permit them. During the past few years the number of resident Chinese has somewhat diminished, owing in part to the resident Californian's conviction, which he has not failed to express in practice, that the pagan element in a Christian population should be discouraged. This conviction, if we may trust the evidence of Commissioner John A. Swift (p. 250), would seem to be increasing. "In 1852," says Mr. Swift, "the Chinamen were allowed to turn out and celebrate the Fourth of July. In 1862 they would have been mobbed. In 1872 they would have been burned at the stake." This spirit may be profitably contrasted with that of a memorial written by a Chinaman resident in this country (p. 245): "If the spirit be noble and good, although the man be poor and humble, we honor and love him. But we affirm that the people of your honorable country dislike the Chinese because they see the plain appearance and the patched clothes of our poor, and do not think how many spirits there are among us whom they could respect and love." 2. The results of Chinese labor in California are considerable. In railroad-building, in farming, fruit-culture, and the reclamation of swamp-lands, in mining and manufacturing, and in such special industries as cigar-and shoe making and laundry work, they have been of particular service. Governor Low estimated that four fifths of the grading oh the Central Pacific Railroad was done by Chinese laborers. Mr. Charles Crocker, one of the builders of that road, testified before the Congressional investigating committee: "If I had a big job of work that I wanted to get through quickly, and had a limited time to do it in, I should take Chinese labor to do it with, because of its greater reliability and steadiness, and their aptitude and capacity for hard work. They are equal to the best white men." On this point, however, there is some discrepancy in the evidence, one estimate being that three Chinamen are needed to do the work of two first-rate white laborers. In domestic service the Chinese hold an unquestioned place. No one who has had experience of them will underrate their intelligence and faithfulness. A great want of the American community is that of good house-servants. To what is the lack of supply due? To our liberal institutions, the spirit of which makes domestic service of any kind seem degrading in American eyes, and even after a short term of residence in the eyes of the European immigrant. But, in the case of the Chinese immigrant, who, it is complained, does not "assimilate" with us, this moral condition is not set up. This lack of assimilability may be owing to our inquisitorial treatment of him; but it will be time enough to decide whether he will assimilate, or wishes to assimilate, with us, when we shall have admitted his rights as a human creature. Meanwhile, as Mr. Seward might have pointed out, it is precisely because he does not assimilate that he makes the best house servant that our community has yet seen. He has no thought of becoming an alderman or a mayor, or of being promoted from the kitchen to Congress. He comes to do the day's work for the day's wages; he does it faithfully and contentedly, and there the matter ends. If American politicians have taken pleasure in the rapid assimilation of the Celtic contingent in our immigration, American housekeepers, on the other hand, would welcome a class of servants a little less in haste to assimilate, and a little more disposed to serve. If the American home is in danger of extinction, as some foreign critics have predicted, and our families are to be driven into hotels for the lack of cooks and chambermaids, it will not be because a race of real servants could not be brought from China. 3. The main objection to Chinese immigration, as already intimated, is political, and not social. Political equality, political availability, have been made the test, and unjustly so. Mr. Seward reviews other grounds of objection in detail, and concludes by saying: "I dispute earnestly the statement that they are a servile class; that they interfere with the labor of our people; that they send money out of the country; that they have set up a quasi government of their own upon our soil; and that they do not accommodate themselves to the requirements of our life." That they are a vicious people has been argued from their sexual immorality, which, however, is not greater than would be expected in a celibate community like that of the Chinese in California. 4. As to the fear of an overflowing immigration of the Chinese, in case immigration should be freely permitted, the fact is that the Chinese are not, and never have been, a migratory people, but are, on the contrary, more strongly attached to their native soil than the people of any Western nation—except, perhaps, the French. They have not even "settled up" their own outlying districts, as Formosa, central and northern Manchooria, and the vast regions of inner Mongolia. And it is to be added that the demand for Chinese labor in California lessens yearly as the country is cleared up. The whole question is one that could safely be left to the operation of natural laws, social and economic. As it stands, it has been sadly muddled by governmental interference. Mr. Seward does not deal with the philosophic aspects of the question, though they are constantly suggested by his book. One can not leave it without perceiving, for instance, the strong side of the Chinese conservatism. The rulers of China see that conservatism, ancient routine, the established order of things, mean a condition of stable equilibrium for the people, or, in the terminology of our day, that the individual nation is adjusted to its environment; and they wisely refuse to break up this adjustment by the too hasty introduction of foreign works or devices of any kind. At the present writing the Chinese policy seems to us a sounder one than that of Japan, where the changes introduced within twenty years are such as to imperil the institutions which had been perfecting themselves for many centuries. But inquiries like this are outside of the province of this work; meanwhile, Mr. Seward has given us a full, intelligent, and temperate treatment of the whole question of Chinese immigration, which, he thinks, within bounds, would be wisely encouraged. Discovery of Palæolithic Flint Implements in Upper Egypt. By Professor Henry W. Haynes. Pp. 5, with Seven Plates. MM. Brugsch, Mariette, and Chabas, have denied that any palæolithic implements occurred in Egypt; M. Arcelin, Dr. Hamy, M. Lenormant, the Abbé Richard, and Sir John Lubbock, have asserted that they have found them. The general impression has been that the stone implements of Egypt, which were always used ceremonially in the embalming process, were all neolithic, and of historic times. The author went to look for himself, and claims that he found near Cairo, and near Helouan, in the desert, and in the valley west of Thebes, palæolithic implements of the true St. Acheul type, with the other forms that usually occur with them, some of which were exhibited in Paris, and have been referred to in articles by M. de Mortillet and himself, which have been published in "The Popular Science Monthly." Sixty illustrations of the implements are given in the plates to the present work. A Memorial of Joseph Henry. Published by order of Congress. Washington: Government Printing-Office. Pp. 528. A public commemoration of the services of Joseph Henry in behalf of the Smithsonian Institution and of scientific progress in America was held, under the auspices of the Regents of the Institution in conjunction with the two Houses of Congress, on the 16th of January, 1879. The present volume contains the verbatim report of the proceedings on the occasion, published under the direction of Congress, together with the addresses which were delivered at other memorial meetings, of Princeton College, and several scientific societies. In the memorial services at the Capitol, Professor Asa Gray, in behalf of the Board of Regents, gave a brief statement of the life, studies, experiments, discoveries, and general scientific work of Professor Henry; Professor W. B. Rogers made a special review of his electrical studies and discoveries. Mr. Garfield showed how, when all others had failed, he solved the true meaning of Smithson's bequest in a way of which the world has recognized the correctness, and Mr. S. S. Cox how he had labored to give that meaning effect; and General Sherman bore testimony to Professor Henry's personal qualities as a scientific teacher and guide; while the Hon. Hannibal Hamlin demonstrated the satisfactory manner in which he had managed the financial and material interests of the institution, and the excellent condition in which he left it. To these minutes are added a memorial discourse by Samuel B. Dodd, and reminiscences by Professor Cameron, at Princeton College; the discourse of President Welling, of Columbian University, before the Philosophical Society of Washington; the discourse by William B. Taylor before the same body on "The Scientific Work of Joseph Henry," full and elaborate enough to make a volume by itself; and addresses by Professor J. Lovering, Professor Simon Newcomb, and Professor A. M. Mayer, before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Association, respectively. The special subject of the last address is "Henry as a Discoverer," The recognition of the simplicity, gentleness, and strict integrity of Professor Henry's character is a distinct feature in all of the addresses. Anniversary Memoirs of the Boston Society OF Natural History. Published in Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Society's Foundation, 18301880. Boston: Published by the Society. Pp. 635, with 44 Plates. Price, $10. The Boston Society of Natural History, having completed its fiftieth year in 1880, celebrated the event by a jubilee meeting on the 28th of April, and by the publication of this noble volume, containing the history of the Society and a number of special scientific papers. The book is a worthy memorial of the work of one of the oldest and most active of American scientific societies, and docs justice to the part which that body has taken in the promotion of scientific research and the extension of scientific knowledge in the United States. The history of the Society is given from year to year, and by periods of ten years each, with a minuteness of detail which records every gift of specimens, every trouble from the ravages of insects in the museum, and even such matters as the passage of a resolution forbidding smoking in the room—things which may seem superficially of little interest, but which are instructive enough to justify their place, for they show how the life of the Society was maintained, what mistakes it made, and what difficulties it had to encounter. These features and accidents are such as are common to all similar societies, and this frank setting of them forth, as lessons of experience by which other bodies may be guided to the wisest management, is a good work. The present Society was preceded by the Linnæan Society of New England, which was founded in 1814, and was the first organized effort to excite the interest of the American public in natural science. It had a successful and prosperous career for several years, but finally died out because it depended entirely upon the voluntary effort of men whose time was already wholly occupied with their own business for its maintenance and the care of its collections. The museum—a fine one for the period—was given to Harvard College, which promised to provide a building for it and did not, and consequently it was nearly all lost. The Boston Society of Natural History was founded in 1830, on the same plan as the Linnæan Society, and by the same leading men, and would probably have met the same fate, but that it came into the possession of a fund sufficient to put it on a firm footing and enable it to employ special curators for its collections. Its early history is an epitome of the earlier development of scientific thought in this country, and, in its later history, it has kept pace with the broadest expansion of that thought. Its contributions to knowledge, as related in the yearly records, appear important and valuable when regarded in detail, and give, when summed up, occasion for satisfaction that we have had such a body laboring so long and so industriously to lead the public to higher objects of study, and that its vigor is still waxing. Not the least important of the works of the Society has been the institution of the practical scientific lectures to teachers, with object-illustrations, for the purpose of introducing better methods of instruction into the public schools. Besides the annals of the meetings and work of the Society, the memorial contains notices of the lives and labors of its members, officers, and benefactors, who have died during its existence, accompanied with nine portraits. In the "special scientific papers" are included articles on "The Classification of Lavas," by N. S. Shaler; the "Species of Planorbis at Steinheim," by Alpheus Hyatt; "The Devonian Insects of New Brunswick," by S. H. Scudder; "The Cedar-Apples of the United States," by W. G. Farlow; "A Structural Feature in Deep-Sea Ophiurians," by Theodore Lyman; "The Development of the Squid," by W. K. Brooks; "Limulus Polyphemus," by A. S. Packard, Jr.; "The Milkweed Butterfly," by Edward Burgess; "The Development of Double headed Vertebrates," by Samuel F. Clarke; "The Tongues of Reptiles and Birds," by C. S. Minot; "A Special Anatomical Study in Birds," by E. S. Morse; "The Crania of New England Indians," by Lucien Carr; and "The Feeling of Effort," by William James. Indigestion, Biliousness, and Gout in its Protean Aspects. Part I. Indigestion and Biliousness. By J. Milner Fothergill, M. D., Member of the Royal College of Physicians of London. New York: William Wood & Co. Pp. 320. Price, $2. This is a book for the medical profession, and a very valuable one, as it is based upon the latest scientific knowledge brought to the test of practice. Physiology and animal chemistry have made sure and very important advances in late years, so that the fundamental changes of digestion, nutrition, and excretion are far more clearly understood than formerly. Physiology, treating of the normal operations of the living system, is the basis of all knowledge of perverted or diseased action, and this book is written from a strictly physiological standpoint. It opens with an excellent history of the processes of natural digestion in their several stages, including, of course, the constitution of foods, and their transformations under the influence of the digestive secretions. From this point the author passes on in successive chapters to the consideration of Primary Indigestion, Artificial Digestion, Ferments, Tissue Nutrition, Secondary Indigestion, Diet and Drink, the Functions of the Liver, Liver Disturbance, Biliousness, and the medicinal and Dietetic Treatment of Liver Derangements. The subject will be pursued in another volume devoted to the consideration of Gout. The author holds that disturbances of digestion are terribly on the increase in the present day, and he adds a valuable appendix on "the failure of the digestive organs at the present time," and on the "failure of nutrition in children." We have said that this volume has been made for physicians, but it would be a mistake to infer that it had been exclusively prepared for them, and will not be of great value to non-professional readers. The information it contains ought to be widely diffused, and persons of ordinary intelligence can learn a great deal from it that will be of the highest practical use. It can not, of course, be mastered without study, but no subject will better repay careful attention. The general ignorance in relation to foods, their composition, preparation, and physiological effects, and the causes of indigestion in its various forms, is something lamentable, and the daily practice that results from this ignorance is almost heathenish. There are, moreover, abundance of quackish books on these subjects which so mislead people that they are worse than nothing. It is, therefore, important that the circulation of really valuable volumes on such topics as the one before us should be in every way promoted. Ranthorpe. By George Henry Lewes. New York: William S. Gottsberger. Pp. 326. Price, 75 cents. There are not many novels that survive their generation; they generally fall into an early and deserved oblivion. Mr. Lewes was not eminent as a novelist, his efforts in this direction being, indeed, regarded rather as failures than successes; but, after the lapse of a generation, his first essay of this kind reappears in a new and American edition. Mr. Lewes began with novel writing, went on into dramatic composition, passed from this to philosophy, and finally emerged in the field of science. His novels, therefore, do not embody the results of his long and varied studies, but they have the interest of being his first and freshest intellectual work. "Ranthorpe" was written at the age of twenty-five, though it was published five years later, in 1847. He says, in the preface, after acknowledging the defects of the book: "That the faults are not more numerous is owing to the admirable criticisms of two eminent friends, who paid me the compliment of being frankly severe on the work submitted to their judgment. Sensible of the kindness in their severity, I have made them what, for an author, must be considered as a magnificent acknowledgment—I have adopted all their suggestions"! It is not difficult to explain why "Ranthorpe" was not a success in the ordinary sense of a popular novel; but the explanation will probably give the reason why it has been since recalled to the attention of the reading world. It was of too didactic a quality to suit the tastes of novel-readers in search of mere sensation. It is full of moralizings, and, although the topics are secular enough, it is rather preachy. But there is a good deal of wisdom in it that is not without its use. The hero of the book runs a literary career, goes first into poetry and fails, then into the drama, and his tragedy is d——d. The main interest of the volume is in the copious side discussions on the causes of failure in literary adventure, and we have a vivid and readable illustration of ideas which the author subsequently developed in his review articles on "The Principles of Success in Literature." From this point of view the book is instructive, while the plot keeps up the reader's interest in the usual way. Sewer-Gas and its Dangers; with an Exposition of Common Defects in House Drainage, and Practical Information relating to their Remedy. By George Preston Brown. Chicago: Jansen, McClurg & Co. Pp. 242. Price, $1.25. This work is the result of investigations made by an impartial inquirer in the city of Chicago into the extent to which sewer-gas is responsible for sickness and discomfort. An amazing prevalence of defects of all kinds in the construction and working of the house-drains was discovered, of which the dwellers in the houses generally seemed unconscious. The conditions were not exceptional or peculiar to Chicago, but may be considered as general and common to all large towns in which the improvements suggested by the most recent experience and knowledge have not been adopted. Many particular defects are described, and cases of sickness that were traced to them noticed. Illustrations are given of bad drainage in actual houses whose appearance promised a better condition. The dangers which bad sewers and drains entail are forcibly presented; and suggestions are given for remedying and preventing the evils which they occasion. The Wilderness-Cure. By Marc Cook, author of "Camp Lou." New York: William Wood & Co. Pp. 153. Price, $1. "Camp Lou" was a magazine article which related how the author, being in a decline with lung-disease, was restored to health by camping in the Adirondacks. It called out more inquiries for minor details than the writer could answer individually, and he has therefore put all the information that was sought in the questions in this little volume. The book describes the "Wilderness" country and the conditions of the camp; considers the practicability of weak persons wintering in the region described, furnishes a summary of several cases that have been treated in the method recommended, or one like it, and considers the questions of necessary outfit and expense. A Text-Book of Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene. By J. T. Scovell. Terre Haute, Indiana: Moore & Langen, Printers. Pp. 88, with six plates. This work is designed as a text-book, to be supplemented with the study of other works more completely discussing the points considered, of which a partial list is given. It presents the principles of the science plainly, clearly, and briefly, in well-framed sentences, and is arranged after a logical classification of the divisions and subdivisions of the subject. In addition to this, the section on hygiene is practical. The illustrations are given in engravings in separate plates. Extra Census Bulletin. Report on the Cotton Production of the State of Louisiana. By Eugene W. Hilgard. Illustrated. Washington: Government Printing-Office. 1881 Pp. 9a. Studies in Astronomy. By Arthur K. Bartlett. Published by the author. Battle Creek, Michigan. Pp. 56. Price, 35 cents. "The Utah Review." Rev. Theophilus Hilton, A.M, Editor Vol. I, No. 1. July, 1881. Salt Luke: H. P. Palmerston & Co. Monthly. Pp. 31. $2 a year. Report of Field Experiments with Fertilizers. By Professor W. O. Atwater. 1880. From the Report of the Connecticut Board of Agriculture. Pp. 56. First Annual Report of the Astronomer in charge of the Horological and Thermometric Bureaus of the Winchester Observatory of Yale College. By Leonard Waldo. New Haven. 1881. Pp. 32. "The Journal of the American Agricultural Association." Vol. I, No. 1. Joseph H. Reall, Editor. New York. Published by the Association. 1881. Pp. 260. Report on Hawaiian Leprosy. By A. W. Saxe, M.D. Illustrated. Santa Clara, California. 1881. Pp. 26. To the English-speaking Populations in America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceanica, concerning Testimonials on "Origin, Progress, and Destiny of the English Language and Literature." By John A. Weisse, M.D. New York: J. W. Bouton. 1881. Pp. 49. Proceedings of the California Pharmaceutical Society and College of Pharmacy, and Report of the Twelfth Annual Meeting held at San Francisco, January 13, 1881. San Francisco: Joseph Winterburn & Co. 1881. Pp.. 66. The Reasoning Faculty of Animals. By Joseph P. James. Reprint from "The American Naturalist." Pp. 12. A Great Lawyer. By Charles C. Bonney. Chicago: Legal News Co. 1881. Pp. 12. "The Hour-Glass: A Popular Weekly Illustrated Journal." Chicago: Everett W. Fish & Co. Vol. I, No. 4. July 30, 1881. Pp. 6. 50 cents a year. Report of Professor Spencer F. Baird, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, for the Year 1880. Washington: Government Printing-Office. 1881. Pp. 83. On Maximum Synchronous Glaciation. By W. J. McGee. Salem, Massachusetts. 1881. Pp. 65. A Memoir upon Loxolophodon and Uintatherium. By Henry F. Osborn, Sc.D. Accompanied by Stratigraphical Report of the Bridge Beds in the Washakee Basin. By J. B. McMaster, C.E. Illustrated. Princeton, New Jersey. Pp. 54. Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Statistics for Three Months, ending March 31, 1881. Washington: Government Printing-Office. 1881. Pp. 100. The University of Texas. By Professor Alexander Hogg. Pp. 7. Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education. Nos. 6 and 7, 1880, and 1 and 2, 1881. Washington: Government Printing-Office. 1881. Fashion in Deformity. By Professor W. H. Flower. London: Macmillan & Co. 1881. Pp. 85. 75 cents. The Foreigner in China. By L. N. Wheeler, D.D. Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co. 1881. Pp. 268. $1.25. The Bible and Science. By T. Lauder Brunton, M.D. F.R.S. London: Macmillan & Co. 1881. Pp. 415. $2.50. A Sketch of Ancient Philosophy, from Thales to Cicero. By Joseph B. Mayor, M.A. Cambridge: University Press. 1881. Pp. 254. 75 cents. Botany. Outlines of Morphology, Physiology, and Classification of Plants. By W. R. McNab, M.D., F.L.S. Revised for American Students by Charles E. Bessey, Ph.D. Pp. 400. $1.10. And English History for Young Folks. By S. R. Gardiner. Revised for American Students. Pp. 457. $1. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1881. The Microscope and its Revelations. By William B. Carpenter. Sixth edition. Philadelphia: Presley Blakiston. 1881. Pp. 882, $5.50. Catalogue of 1,098 Standard Clock and Zodiacal Stars. Prepared under the Direction of Professor Simon Newcomb. Pp. 314. Indigestion and Biliousness. By J. Milner Fothergill, M.D. New York: William Wood & Co. 1881. $2. The Ancient Bronze Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments of Great Britain and Ireland. By John Evans, D.C.L., F.R.S. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1881. Pp. 509. Illustrated. $5.

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History of Bihar Introduction of Bihar – Bihar, the ancient land of Buddha, has witnessed golden period of Indian history. It is the same land where the seeds of the first republic were sown and which cultivated the first crop of democracy. Such fertile is the soil that has given birth to innumerous intellectuals which spread the light of knowledge and wisdom not only in the country but in the whole world. The state has its capital at Patna, which is situated on the bank of the holy river Ganga. The state as it is today has been shaped from its partition from the province of Bengal and most recently after the separation of the tribal southern region now called Jharkhand. Ancient History of Bihar The history of the land mass currently known as Bihar is very ancient. In fact, it extends to the very dawn of human civilization. Earliest myths and legends of hinduism the Sanatana (Eternal) Dharma – are associated with Bihar. Sita, the consort of Lord Rama, was a princess of Bihar. She was the daughter of King Janak of Videha. The present districts of Muzaffarpur, Sitamarhi, Samastipur, Madhubani, and Darbhanga, in north-central Bihar, mark this ancient kingdom. The present small township of Sitamarhi is located here. According to legend, the birthplace of Sita is Punaura, located on the west-side of Sitamarhi, the headquarters of the district. Janakpur, the capital of King Janak, and the place where Lord Rama and Sita were married, lies just across the border in Nepal. It is reached via the rail station of Janakapur Road located in the Sitamarhi district, on the Narkatiyaganj – Darbhanga section of the North-Eastern Railway. It is no accident, therefore, that the original author of the Hindu epic – The Ramayana – Maharishi Valmiki – lived in Ancient Bihar. Valmikinagar is a small town and a railroad station in the district of West Champaran, close to the railhead of Narkatiyaganj in northwest Bihar. The word Champaran is derived from champa-arnya, or a forest of the fragrant Champa (magnolia) tree. It was here that Prince Gautam attained enlightenment, became the Buddha- at the present Bodh Gaya- a town in central Bihar; and the great religion of buddhism was born. It is here also that Lord Mahavira, the founder of another great religion, Jainism, was born and attained nirvana (death). That site is located at the present town of pawapuri, some miles to the south east of patna, the Capital of Bihar., it is here that the tenth and last Guru of the Sikhs, Guru Gobind Singh was born and attained the sainthood of sikhism, that is became a Guru. A lovely and majestic Gurudwara (a temple for Sikhs) built to commemorate his memory – the harmandir- is located in eastern Patna. Known reverentially as the Patna Sahib, it is one of the five holiest places of worhip (Takhat) for Sikhs. The ancient kingdoms of Magadh and of Licchavis, around about 7-8th century B.C., produced rulers who devised a system of administration that truly is progenitor of the modern art of statecraft, and of the linkage of statecraft with economics. Kautilya, the author of Arthashastra, the first treatise of the modern science of Economics, lived here. Also known as Chanakya, he was the wily and canny adviser to the Magadh king, Chandragupta Maurya. As an emissary of Chandragupta Maurya, Chanakya traveled far and wide in pursuit of promoting the interests of the State and dealing with the Greek invaders settled in the northwest of India, along the Indus valley. He succeeded in preventing the further onslaught of the Greeks. Indeed, he brought about amicable co-existence between the Greeks and the Mauryan Empire. Megasthenes, an emissary of Alexander’s General, Seleucus Necator, lived in Pataliputra (ancient name of Patna, the Mauryan capital) around 302 B.C. He left behind a chronicle of life in and around Patliputra. This is the first recorded account by a foreign traveler in India. It describes in vivid terms the grandeur of life in Patliputra, a city established by King Ajatshatru, around 5th Century B.C., at the confluence of the rivers Sone and Ganga. Another Mauryan king, Ashok, (also known as Priyadarshi or Priyadassi), around 270 B.C., was the first to formulate firm tenets for the governance of a people. He had these tenets, the so called Edicts of Ashok, inscribed on stone pillars which were planted across his kingdom. The pillar were crowned with the statue of one or more lions sitting on top of a pedestal which was inscribed with symbols of wheels. As the lion denoted strength, the wheel denoted the eternal (endless) nature of truth (dharma), hence the name Dharma (or Dhamma) Chakra. This figure of lions, atop a pedestal, with inscription of a wheel, was adopted as the Official Seal of the independent Republic of India (1947). Also, Ashok’s dharma chakra was incorporated into the national flag of India, the Indian tricolor. Remains of a few of these pillars are still extant, for example at Lauriya-Nandan Garh in the district of West Champaran and at vaishali, in the present district of the same name. Ashok, a contemporary of Ptolemy and Euclid, was a great conqueror. His empire extended from what is now the North West Frontier Province (in Pakistan) in the west, to the eastern boundaries of present India in the north, and certainly, up to the Vindhyan Range in the south. Ashok was responsible also for the widespread proselytization of people into Buddhism. He sent his son, Prince Mahendra, and daughter, Sanghamitra, for this purpose to as far south as the present country of Sri Lanka (Sinhal Dweep in ancient times, and Ceylon during the British Empire. Some historians, particularly Sinhalese, consider Mahindra and Sanghmitra as brother and sister. Ancient Bihar also saw the glorification of women in matters of state affairs. It was here that Amrapali, a courtesan of Vaishali (the present district of the same name) in the kingdom of the Lichhavis, attained and wielded enormous power. It is said that the Lord Buddha, during his visit to Vaishali, refused the invitation of many princes, and chose to have dinner with Amrapali instead. Such was the status of women in the Bihari society of several centuries B.C.! A little-known, but historically and archaeologically documented, event is worth mentioning in this context. After his visit with Amrapali, Lord Buddha continued with his journey towards Kushinagar (also called Kusinara in Buddhist texts.) He travelled along the eastern banks of the river Gandak (also called Narayani, which marks the western border of Champaran, a district now administratively split into two- West and East Champaran.) A band of his devoted Licchavis accompanied Lord Buddha in this journey. At a spot known as Kesariya, in the present Purbi (meaning, East) Champaran district, Lord Buddha took rest for the night. It was here that he chose to announce to his disciples the news of his impending niravana (meaning, death); and implored them to return to Vaishali. The wildly lamenting Licchavis would have none of that. They steadfastly refused to leave. Whereupon, Lord Buddha, by creating a 3,000 feet wide stream between them and himself compelled them to leave. As a souvenir he gave them his alms-bowl. The Licchavis, most reluctantly and expressing their sorrow wildly, took leave and built a stupa there to commemorate the event. Lord Buddha had chosen that spot to announce his impending nirvana because, as he told his disciple Anand, he knew that in a previous life he had ruled from that place, namely, Kesariya, as a Chakravarti Raja, Raja Ben. (Again, this is not just a mere legend, myth or folk-lore. Rather, it is a historiclly documented fact supported by archaeological findings. However, neither this part of Buddha’s life, nor the little town of Kesariya, is well-known even in India or Bihar. At Nalanda, the world’s first seat of higher learning, an university, was established during the Gupta period. It continued as a seat of learning till the middle ages, when the muslim invaders burned it down. The ruins are a protected monument and a popular tourist spot. A museum and a learning center- The Nava Nalanda Mahavira – are located here. Nearby, Rajgir, was capital of the Muaryan Empire during the reign of Bimbisara. It was frequently visited by Lord Buddha and Lord Mahavira. There are many Buddhist ruins here. It is also well-known for its many hot-springs which, like similar hot-springs elsewhere in the world, are reputed to have medicinal property. This glorious history of Bihar lasted till around the middle of the 7th or 8th century A.D. – the Gupta Period – when, with the conquest of almost all of northern India by invaders from the middle-east, the Gupta dynasty also fell a victim. In medieval times Bihar lost its prestige as the political and cultural center of India. The Mughal period was a period of unremarkable provincial administration from Delhi. The only remarkable person of these times in Bihar was Sher Shah, or Sher Khan Sur, an Afghan. Based at Sasaram which is now a town in the district of the same name in central-western Bihar, this jagirdar of the Mughal King Babur was successful in defeating Humayun, the son of Babur, twice – once at Chausa and then, again, at Kannauj (in the present state of Uttar Pradesh or U.P.) Through his conquest Sher Shah became the ruler of a territory that, again, extended all the way to the Punjab. He was noted as a ferocious warrior but also a noble administrator – in the tradition of Ashok and the Gupta kings. Several acts of land reform are attributed to him. The remains of a grand mausoleum that he built for himself can be seen in today’s Sasaram (Sher Shah’s maqbara.) Modern History During most of British India, Bihar was a part of the Presidency of Bengal, and was governed from Calcutta. As such, this was a territory very much dominated by the people of Bengal. All leading educational and medical centers were in Bengal. In spite of the unfair advantage that Bengalis possessed, some sons of Bihar rose to positions of prominence, by dint of their intelligence and hard labor. One such was Rajendra Prasad, native of Ziradei, in the district of Saran. He became the first President of the Republic of India. When separated from the Bengal Presidency in 1912, Bihar and Orissa comprised a single province. Later, under the Government of India Act of 1935, the Division of Orissa became a separate province; and the Province of Bihar came into being as an administrative unit of British India. At Independence in 1947, the State of Bihar, with the same geographic boundary, formed a part of the Republic of India, until 1956. At that time, an area in the south-east, predominantly the district of Purulia, was separated and incorporated into West Bengal as part of the Linguistic Reorganization of Indian States. Resurgence in the history of Bihar came during the struggle for India’s independence. It was from Bihar that Mahatma Gandhi launched his civil-disobedience movement, which ultimately led to India’s independence. At the persistent request of a farmer, Raj Kumar Shukla, from the district of Champaran, in 1917 Gandhiji took a train ride to Motihari, the district headquarters of Champaran. Here he learned, first hand, the sad plight of the indigo farmers suffering under the oppressive rule of the British. Alarmed at the tumultuous reception Gandhiji received in Champaran, the British authorities served notice on him to leave the Province of Bihar. Gandhiji refused to comply, saying that as an Indian he was free to travel anywhere in his own country. For this act of defiance he was detained in the district jail at Motihari. From his jail cell, with the help of his friend from South Africa days, C. F. Andrews, Gandhiji managed to send letters to journalists and the Viceroy of India describing what he saw in Champaran, and made formal demands for the emancipation of these people. When produced in court, the Magistrate ordered him released, but on payment of bail. Gandhiji refused to pay the bail. Instead, he indicated his preference to remain in jail under arrest. Alarmed at the huge response Gandhiji was receiving from the people of Champaran, and intimidated by the knowledge that Gandhiji had already managed to inform the Viceroy of the mistreatment of the farmers by the British plantation owners, the magistrate set him free, without payment of any bail. This was the first instance of the success of civil-disobedience as a tool to win freedom. The British received, their first “object lesson” of the power of civil-disobedience. It also made the British authorities recognize, for the first time, Gandhiji as a national leader of some consequence. What Raj Kumar Shukla had started, and the massive response people of Champaran gave to Gandhiji, catapulted his reputation throughout India. Thus, in 1917, began a series of events in a remote corner of Bihar, that ultimately led to the freedom of India in 1947. Sir Richard Attenborough’s award winning film, “Gandhi”, authentically, and at some length, depicts the above episode. (Raj Kumar Shukla is not mentioned by his name in the film, however.) The two images here are from that film. The bearded gentleman, just behind Gandhiji, in the picture on the left, and on the elephant at right, is Raj Kumar Shukla. Gandhiji, in his usual joking way, had commented that in Champaran he “found elephants just as common as bullock carts in (his native) Gujarat”!! It was natural, therefore, that many people from Bihar became leading participants in India’s struggle for independence. Dr. Rajendra Prasad has been mentioned above. Another was Jay Prakash Narayan, affectionately called JP. JP’s substantial contribution to modern Indian history continued up until his death in 1979. It was he who steadfastly and staunchly opposed the autocratic rule of Indira Gandhi and her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi. Fearing people’s reaction to his opposition, Indira Gandhi had him arrested on the eve of declaring National Emergency beginning June 26, 1975. He was put in the Tihar Jail, located near Delhi, where notorious criminals are jailed. Thus, in Free India, this septuagenarian, who had fought for India’s freedom alongside Indira Gandhi’s father, Jawahar Lal Nehru, received a treatment that was worse than what the British had meted out to Gandhiji in Champaran in 1917, for his speaking out against oppression. The movement started by JP, however, brought the Emergency to an end, led to the massive defeat of Indira Gandhi and her Congress Party at the polls, and, to the installation of a non-Congress government -The Janata Party – at Delhi, for the first time. With the blessings of JP, Morarji Desai became the fourth Prime Minister of India. JP remained the Conscience of the Janata Party and of post-Gandhi – post-Nehru India. He gave a call to all Indians to work ceaselessly towards eliminating “dictatorship in favour of democracy” and bringing about “freedom from slavery”. Sadly, soon after attaining power, bickering began among the leaders of the Janata Party which led to the resignation of Shri Desai as the Prime Minister. JP continued with his call for “total revolution” (sampporna kranti), but he succumbed to kidney failure at a hospital in Bombay in 1979. Subsequent bickering in the Janata Party led to the formation of a breakaway political party – the Janata Dal. This political party is a constituent unit of the current ruling coalition at Delhi, the so called, United Front. It was also from this party that Laloo Prasad Yadav, the Chief Minister of Bihar was elected. The bickering continued. A new party led by Mr. Yadav was formed as – the Rashtriya Janata Dal – which went on to rule for almost 15 years in Bihar. This was also a period when Hindi literature came to flourish in the state. Raja Radhika Raman Singh, Shiva Pujan Sahay, Divakar Prasad Vidyarthy, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Ram Briksha Benipuri, are some of the luminaries who contributed to the flowering of Hindi literature, which did not have much of a long history. The Hindi language, certainly its literature, began around mid to late nineteenth century. It is marked by the appearance of Bhartendu Babu Harischandra’s ( a resident of Varanasi in U.P.) drama “Harischandra”. Devaki Nandan Khatri began writing his mystery novels in Hindi during this time (Chandrakanta, Chandrakanta Santati, Kajar ki Kothari, Bhootnath, etc.) He was born at Muzaffarpur in Bihar and had his earlier education there. He then moved to Tekari Estate in Gaya in Bihar. He later became an employee of the Raja of Benares (now Varanasi.) He started a printing press called “Lahari” which began the publication of a Hindi monthly, “Sudarshan”, in 1898. One of the first short stories in Hindi, if not the very first, was “Indumati” (Pundit Kishorilal Goswami, author) which was published in 1900. The collection of short stories “Rajani aur Taare” (Anupam Prakashan, Patna, publishers) contains an extended history of the origin and evolution of the short story as a distinct literary form in the Hindi literature. Conclusion For its geographical location, natural beauty, mythological and historical importance, Bihar feels proud of the assets it has been gifted by time. And for its moral contributions in the fields of arts-literature and religion and spiritualism, it knows no competitors centuries old stories related to this land are told even today. The state is the same kingdom, which once upon a time ruled the country as well as the neighbouring countries . Many great rulers have lived here and it fills us with a sense of pride when we think of Bihar as the ‘Karmabhumi’ of Buddha and Mahavir. Bihar, to liven up the glorious tale of which land, words fall short.

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|Topical Bible Study|| Topical Bible Studies list all the Scripture references you need to study up on a topic pertaining to creation. Then, you can incorporate these references into your “on location” lessons on Creation Safaris. Be sure to “rightly divide the word of truth” (2 Tim 2:15) by using these verses in context and with proper balance with the whole panorama of Biblical revelation. – David F. Coppedge LIONS IN SCRIPTURE Need to teach your group about mountain lions? People in Bible times knew a lot about big cats! Lions in the Bible: GEN 49:9 “Judah is a lion’s whelp; From the prey, my son, you have gone up. He couches, he lies down as a lion, And as a lion, who dares rouse him up? NUM 23:24 “Behold, a people rises like a lioness, And as a lion it lifts itself; It shall not lie down until it devours the prey, And drinks the blood of the slain.” NUM 24:9 “He couches, he lies down as a lion, And as a lion, who dares rouse him? Blessed is everyone who blesses you, And cursed is everyone who curses you.” DEU 33:20 And of Gad he said, “Blessed is the one who enlarges Gad; He lies down as a lion, And tears the arm, also the crown of the head. DEU 33:22 And of Dan he said, “Dan is a lion’s whelp, That leaps forth from Bashan.” JDG 14:5 Then Samson went down to Timnah with his father and mother, and came as far as the vineyards of Timnah; and behold, a young lion came roaring toward him. JDG 14:8 When he returned later to take her, he turned aside to look at the carcass of the lion; and behold, a swarm of bees and honey were in the body of the lion. JDG 14:9 So he scraped the honey into his hands and went on, eating as he went. When he came to his father and mother, he gave some to them and they ate it; but he did not tell them that he had scraped the honey out of the body of the lion. JDG 14:18 So the men of the city said to him on the seventh day before the sun went down, “What is sweeter than honey? And what is stronger than a lion?” And he said to them, “If you had not plowed with my heifer, You would not have found out my riddle.” 1SA 17:34 But David said to Saul, “Your servant was tending his father’s sheep. When a lion or a bear came and took a lamb from the flock, 1SA 17:36 “Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; and this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, since he has taunted the armies of the living God.” 1SA 17:37 And David said, “The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, He will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine.” And Saul said to David, “Go, and may the Lord be with you.” 2SA 1:23 “Saul and Jonathan, beloved and pleasant in their life, And in their death they were not parted; They were swifter than eagles, They were stronger than lions. 2SA 17:10 “And even the one who is valiant, whose heart is like the heart of a lion, will completely lose heart; for all Israel knows that your father is a mighty man and those who are with him are valiant men. 2SA 23:20 Then Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, the son of a valiant man of Kabzeel, who had done mighty deeds, killed the two sons of Ariel of Moab. He also went down and killed a lion in the middle of a pit on a snowy day. 1KI 7:29 and on the borders which were between the frames were lions, oxen and cherubim; and on the frames there was a pedestal above, and beneath the lions and oxen were wreaths of hanging work. 1KI 7:36 And he engraved on the plates of its stays and on its borders, cherubim, lions and palm trees, according to the clear space on each, with wreaths all around. 1KI 10:19 There were six steps to the throne and a round top to the throne at its rear, and arms on each side of the seat, and two lions standing beside the arms. 1KI 10:20 And twelve lions were standing there on the six steps on the one side and on the other; nothing like it was made for any other kingdom. 1KI 13:24 Now when he had gone, a lion met him on the way and killed him, and his body was thrown on the road, with the donkey standing beside it; the lion also was standing beside the body. 1KI 13:25 And behold, men passed by and saw the body thrown on the road, and the lion standing beside the body; so they came and told it in the city where the old prophet lived. 1KI 13:26 Now when the prophet who brought him back from the way heard it, he said, “It is the man of God, who disobeyed the command of the Lord; therefore the Lord has given him to the lion, which has torn him and killed him, according to the word of the Lord which He spoke to him.” 1KI 13:28 And he went and found his body thrown on the road with the donkey and the lion standing beside the body; the lion had not eaten the body nor torn the donkey. 1KI 20:36 Then he said to him, “Because you have not listened to the voice of the Lord, behold, as soon as you have departed from me, a lion will kill you.” And as soon as he had departed from him a lion found him, and killed him. 2KI 17:25 And it came about at the beginning of their living there, that they did not fear the Lord; therefore the Lord sent lions among them which killed some of them. 2KI 17:26 So they spoke to the king of Assyria, saying, “The nations whom you have carried away into exile in the cities of Samaria do not know the custom of the god of the land; so he has sent lions among them, and behold, they kill them because they do not know the custom of the god of the land.” 1CH 11:22 Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, the son of a valiant man of Kabzeel, mighty in deeds, struck down the two sons of Ariel of Moab. He also went down and killed a lion inside a pit on a snowy day. 1CH 12:8 And from the Gadites there came over to David in the stronghold in the wilderness, mighty men of valor, men trained for war, who could handle shield and spear, and whose faces were like the faces of lions, and they were as swift as the gazelles on the mountains. 2CH 9:18 And there were six steps to the throne and a footstool in gold attached to the throne, and arms on each side of the seat, and two lions standing beside the arms. 2CH 9:19 And twelve lions were standing there on the six steps on the one side and on the other; nothing like it was made for any other kingdom. JOB 4:10 “The roaring of the lion and the voice of the fierce lion, And the teeth of the young lions are broken. JOB 4:11 “The lion perishes for lack of prey, And the whelps of the lioness are scattered. JOB 10:16 ’And should my head be lifted up, Thou wouldst hunt me like a lion; And again Thou wouldst show Thy power against me. JOB 28:8 “The proud beasts have not trodden it, Nor has the fierce lion passed over it. JOB 38:39 “Can you hunt the prey for the lion, Or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, PSA 7:2 Lest he tear my soul like a lion, Dragging me away, while there is none to deliver. PSA 10:9 He lurks in a hiding place as a lion in his lair; He lurks to catch the afflicted; He catches the afflicted when he draws him into his net. PSA 17:12 He is like a lion that is eager to tear, And as a young lion lurking in hiding places. PSA 22:13 They open wide their mouth at me, As a ravening and a roaring lion. PSA 22:21 Save me from the lion’s mouth; And from the horns of the wild oxen Thou dost answer me. PSA 34:10 The young lions do lack and suffer hunger; But they who seek the Lord shall not be in want of any good thing. PSA 35:17 Lord, how long wilt Thou look on? Rescue my soul from their ravages, My only life from the lions. PSA 57:4 My soul is among lions; I must lie among those who breathe forth fire, Even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, And their tongue a sharp sword. PSA 58:6 O God, shatter their teeth in their mouth; Break out the fangs of the young lions, O Lord. PSA 91:13 You will tread upon the lion and cobra, The young lion and the serpent you will trample down. PSA 104:21 The young lions roar after their prey, And seek their food from God. PRO 19:12 The king’s wrath is like the roaring of a lion, But his favor is like dew on the grass. PRO 20:2 The terror of a king is like the growling of a lion; He who provokes him to anger forfeits his own life. PRO 22:13 The sluggard says, “There is a lion outside; I shall be slain in the streets!” PRO 26:13 The sluggard says, “There is a lion in the road! A lion is in the open square!” PRO 28:1 The wicked flee when no one is pursuing, But the righteous are bold as a lion. PRO 28:15 Like a roaring lion and a rushing bear Is a wicked ruler over a poor people. PRO 30:30 The lion which is mighty among beasts And does not retreat before any, ECC 9:4 For whoever is joined with all the living, there is hope; surely a live dog is better than a dead lion. SOL 4:8 “Come with me from Lebanon, my bride, May you come with me from Lebanon. Journey down from the summit of Amana, From the summit of Senir and Hermon, From the dens of lions, From the mountains of leopards. ISA 5:29 Its roaring is like a lioness, and it roars like young lions; It growls as it seizes the prey, And carries it off with no one to deliver it. ISA 11:6 And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, And the leopard will lie down with the kid, And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; And a little boy will lead them. ISA 11:7 Also the cow and the bear will graze; Their young will lie down together; And the lion will eat straw like the ox. ISA 15:9 For the waters of Dimon are full of blood; Surely I will bring added woes upon Dimon, A lion upon the fugitives of Moab and upon the remnant of the land. ISA 30:6 The oracle concerning the beasts of the Negev. Through a land of distress and anguish, From where come lioness and lion, viper and flying serpent, They carry their riches on the backs of young donkeys And their treasures on camels’ humps, To a people who cannot profit them; ISA 31:4 For thus says the Lord to me, “As the lion or the young lion growls over his prey, Against which a band of shepherds is called out, Will not be terrified at their voice, nor disturbed at their noise, So will the Lord of hosts come down to wage war on Mount Zion and on its hill.” ISA 35:9 No lion will be there, Nor will any vicious beast go up on it; These will not be found there. But the redeemed will walk there, ISA 38:13 “I composed my soul until morning. Like a lion-- so He breaks all my bones, From day until night Thou dost make an end of me. ISA 65:25 “The wolf and the lamb shall graze together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox; and dust shall be the serpent’s food. They shall do no evil or harm in all My holy mountain,” says the Lord. JER 2:15 “The young lions have roared at him, They have roared loudly. And they have made his land a waste; His cities have been destroyed, without inhabitant. JER 2:30 “In vain I have struck your sons; They accepted no chastening. Your sword has devoured your prophets Like a destroying lion. JER 4:7 “A lion has gone up from his thicket, And a destroyer of nations has set out; He has gone out from his place To make your land a waste. Your cities will be ruins Without inhabitant. JER 5:6 Therefore a lion from the forest shall slay them, A wolf of the deserts shall destroy them, A leopard is watching their cities. Everyone who goes out of them shall be torn in pieces, Because their transgressions are many, Their apostasies are numerous. JER 12:8 “My inheritance has become to Me Like a lion in the forest; She has roared against Me; Therefore I have come to hate her. JER 25:38 “He has left His hiding place like the lion; For their land has become a horror Because of the fierceness of the oppressing sword, And because of His fierce anger.” JER 49:19 “Behold, one will come up like a lion from the thickets of the Jordan against a perennially watered pasture; for in an instant I shall make him run away from it, and whoever is chosen I shall appoint over it. For who is like Me, and who will summon Me into court? And who then is the shepherd who can stand against Me?” JER 50:17 “Israel is a scattered flock, the lions have driven them away. The first one who devoured him was the king of Assyria, and this last one who has broken his bones is Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon. JER 50:44 “Behold, one will come up like a lion from the thicket of the Jordan to a perennially watered pasture; for in an instant I shall make them run away from it, and whoever is chosen I shall appoint over it. For who is like Me, and who will summon Me into court? And who then is the shepherd who can stand before Me?” JER 51:38 “They will roar together like young lions, They will growl like lions’ cubs. LAM 3:10 He is to me like a bear lying in wait, Like a lion in secret places. EZE 1:10 As for the form of their faces, each had the face of a man, all four had the face of a lion on the right and the face of a bull on the left, and all four had the face of an eagle. EZE 10:14 And each one had four faces. The first face was the face of a cherub, the second face was the face of a man, the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle. EZE 19:2 and say, ’What was your mother? A lioness among lions! She lay down among young lions, She reared her cubs. EZE 19:3 ’When she brought up one of her cubs, He became a lion, And he learned to tear his prey; He devoured men. EZE 19:5 ’When she saw, as she waited, That her hope was lost, She took another of her cubs And made him a young lion. EZE 19:6 ’And he walked about among the lions; He became a young lion, He learned to tear his prey; He devoured men. EZE 22:25 “There is a conspiracy of her prophets in her midst, like a roaring lion tearing the prey. They have devoured lives; they have taken treasure and precious things; they have made many widows in the midst of her. EZE 32:2 “Son of man, take up a lamentation over Pharaoh king of Egypt, and say to him, ’You compared yourself to a young lion of the nations, Yet you are like the monster in the seas; And you burst forth in your rivers, And muddied the waters with your feet, And fouled their rivers.’” EZE 41:19 a man’s face toward the palm tree on one side, and a young lion’s face toward the palm tree on the other side; they were carved on all the house all around. DAN 6:7 “All the commissioners of the kingdom, the prefects and the satraps, the high officials and the governors have consulted together that the king should establish a statute and enforce an injunction that anyone who makes a petition to any god or man besides you, O king, for thirty days, shall be cast into the lions’ den. DAN 6:12 Then they approached and spoke before the king about the king’s injunction, “Did you not sign an injunction that any man who makes a petition to any god or man besides you, O king, for thirty days, is to be cast into the lions’ den?” The king answered and said, “The statement is true, according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which may not be revoked.” DAN 6:16 Then the king gave orders, and Daniel was brought in and cast into the lions’ den. The king spoke and said to Daniel, “Your God whom you constantly serve will Himself deliver you.” DAN 6:19 Then the king arose with the dawn, at the break of day, and went in haste to the lions’ den. DAN 6:20 And when he had come near the den to Daniel, he cried out with a troubled voice. The king spoke and said to Daniel, “Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you constantly serve, been able to deliver you from the lions?” DAN 6:22 “My God sent His angel and shut the lions’ mouths, and they have not harmed me, inasmuch as I was found innocent before Him; and also toward you, O king, I have committed no crime.” DAN 6:24 The king then gave orders, and they brought those men who had maliciously accused Daniel, and they cast them, their children, and their wives into the lions’ den; and they had not reached the bottom of the den before the lions overpowered them and crushed all their bones. DAN 6:27 “He delivers and rescues and performs signs and wonders In heaven and on earth, Who has also delivered Daniel from the power of the lions.” DAN 7:4 “The first was like a lion and had the wings of an eagle. I kept looking until its wings were plucked, and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a man; a human mind also was given to it. HOS 5:14 For I will be like a lion to Ephraim, And like a young lion to the house of Judah. I, even I, will tear to pieces and go away, I will carry away, and there will be none to deliver. HOS 11:10 They will walk after the Lord, He will roar like a lion; Indeed He will roar, And His sons will come trembling from the west. HOS 13:7 So I will be like a lion to them; Like a leopard I will lie in wait by the wayside. HOS 13:8 I will encounter them like a bear robbed of her cubs, And I will tear open their chests; There I will also devour them like a lioness, As a wild beast would tear them. JOE 1:6 For a nation has invaded my land, Mighty and without number; Its teeth are the teeth of a lion, And it has the fangs of a lioness. AMO 3:4 Does a lion roar in the forest when he has no prey? Does a young lion growl from his den unless he has captured something? AMO 3:8 A lion has roared! Who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken! Who can but prophesy? AMO 3:12 Thus says the Lord, “Just as the shepherd snatches from the lion’s mouth a couple of legs or a piece of an ear, So will the sons of Israel dwelling in Samaria be snatched away-- With the corner of a bed and the cover of a couch! AMO 5:19 As when a man flees from a lion, And a bear meets him, Or goes home, leans his hand against the wall, And a snake bites him. MIC 5:8 And the remnant of Jacob Will be among the nations, Among many peoples Like a lion among the beasts of the forest, Like a young lion among flocks of sheep, Which, if he passes through, Tramples down and tears, And there is none to rescue. NAH 2:11 Where is the den of the lions And the feeding place of the young lions, Where the lion, lioness, and lion’s cub prowled, With nothing to disturb them? NAH 2:12 The lion tore enough for his cubs, Killed enough for his lionesses, And filled his lairs with prey And his dens with torn flesh. NAH 2:13 “Behold, I am against you,” declares the Lord of hosts. “I will burn up her chariots in smoke, a sword will devour your young lions, I will cut off your prey from the land, and no longer will the voice of your messengers be heard.” ZEP 3:3 Her princes within her are roaring lions, Her judges are wolves at evening; They leave nothing for the morning. ZEC 11:3 There is a sound of the shepherds’ wail, For their glory is ruined; There is a sound of the young lions’ roar, For the pride of the Jordan is ruined. 2TI 4:17 But the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me, in order that through me the proclamation might be fully accomplished, and that all the Gentiles might hear; and I was delivered out of the lion’s mouth. HEB 11:33 who by faith conquered kingdoms, performed acts of righteousness, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, 1PE 5:8 Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. REV 4:7 And the first creature was like a lion, and the second creature like a calf, and the third creature had a face like that of a man, and the fourth creature was like a flying eagle. REV 5:5 and one of the elders *said to me, “Stop weeping; behold, the Lion that is from the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has overcome so as to open the book and its seven seals.” REV 9:8 And they had hair like the hair of women, and their teeth were like the teeth of lions. REV 9:17 And this is how I saw in the vision the horses and those who sat on them: the riders had breastplates the color of fire and of hyacinth and of brimstone; and the heads of the horses are like the heads of lions; and out of their mouths proceed fire and smoke and brimstone. REV 10:3 and he cried out with a loud voice, as when a lion roars; and when he had cried out, the seven peals of thunder uttered their voices. REV 13:2 And the beast which I saw was like a leopard, and his feet were like those of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. And the dragon gave him his power and his throne and great authority.

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Genealogy is not just the collection of names, dates and locations, but an attempt to preserve memory. One of the best ways to preserve memory is through the use of photographs. It’s one thing to say your great-grandfather lived in such-and-such a place, and was born on such-and-such a date, but if you have a picture of him, he suddenly becomes more than just name, but in some way he becomes real in a way hard to accomplish with just the written word. It’s a common aphorism that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I would say that in the case of your family history that understates the significance of having photos of people in your family tree. So here’s the truth – all photographs fade. There is no way to truly prevent photographs from deteriorating over time. The best we can do is extend their life. The good news is that there is a lot we can do to extend their life (in most cases). The enemies of photographic media are light, heat, humidity and chemical fumes. Many of the storage mediums bought for photographs in the past (and even today) contain chemicals that can actually eat away at the photographs. Even chemicals in wood and glue used to make a wooden cabinet can seep out and cause damage to photographs. Those ‘magnetic’ photo albums that are so common, where the photos stick to the page and then are covered with a plastic sheet? In most cases, both the glue that makes the pages sticky and the plastic sheet covering the photographs can be bad for the photos. Did you or your ancestor glue photos to album pages? Think the glue was archival quality non-acidic glue? Let’s start with slides. Slides have the best longevity of various photo mediums, although they too will fade over time. Kodachrome, the first successful color film, uses a technique unique among slide films that contributes to being stable in the dark for well over a hundred years. One study estimates that it would take 185 years before the least stable dye (yellow) in Kodachrome would fade 20%. Another problem among film and prints is their tendency to turn yellow over time, something Kodachrome also is uniquely (for films dating back that far) immune. In recently years, let’s say the past 25 years, films and papers have improved significantly, but nothing matches Kodachrome which was invented in the 1930s. During the 1940s through the 1960s or so, Kodachrome was the film of choice. Many families would sit in their living room and watch photos of their family trips projected onto the wall. Ironically, Kodachrome will fade faster than other slide films when left in a projector. So what happened to all those slides from all those families? Frequently they were actually left in the slide carousels which were stored in boxes. A family might have kept a stack of these boxes, and whenever they wanted to see photos of a particular trip they would open the box, take out the carousel, put it in the projector and watch. Carousels came in a few different types – some round (the carousel would rotate the whole carousel) and some straight (the projector would move through from beginning to end). It’s important to note that the order of film in a slide carousel is not necessarily the order of the film shot, nor even from the same roll of film. Sometimes families would buy pre-made slides of the place they visited (perhaps shots they would never be able to take) and mix them in with their own slides, to better show off the place they had visited. As this blog does focus on Jewish genealogy, I should point out that Kodachrome was invented by two Jewish musicians. Indeed, while they had studied chemistry and physics, they were, for lack of a better term, hobbyists when it came to photography. Jews were not hired as chemists in those days, so they worked in their kitchens on their ideas for color film. When they made progress, Kodak wouldn’t hire them, but private funds helped them set up a laboratory on their own. As they made progress Kodak finally bought the rights to any film they developed, but still not willing to pay them, did so in a deal offering them future money per foot of film sold (thus no risk to Kodak). That ended up working out pretty well for a couple of Jews who couldn’t get jobs in chemistry, yet ended up creating what would become the most popular color film for decades to follow. Both would continue in their careers in music following the creation of Kodachrome. Okay, history lesson over. You’ve collected your slides, in carousels and/or boxes, now what? The first thing I suggest doing is labeling your slides. Every single one of them. This takes a bit of organization first. First, organize the slides into rolls. If your slides were already in one box per roll and properly ordered, you’re ahead of the game. If not, try your best to organize the slides into rolls as best you can. You might choose instead to organize them around the original slideshows if you found the slides in carousels, but then you might also find boxes with slides that didn’t make it into the original slideshows and you’ll have to decide how to fit those in as well. Assign a name to each roll (or slideshow). If, for example, you’ve collected slides from different people, you could organize them by naming them after the person who took the photos and assigning a roll number. So if you received a box from your cousin Robert and a stack of carousels from your grandfather Charles, then you might have a roll labeled robert01, another named charles04, etc. For each slide you will label the slide with the slide number, so for the roll robert01, the 22nd slide would be labeled robert01-22. We’ll get to how to label them in a minute. Second, put the slide into archival plastic pages. These are essentially pages that fit into 3-ring binders or which you can hang in hanging filing systems. They usually will hold 20 slides, so in most cases you will need two sheet per roll of film. You can find these in most photography stores, archival suppliers, and many places online. Some major manufacturers of slide protector pages: Photo retailers probably sell the pages from Print File. Other companies make their own. The most important thing is that the material used to manufacturer the sheets is archival – for slides this will usually be polypropylene (negative sheets may use polyethylene as explained below). You might notice that different companies manufacturer these in different thicknesses, measured in mils. Archival Methods sells their sheets with 2.5mil polypropylene. Light Impressions actually sells their sheets in two different thicknesses, 3 mil and 5 mil. Print File manufacturers their pages out of 8 mil polypropylene. You can decide which brand you prefer. Each of these companies also sells binders or binder boxes (my personal favorite), for storing these pages. Keep in mind that if you are going to go to the trouble of getting archival sheets to store your slides, you should also get an archival binder. You can also buy sheets intended to be hung in a filing cabinet. If you have a filing cabinet this might be a good option, just keep in mind you want to make sure everything in the filing cabinet is archival (so if you’re planning on sharing the space with your bills and other documents, this might not be such a good idea). You might be asking, what is ‘archival’ and how do I know if something really is archival? Well, the basic answer is something is archival if it contains no materials that will contribute to the deterioration of the items stored within. As mentioned before, even the glue in a wood cabinet can seep out fumes that will ruin your photos. For example, based on the issue with cabinets, many professionals will only store their photos in steel cabinets. As to how you know if a particular product is really archival, there is an organization called the Image Permanence Institute (IPI) which has a test called the Photographic Activity Test (PAT) which tested products for their effects on photographic materials. If the product shows it has passed the PAT test, you should be safe. The PAT test applies to anything that comes in close contact with your photographs and film, and indeed even when having your photos framed you should make sure the mat surrounding the photo has passed the PAT test. If you’re buying a frame with a pre-cut mat in a retail store, it might not be so easy to find that out, but if you’re having a photo professionally framed, the framer should be able to tell you if the mat they use has passed the PAT test, or should be able to find out from the manufacturer. Okay, so you’ve organized your slides into rolls and placed them into plastic sheets, with an assigned roll name written on the top of each sheet. Now we get to the hard part, labeling each slide. If you received the slides from a relative who is still alive, I recommend now visiting them with your newly organized slide pages and going over each roll and determining who is in each photo and when and where the photos were taken. This might not be so easy if you have not yet scanned the photos since slides are hard to see, especially by elderly relatives, but you can either scan the slides first, showing the photos on the computer, or bring along a slide viewer (a small hand-held viewer that magnifies the slide a bit works well). Once you know everything you can about every slide, you need to create labels. This is really only possible by computer, and let me explain how. I used to use Avery 5167 return-address labels for this purpose, as they are actually the exact size necessary to fill either the top or the bottom of a slide mount. This is a well-known fact among photographers. If you find some special ‘slide label’ for sale, you’re probably just overpaying for an inferior product. That said, there is a problem with the Avery labels, and that is that they are not archival. Avery does sell some archival products, but apparently their return-address labels are not among them. The good news is that some of Avery’s competitors do provide acid-free and lignon-free labels that are the same size. One company, Chartpak, has a product line called Maco and a product called ML-8100 which is similar to the Avery 5167 and is acid-free and lignon-free. I doubt they have submitted their products for the PAT test (since it is not intended for archival purposes but for return addresses), but Avery is not acid-free or lignon-free so I would suggest going with Maco or another company that does claim their labels are acid-free and lignon-free. All of these companies provide templates that you can use for their labels on their web sites. Microsoft actually provides Avery templates with Word I believe. Avery also has free software you can use for printing their labels. In any case, you open up the template and fill in the information on each slide. I recommend putting the unique identifier you’ve come up for each slide (i.e. robert01-22 in the above example) on the top line, then following it with date, location, event and who is in the photo. There is a lot of copying and pasting here, since the information is largely repetitive. Once you’ve filled out the template, print out the labels and affix them to each slide. Great, so you’ve organized your slides into rolls, inserted them into plastic sheets, collected all the information on each slide and labeled them properly. That’s a huge amount of work, believe me. IF ou’ve done this, you owe yourself congratulations. Moving on, we have negatives. I’ll be discussing 35mm negatives, but the idea is the same with other sizes, if not specifics. There are generally two kinds of negatives, black and white, and color. Color negatives only became available in the 50s and probably only became really popular in the 70s. The good news is for black and white negatives, their longevity is quite good. Black and white negatives are usually formed by particles of silver, and thus do not fade like color dyes. The bad news here is that color negatives don’t last as long as slides. They fade quickly, and if you left them in the original envelopes you received from the photo processor, they were not kept in the best conditions. If you have old color negatives, they may have already faded beyond usefulness. The other problem with negatives is that they are obviously harder to check. Most people can’t easily look at a negative and know the quality of the print that will come from it. If the negative has faded a lot you might not even be able to see the image, which would be a good hint, but most people will not be able to tell too much by looking at the negatives themselves. What this means is that you either need to print from the negatives to find out their quality, or scan the negatives. As my suggestion with all photographs is to scan them immediately, this is obviously the path I would take. It’s up to you if you want to put your negatives into pages first, or test them out by scanning first. Personally, unless you can’t see any image at all on the negatives, I would put them into archival pages and then scan all the images. The same companies mentioned above sell pages for preserving negatives. These work similarly to the slide pages, except you slide each negative strip (usually 4-6 frames per strip) into the page. There are seven slots, so depending on the number of frames per strip (decided on by the photo processor) and the number of frames in the roll you may need a second page for the roll. Obviously if your roll was 36 frames and you have a 35-frame page (5 frames per strip, 7 strips per page), you will need to find a spot for that last image in a different page. If I’m collecting negatives from a series (i.e. from the same trip) I usually will keep a page for those extras and keep them together. There are different materials used for these kinds of negative preservers. First, there’s polypropylene like that used for the slide sheets. Polypropylene is used for slides because it is very clear, and since people tend to look at their slides while still in the sheets (by putting them on a light table, or holding them up to a light source) it is important to be very clear. One negative aspect of polypropylene is that it has a tendency to attract dust, and you don’t want dust on your slides and negatives. Keep in mind with polypropylene pages to check your slides and negatives for dust before scanning. Use a can of compressed air to clean them before putting them in the scanner. Another material used for negative pages is polyethylene. Polyethylene is not as clear as Polypropylene, which is actually a benefit since it means less light coming through to the negatives. Since people tend not to view negatives through these sheets and don’t need color fidelity when looking, the clarity of polypropylene is not a benefit for negatives. In addition, the fact that polyethylene does not attract as much dust as polypropylene, means it’s better for archival purposes. Thus, for negatives I would use polyethylene pages. Truthfully, I’m not sure if all the companies sell polyethylene pages for negatives, but I know Print File does, and I recommend their pages. There is a third material available, called either Mylar or polyester. This is even clearer than polypropylene and relatively expensive. I don’t think it is necessary, and certainly not for negatives. Print File actually sells polyester sleeves that fit around individual strips of negatives, and then are inserted into polypropylene pages for storage, thus allowing you to take out the individual strip for viewing in the clearer Polyester protector. This is overkill in my book, and really only intended for professional photographers. When it comes to labeling negatives, you obviously have no place to put labels on the film itself. I would thus suggest naming the roll just like you did for the slides, and then typing up a description of each frame in the roll to keep with the film. You can just keep these descriptions on your computer, or since you’re putting the negatives in binders anyways, you can print out the descriptions, hole-punch the sheet and put it in with the negatives. Remember if you’re putting paper into the binder to use acid-free lignon-free paper! Preserving prints probably deserves its own posting as this one is already getting way too long, and there is a lot to discuss. I’ll try to be brief. Basically if you have a box full of family photographs, or a stack of albums, you should consider putting all the photographs into archival binders. It is unlikely that 50 year old photo albums are made of archival materials and your photographs are literally being eaten by these old albums. Unfortunately, when it comes to prints, it’s not usually as a simple as just placing the photographs into sheets. There is usually a process of removing the photographs from their old albums. Even those ‘magnetic’ albums which were supposed to be easy to remove photographs from can over time permanently attach themselves to the photographs. As mentioned early, it was common in the old days to glue photographs into albums. It’s not so easy to remove a photograph from a glued-in album. There are various techniques for doing this, and it depends largely on the specific type of album and glue being used. As such, I won’t go into detail on this topic, but I will say that if you have any doubt about your ability to remove a photo from an album, you should consider it very carefully, and in either case scan the photograph first. In my case, I usually remove those that are easy to remove, scan those that are difficult to remove, try to remove the difficult ones, but if I think I may damage them I just leave them in the old albums and am content to have the scan. After I finish I scan the photographs I removed from the old albums and put them in archival storage. Old photographs came in different sizes than we are used to today, usually smaller than out current standard print sizes, and usually square instead of rectangular. Print preserver pages tend to come in the standard sizes available today, not in sizes from 50 years ago. As such, I try to find sheets that have slots the same size or slightly larger than the prints I am preserving. As the sizes can vary greatly among the prints I’m preserving, this means buying a variety of different sizes. Since the prints are smaller than the pockets they are being put into, and you want to be able to use both sides of the sheet, I buy non-acidic paper inserts to go into each pocket of the plastic pages. Thus, even if a picture on one side is very small, you will have a nice white background behind it, instead of seeing through to the print on the other side. This also helps isolate the prints on either side of the paper from each other. Make sure the paper is non-acidic. Basically buy it from an archival provider. Archival Methods sells inserts for all their print pages. Needless to say, if there is any glue or other adhesive on the prints you find, you should try your best to remove it as the fumes from the glue can damage your photographs over time. So you buy the plastic print preservers with matching paper inserts (i.e. if you buy a package of 25 sheets of 4×6 print pages, which hold 3 4×6 prints each, you need 75 paper inserts). Insert the paper inserts into the pages, and then put in the prints. With very small prints where you can fit more than one into a sleeve you can do this, but be aware that the print can move around and overlap which could be problematic. I would try to stick to one print per side of each sleeve as best you can, which is why I suggest buying a variety of sizes of print preservers. Labeling the prints is important, but obviously do not write on the prints themselves! You can buy archival labels and affix them to the plastic sheets with information on the prints underneath them, or you can number the print preserver sheet and write up the print descriptions separately. After you scan them you can even create index sheets with thumbnails of each photo with their description of each photo next to them, but if you’re going to put that paper inside the binders, remember to use acid-free lignon-free paper. Like I mentioned earlier, I like to put my photographs in binder boxes, which most of the archival companies sell. Binder boxes are basically boxes with a the rings of a three-ring binder inside. The boxes must also be archival (and pass the PAT test) but if you source them from a reputable archival provider, that shouldn’t be a problem. These boxes tend to be very sturdy and protect your photographs from being banged around. As they are closed, they also prevent photographs from falling out of the sheets since there is no place for them to go. They are also stackable, which is sometimes very helpful when finding where to put your precious photographs. Once all your slides, negatives and prints are in their pages and the pages in their binders, now all you need is to find a safe place to put them. Make sure it doesn’t get too hot, there isn’t a lot of humidity, and there are no chemical fumes. Basements and attics are thus not usually the best place to keep photographs. I suspect this is my longest posting so far. Maybe too long. Hope it was helpful to someone.

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Vol.5 No.7(2013), Article ID:35002,7 pages DOI:10.4236/health.2013.57151 Nutraceuticals in Hypercholesterolemic children Department of Health and Pediatric Science, University of Turin, Turin, Italy; *Corresponding Author: email@example.com Copyright © 2013 Paola Cagliero et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Received 16 May 2013; revised 17 June 2013; accepted 30 June 2013 Keywords: Hypercholesterolemia; Child; Dietary Supplement; Fiber; Phytosterols; Red Yeast Rice; Probiotics Hypercholesterolemia is associated with the atherosclerotic process and cardiovascular disease from childhood, thus introducing the need of an early prevention. The dietary approach is the treatment cornerstone but sometimes is unsuccessful to reach the lipoprotein optimal target. Furthermore, drugs like statins have limited use in childhood as their administration is limited to high risk children. The effects of nutraceuticals are known in adults and considered useful in children to overcome this therapy gap. In the present paper a review of pediatric experiences from fiber, phytosterols and RYR handing out is considered. The atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the first cause of death in western countries. It has a multifactorial genesis and it is caused by different risk factors, changeable (dyslipidemia, hypertension, diabetes, smocking, obesity, physical inactivity) or not (age, male sex, genetic predisposition). Atherosclerotic process is proved to start since childhood, so it is important to discover precociously children affected by dyslipidemia and to start a follow up as well as therapeutic plan . Dietary modification is the cornerstone of the management of these affected children. The Expert Panel on Blood Cholesterol Levels in Children and Adolescents recommends a dietary intervention in two steps, the Child-1 and the Child-2 diets . The Child-1 diet calls for an intake of total fat and of saturated fat less than 30% and 10% of total calories respectively, and of dietary cholesterol <300 mg per day. If cholesterol reduction is not reached after a minimum of 3 months on this dietary approach, the child continues with the Child-2 diet (reduction of saturated fat <7% and of dietary cholesterol <200 mg per day) . This dietary intervention has been proven to be safe and effective in decreasing total cholesterol (TC) and Low-Density Lipoprotein-Cholesterol (LDL-C) but, even with good compliance, the dietary modification gives a not satisfying reduction of cholesterol concentrations . Lipid-lowering drugs have been tolerated in short and medium terms, but long terms effects are still questionable. As this reason drug delivery is limited to high risk children. To overcome limits related to insufficient dietary approach and drug restriction, nutraceuticals can be considered. Nutraceutical is a food or a part of it, with beneficial effects on human system, which improves our health and well-being and prevents or treats a disease . This group includes many active principles and paediatrics experiences, including up to now fiber, phytosterol and RYR. 2.1. Definition and Recommended Doses A generally accepted definition of fiber does not exist and the most common is based on its action in the gastrointestinal tract: “the remains of cell wall that resists to the hydrolysis by human digestive enzymes”. The dietary fiber is an extremely complex mixture of different polysaccharides (cellulose, pectins, mucilages, galactomannans, β glucans). These components are divided in soluble and insoluble and both are present in most of vegetable foods (cereals, fruits) . The recommended doses are not well-defined, but it is generally accepted that fiber is important for a healthy diet. The American Health Foundation suggests an intake of 5 - 10 g/die added to the children age for children older than 2 years old and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Committee on Nutrition recommends an intake of 0.5 g/kg body weight for children older than 2 y, gradually increased to reach the adult recommendation (25 - 35 g/d) during adolescence . 2.2. Functions and Mechanisms of Action Dietary fiber is a relevant dietary component, with several health benefits in both adults and children. It promotes gastrointestinal function and helps to reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases by decreasing serum TC and LDL-C concentrations: in particular, various studies proved that a Child-1 diet associated with 0.5 g/day of glucomannan reduces TC and LDL-C to 10% [8-10], and 6 gr of psyllium reduce TC of 16% - 18% and LDL-C of 22% - 24% [11-13]. Generally dietary fiber intake has no effect on High-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol (HDL-C) or triglyceride (Tg) concentrations, but lowers serum insulin concentrations and reduces the risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes. There are a lot of mechanisms of actions: fiber binds bile acid or cholesterol to form the mixed micelles, increasing their excretion with faeces; by this way there is an improvement of LDL-C receptor expression so resulting in a LDL-C increased clearance. It seems also that fiber inhibits the hepatic synthesis of fatty acids as well as it increases the intestinal motility and improves the satiety [14,15]. 2.3. Collateral Effects Increasing the consumption of fiber can arise some unpleasant collateral effects (gas formation, abdominal discomfort, diarrhea, nausea) caused by the bacterial fiber fermentation. Therefore fiber intake should be increased gradually and should be accompanied by liquids, so that the gut can adapt to the change. These collateral effects should disappear after 24 - 48 hours . Furthermore, some data suggest that a diet rich in fiber could cause an inadequate statural growth and nutritional status. This observation was confirmed only in children who consumed a vegan or macrobiotic diet . The results of clinical trials are represented in Table 1. These trials show how the use of glucomannan and psyllium influences the lipid profile. Results are very different in both situation, ranging from −5% [8,16] to −18% [9,13] for the TC and from −6.8% to −24% for the LDL-C. These variations could be related to study design differences including the subjects diagnosis and age variability, limited number of patients, different fiber dosages and treatment period. Generally with the administration of 0.5 g of glucomannan once a day for 9 weeks , until a maximum of 24 weeks of treatment twice a day , we can observe a significant reduction of TC and LDL-C levels. Comparing TC and LDL-C levels in these studies, similar results are obtained with a Table 1. The effects of fiber supplementation on lipid profile in dyslipidemic children. long period treatment, maybe due to the reaching of a balance of the metabolism. With the psyllium administration results are conflicting, since a dose of 12 g/day for 20 weeks gave no variations , while a dose of 6.4 g/day for 26 weeks gave a small, but significant reduction both of TC and LDL-C . In these studies there are controversial results about the atherogenic factor Apolipoprotein B (ApoB): in fact in some trials it does not change or it is not measured, and in others it is decreased [3,15]. 3.1. Definition and Recommended Doses They are plant sterols structurally similar to cholesterol, the main difference being the presence of ethilic and methilic groups in the lateral chain. They are principally found in nuts, fruits, seeds and their oils. Phytosterols exist mainly in a free (sterol) and esterified (stanol) form: when incorporated as functional food ingredient, they are frequently esterified with a fatty acid ester to increase their solubility in the food matrix. They are available in different forms: added to cereals, margarines, milk and yoghurt. Foods enriched with fatty acid esters of plant sterols or stanols are well known for their cholesterol lowering effect. The latter is not transient, as shown in a study with a daily assumption of 2 g plant sterols or stanols into a healthy diet low in saturated fatty acids . 3.2. Functions and Action Mechanisms A daily assumption of 1.5 - 2.5 g of phytosterols/ stanols, possibly at the main meal, reduces TC levels of 5% - 11% [19,20] and LDL-C levels until 9% - 17% [20- 24], without modifying HDL-C and VLDL-C concentrations. Phytosterols are incorporated in mixed micelles, then cross the intestinal brush border membrane, and are internalized in the enterocytes by Niemann-Pick C1-Like 1 Receptor (NPC1L1). Here most of them are immediately expelled by the ATP-Binding Cassette subfamily G member 5 and 8 (ABCG 5 and 8), and only 5% of them enters chylomicrons and reaches the liver. The hypolipidemic effects are releated to competition with cholesterol to form mixed micelles; production of insoluble complexes with cholesterol in the gut thus eliminated with faeces; competition for protein NPC1L1 and promotion of cholesterol elimination by ABCG5 e ABCG8 . 3.3. Collateral Effects Phytosterols are safe, except for a condition: this is ascribable to patients affected by sitosterolaemia. The latter disease is characterized by high phytosterol levels, thus additional delivery resulting proatherogenic as they display premature and severe CVD. Previously it was postulated, from population-based studies, that plant sterols could promote CVD, but findings from 17 studies involving 11182 subjects did not yield any evidence of this association . For these reasons plant sterols can be considered safe, well-tollerated and effective also in pediatrics; the unique demonstrated collateral effect is a modest reduction of the absorption of beta-carotene, which does not influence the final level of vitamin A . Table 2 shows the results of the clinical trials. There are less differences in the reduction of TC and LDL-C levels, ranging from −5% to 11% for TC and from 9% to 17% for LDL-C. With the administration of stanol/sterol enriched yoghurt [27-29] or only with plant sterols [19-24], we observe a reduction of TC and LDL-C levels, sometimes accompanied with an increasing of HDL-C concentrations and a reduction of ApoB levels . Dairy foods phytosteol added show the best results in improving lipid profile. Comparing these data with those regarding the fiber, we can appreciate a minor variability in the age range of the patients and in the doses of sterols or stanols administrated. 4. RED YEAST RICE (MONACOLIN K) 4.1. Definition and Recommended Doses Fermented red rice is produced traditionally by fermenting washed and cooked rice with red wine mash, that gives it the common red-violet colour. Instead, the commercially prepared red yeast rice (RYR) extract is fermented during 9 days with a specific strain of red yeast (Monascus purpureus Went) at a temperature of 25˚C, and at a pH range of 5 to 6. The rice is then airdried, pulverised and encapsulated into gel capsules . Major components found in RYR extract are nine types of active compounds known as monacolins, showing the same composition of lovostatin, a widely used statin. This active component is equivalent to around 5 mg in a 1.2 g dose of RYR . 4.2. Functions and Mechanisms of Action It Is diffusely admitted that RYR has hypolipidemic effects: many studies about dyslipidemic adults reveal a reduction of TC, LDL-C and Tryglicerides [31-34]; controversial are the effects on HDL-C . The unique trial, as far as we know, applied to children shows how a Table 2. Lipid profile changes after phytosterols therapy in affected children. daily treatment with 200 mg of RYR added to 10 mg of policosanols as long as 8 weeks gives a reduction of TC of 18.5%, of LDL-C of 25.1% and ApoB of 25.3% . It was recently established that RYR has hypolipidemic proprieties because it contains monacolin K, which has similar effects and mechanisms of action of lovastatin: it acts by inhibiting the hydroxymetylglutarylCoA reductase (HMG-CoA reductase), the enzyme present in the hepatic cells that regulates the synthesis of cholesterol. Other mechanisms may involve the prevention of dietary cholesterol absorption and enhanced cholesterol clearance from circulation. It should be underlined that the hypolipidemic RYR effect cannot be accounted only to the HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors, as other components could be involved in lowering lipid profile. Besides plant sterols (h-sitosterol, campesterol, stigmasterol, saponin and sapogenin), isoflavones, selenium and zinc are suggested to act together. Finally the amount of HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors present in a dose of 2.4 g of RYR have similar hypolipidemic effects as lovastatin 10 - 40 mg dose . 4.3. Collateral Effects Red yeast rice seems to be safe when compared with statins. The incidence of adverse side effects is fairly low and long-standing record whose efficacy and safety have been shown over time is available. In addition, there are no reported food or drug interactions, and it appears that it does not interact with renal and liver function. Anyway it should be taken into account the possibility of liver or muscle enzyme increase and the occurrence of rabdomyolisis was reported . Other symptoms including allergy, heart burn, abdominal discomfort, flatulence and dizziness have been noticed. Limitations to explain the final efficacy, and possible limitations of RYR, concern the effects of other bioactive components, their functions and the consideration if effective enough to market as a drug. This latter consideration is important as it questions the purity and standardization of the product. It is unclear in almost all the reviewed studies whether the same fermentation process was used consistently, and why a specific strain of Monascus purpureus Went was chosen to produce red yeast rice. Perhaps other types of Monascus would yield products with different hypolipidemic abilities . In addition, since there is not a standarddisation of the needed dose of the active component, it is possible to obtain different efficacy and toxicity. Monacolin K is chemically a statin so it is necessary when administrated to respect all carefulnesses and indications requested these drugs . A diet enriched with RYR has determined, in adults, an improvement of lipid profile demonstrating a significant reduction of TC, Tg, LDL [31-34], Apo B and an HDL-C increase . On this basis a cross-over, randomized trial, with a brand characterized by RYR and policosanol, was performed in hypercholesterolemic children, including FH (n = 24) and FCHL (n = 16) patients. Results were positive for efficacy showing a TCLDL-C and Apo-B percentage reduction corresponding to 18.5%, 25.1% and 25.3% respectively. Further the nutraceutical resulted well tolerated and no adverse events or symptoms were reported . 5.1. Definition and Recommended Doses They are defined by the WHO as “live micro-organisms which, when administered in adequate amounts, confer a health benefit on the host” and are being examined for their efficacy in preventing or treating a host of diseases. Probiotic strains belong mostly to the genera Lacto-bacillus and Bifidobacterium . 5.2. Functions and Mechanisms of Action Certain probiotic bacterial strains, besides preventing metabolic syndrome, reducing the duration of acute diarrhea and the risk of nosocomial diarrhea and rotavirus gastroenteritis, preventing sepsis and severe acute pancreatitis, they reduce lipid levels in hyperlipidemic patients . Studies show that a daily assumption of probiotic reduces TC and LDL-C [39-41]. The yoghurt enriched with bile-salt hydrolase (BSH) producing probiotic strains (Lactobacillus acidofilus, L. casei, L. reuteri, Bifidobacterium longum) causes a reduction of TC, LDL-C, nonHDL-C and Apo B100 serum levels [42,43]. There are a number of mechanisms of action potentially involved in lowering cholesterol, and involve the intestine lumen, the liver and other organs. BSH is an enzyme only present in bacteria and is responsible for increasing bile acid deconjugation by hydrolysis of the amide bond, in the gut lumen. This mechanism increases levels of circulating deconjugated bile salts and decreases cholesterol absorption by enterocytes, due to a reduced capacity to form mixed micelles. These modifications may influence the farnesoid X receptor (FXR), a bile acid nuclear receptor that, through many steps, leads to the upregulation of ABCG5/G8 resulting in a decreased absorption and increased excretion of cholesterol. Finally BSH activity inhibits NPC1L1 so acting with a similar effect of plant sterols . 5.3. Collateral Effects Collateral effects of probiotics are not yet well-defined, since trials are still in progress. This does not mean that collateral effects are irrelevant or missing, but that does not exist specific sperimental results about it. Among possible collateral effects, there are intolerance or allergy to metals and minerals present in the pharmaceutical. Not serious, but widespread, are the gastrointestinal symptoms: abdominal spasms, meteorism, flatulence and diarrhea . For these reasons specific bacterial strains should be identified and used in probiotic preparation. Healthy [39,41] and dyslipidemic [40,42,43] adults took advantage from probiotic-enriched yoghurt. Results from double blind, randomized, placebo-controlled studies demonstrate a TC and LDL-C levels decrease ranging between 4.4% - 9.1% and 5.4% - 11.6% respectively. These reductions were considered statistically significant. As for children preliminary results from a controlled study conducted on primary affected hypercolesterolemic children confirmed data from adults (P. Cagliero, unpublished data). All these studies show that, when the dietary intervention alone is not sufficient to reach acceptable lipid levels (<90˚ percentile), nutraceutics could be considered for their efficacy and safety in paediatrics. In particular, fiber is also proved to be useful in dyslipidemic children: satisfying results need to be obtained, simply increasing its intake with food, in daily diet. When this result could not be reached by this way some benefits come from added fiber. A more significant reduction of lipoprotein levels is obtained by phytosterol administration, mainly added to dairy products. This dietary supplement resulted efficacy and safe also safe in children. Scientific studies provided enough evidences to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) that established the claim availability of phytosterols as supplementary food with hypocholesterolemic properties . Regarding RYR effects, their effectiveness are abundantly confirmed in adults, while poor in children. However, it does not surprise the hypolipidemic action as ascribed to monacolin K that, acting as a statin, employs a pharmaceutical-like effect. New directions for the near future could be represented by probiotics, which preliminary efficacy has been proven in adults while clinical trials in children are still in progress. - Landmesser, U., Hornig, B. and Drexler, H. (2004) Endothelial function: A critical determinant in atherosclerosis? Circulation, 109, 27-33. doi:10.1161/01.CIR.0000129501.88485.1f - (2011) Expert panel on integrated guidelines for cardiovascular health and risk reduction in children and adolescents: Summary report. Pediatrics, 128, 213-256. doi:10.1542/peds.2009-2107C - Sanchez-Bayle, M., Gonzalez-Requejo, A., Asensio-Anton, J., Ruiz-Jarabo, C., Fernandez-Ruiz, M.L. and Baeza, J. (2001) The effect of fiber supplementation on lipid profile in children with hypercholesterolemia. Clinical Pediatrics, 40, 291-294. doi:10.1177/000992280104000511 - Katan, M.B., Grundy, S.M., Jones, P., Law, M., Miettinen, T. and Paoletti, R. (2003) Efficacy and safety of plant stanols and sterols in the management of blood cholesterol levels. Mayo Clinic Proceeding, 78, 965-978. - Subcommittee on the Tenth Edition of the Recommended Dietary Allowances, Food and Nutrition Board, Commission on Life Sciences, National Research Council (1989) Recommended dietary allowances. 10th Edition, Washington DC, 39-43. - Williams, C.L., Bollella, M. and Wynder, E.L. (1995) A new recommendation for dietary fiber in childhood. Pediatrics, 96, 985-988. - American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on Nutrition (1993) Carbohydrate and dietary fiber. In: Barness, L., Ed., Pediatric Nutrition Handbook, 3rd Edition, American Academy of Pediatrics, Elk Grove, 100-106. - Guardamagna, O., Abello, F. and Visioli, F. (2013) Could dyslipidemic children benefit from glucomannan intake? 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(1995) Sitostanol ester margarine in dietary treatment of children with familial hypercholesterolemia. Journal of lipid researche, 36, 1807-1812. - Tammi, A., Rönnemaa, T., Miettinen, T.A., Gylling, H., Rask-Nissilä, L., Viikari, J., Tuominen, J., Marniemi, J. and Simell, O. (2002) Effect of gender, ApoE phenotype and cholesterol-lowering by plant stanol esters in children: The STRIP study. Acta Paediatrica, 91, 1155-1162. doi:10.1111/j.1651-2227.2002.tb00121.x - Garaiova, I., Muchová, J., Nagyová, Z., Mišľanová, C., Oravec, S., Dukát, A., Wang, D., Plummer, S.F. and Ďuračková, Z. (2013) Effect of a plant sterol, fish oil and B vitamin combination in cardiovascular risk factors in hypercholesterolemic children and adolescent: A pilot study. Nutrition Journal, 8, 12-17. - Amundsen, A.L., Ntanios, F., Put, N. and Ose, L. (2004) Long term compliance and changes in plasma lipids, plant sterols and carotenoids in children and parents with familial hypercholesterolemia consuming plant sterol ester enriched spread. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 58, 1612-1620. doi:10.1038/sj.ejcn.1602015 - De Jongh, S., Vissers, M.N., Rol, P., Bakker, H.D., Kastelein, J.J. and Stroes, E.S. (2003) Plant sterols lower LDL-C without improving endothelial function in prepuberal children with familial hypercholesterolemia. Journal of Inherit Metabolic Disease, 26, 343-351. doi:10.1023/A:1025155002348 - Becker, M., Staab, D. and Von Bergmann, K. (1993) Treatment of severe familial hypercholesterolemia in childhood with sitostenol and sitostanol. Journal of Pediatrics, 122, 292-296. doi:10.1016/S0022-3476(06)80136-8 - Genser, B., Silbernagel, G., De Backer, G., Bruckert, E., Carmena, R., Chapman, M.J., Deanfield, J., Descamps, O.S., Rietzschel, E.R., Dias, K.C. and März, W. 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Current Therapeutic Research, 58, 964-978. - Heber, D., Yip, I., Ashley, J.M., Elashoff, D.A., Elashoff, R.M. and Go, V.L. (1999) Cholesterol-lowering effects of a proprietary Chinese red-yeast-rice dietary supplement. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 69, 231-236. - Lin, C.C., Li, T.C. and Lai, M.M. (2005) Efficacy and safety of Monascus purpureus went rice in subjects with hyperlipidemia. European Journal of Endocrinology, 153, 679-686. doi:10.1530/eje.1.02012 - Guardamagna, O., Abello, F., Baracco, V., Stasiowska, B. and Martino, F. (2011) The treatment of hypercholesterolemic children: Efficacy and safety of a combination of red yeast rice extract and policosanols. Nutrition, Metabolism & Cardiovascular Diseases, 21, 424-429. doi:10.1016/j.numecd.2009.10.015 - Smith, D.J. and Olive, K.E. (2003) Chinese red rice-induced myopathy. Southern Medical Journal, 96, 1265- 1267. doi:10.1097/01.SMJ.0000100117.79718.DC - Yang, C.W. and Mousa, S.A. (2012) The effect of red yeast rice (Monascus purpureus) in dyslipidemia and other disorders. Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 20, 466-474. doi:10.1016/j.ctim.2012.07.004 - Jones, M.L., Tomaro-Duchesneau, C., Martoni, C.J. and Prakash, S. (2013) Cholesterol lowering with bile salt hydrolase-active probiotic bacteria, mechanism of action, clinical evidence, and future direction for heart health applications. Expert Opinion of Biological Therapy, 13, 631-642. doi:10.1517/14712598.2013.758706 - Schaafsma, G., Meuling, W.J., Van Dokkum, W. and Bouley, C. (1998) Effects of a milk product, fermented by Lactobacillus acidophilus and with fructo-oligosaccharides added, on blood lipids in male volunteers. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 52, 436-440. doi:10.1038/sj.ejcn.1600583 - Bertolami, M.C., Faludi, A.A. and Batlouni, M. (1999) Evaluation of the effects of a new fermented milk product (Gaio) on primary hypercholesterolemia. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 53, 97-101. doi:10.1038/sj.ejcn.1600683 - Agerbaek, M., Gerdes, L.U. and Richelsen, B. (1995) Hypocholesterolaemic effect of a new fermented milk product in healthy middle-aged men. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 49, 346-352. - Jones, M.L., Martoni, C.J., Parent, M. and Prakash, S. (2011) Cholesterol-lowering efficacy of a microencapsulated bile salt hydrolase-active Lactobacillus reuteri NCIMB 30242 yoghurt formulation in hypercholesterolaemic adults. British Journal of Nutrition, 107, 1505- 1513. doi:10.1017/S0007114511004703 - Jones, M.L., Martoni, C.J. and Prakash, S. (2012) Cholesterol lowering and inhibition of sterol absorption by Lactobacillus reuteri NCIMB 30242: A randomized controlled trial. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 66, 1234-1241. doi:10.1038/ejcn.2012.126 - Ooi, L.G., Ahmad, R., Yuen, K.H. and Liong, M.T. (2011) Lactobacillus acidophilus CHO-220 and inulin reduced plasma total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol via alteration of lipid transporters. Journal of Dairy Science, 93, 5048-5058. doi:10.3168/jds.2010-3311 - (2008) Scientific opinion of the panel on dietetic products nutrition and allergies on a request from unilever PLC/ NV on plant Sterols and lower/reduced blood cholesterol, reduced the risk of (coronary) heart disease. The EFSA Journal, 781, 1-12.

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Many people today are interested in exercise as a way of improving their health and physical abilities. But there is also concern that too much exercise, or exercise that is not appropriate for certain individuals, may actually do more harm than good. Exercise has many short-term (acute) and long-term effects that the body must be capable of handling for the exercise to be beneficial. Some of the major acute effects of exercising are shown in Figure 1. When we exercise, our heart rate, systolic blood pressure, and cardiac output (the amount of blood pumped per heart beat) all increase. Blood flow to the heart, the muscles, and the skin increase. The body's metabolism becomes more active, producing CO2 and H+ in the muscles. We breathe faster and deeper to supply the oxygen required by this increased metabolism. Eventually, with strenuous exercise, our body's metabolism exceeds the oxygen supply and begins to use alternate biochemical processes that do not require oxygen. These processes generate lactic acid, which enters the blood stream. As we develop a long-term habit of exercise, our cardiac output and lung capacity increase, even when we are at rest, so that we can exercise longer and harder than before. Over time, the amount of muscle in the body increases, and fat is burned as its energy is needed to help fuel the body's increased metabolism. This figure highlights some of the major acute (short-term) effects on the body during exercise. In previous tutorials ("Hemoglobin and the Heme Group: Metal Complexes in the Blood for Oxygen Transport", "Iron Use and Storage in the Body: Ferritin and Molecular Representations", "Maintaining the Body's Chemistry: Dialysis in the Kidneys") you learned about the daily maintenance required in the blood for normal everyday activities such as eating, sleeping, and studying. Now, we turn our attention to the chemical and physiological concepts that explain how the body copes with the stress of exercise. As we shall see, many of the same processes that work to maintain the blood's chemistry under normal conditions are involved in blood-chemistry maintenance during exercise, as well. During exercise, the muscles use up oxygen as they convert chemical energy in glucose to mechanical energy. This O2 comes from hemoglobin in the blood. CO2 and H+ are produced during the breakdown of glucose, and are removed from the muscle via the blood. The production and removal of CO2 and H+, together with the use and transport of O2, cause chemical changes in the blood. These chemical changes, unless offset by other physiological functions, cause the pH of the blood to drop. If the pH of the body gets too low (below 7.4), a condition known as acidosis results. This can be very serious, because many of the chemical reactions that occur in the body, especially those involving proteins, are pH-dependent. Ideally, the pH of the blood should be maintained at 7.4. If the pH drops below 6.8 or rises above 7.8, death may occur. Fortunately, we have buffers in the blood to protect against large changes in pH. All cells in the body continually exchange chemicals (e.g.,nutrients, waste products, and ions) with the external fluid surrounding them (Figure 2). This external fluid, in turn, exchanges chemicals with the blood being pumped throughout the body. A dominant mode of exchange between these fluids (cellular fluid, external fluid, and blood) is diffusion through membrane channels, due to a concentration gradient associated with the contents of the fluids. (Recall your experience with concentration gradients in the "Membranes, Proteins, and Dialysis" experiment.) Hence, the chemical composition of the blood (and therefore of the external fluid) is extremely important for the cell. If, for instance, the pH of the blood and external fluid is too low (too many H+ ions), then an excess of H+ ions will enter the cell. As mentioned above, maintaining the proper pH is critical for the chemical reactions that occur in the body. In order to maintain the proper chemical composition inside the cells, the chemical composition of the fluids outside the cells must be kept relatively constant. This constancy is known in biology as homeostasis. This is a schematic diagram showing the flow of species across membranes between the cells, the extracellular fluid, and the blood in the capillaries. The body has a wide array of mechanisms to maintain homeostasis in the blood and extracellular fluid. The most important way that the pH of the blood is kept relatively constant is by buffers dissolved in the blood. Other organs help enhance the homeostatic function of the buffers. The kidneys help remove excess chemicals from the blood, as discussed in the Kidney Dialysis tutorial. It is the kidneys that ultimately remove (from the body) H+ ions and other components of the pH buffers that build up in excess. Acidosis that results from failure of the kidneys to perform this excretory function is known as metabolic acidosis. However, excretion by the kidneys is a relatively slow process, and may take too long to prevent acute acidosis resulting from a sudden decrease in pH (e.g., during exercise). The lungs provide a faster way to help control the pH of the blood. The increased-breathing response to exercise helps to counteract the pH-lowering effects of exercise by removing CO2, a component of the principal pH buffer in the blood. Acidosis that results from failure of the lungs to eliminate CO2 as fast as it is produced is known as respiratory acidosis. The kidneys and the lungs work together to help maintain a blood pH of 7.4 by affecting the components of the buffers in the blood. Therefore, to understand how these organs help control the pH of the blood, we must first discuss how buffers work in solution. Acid-base buffers confer resistance to a change in the pH of a solution when hydrogen ions (protons) or hydroxide ions are added or removed. An acid-base buffer typically consists of a weak acid, and its conjugate base (salt) (see Equations 2-4 in the blue box, below). Buffers work because the concentrations of the weak acid and its salt are large compared to the amount of protons or hydroxide ions added or removed. When protons are added to the solution from an external source, some of the base component of the buffer is converted to the weak-acid component (thus using up most of the protons added); when hydroxide ions are added to the solution (or, equivalently, protons are removed from the solution; see Equations 8-9 in the blue box, below), protons are dissociated from some of the weak-acid molecules of the buffer, converting them to the base of the buffer (and thus replenishing most of the protons removed). However, the change in acid and base concentrations is small relative to the amounts of these species present in solution. Hence, the ratio of acid to base changes only slightly. Thus, the effect on the pH of the solution is small, within certain limitations on the amount of H+ or OH- added or removed. By far the most important buffer for maintaining acid-base balance in the blood is the carbonic-acid-bicarbonate buffer. The simultaneous equilibrium reactions of interest are We are interested in the change in the pH of the blood; therefore, we want an expression for the concentration of H+ in terms of an equilibrium constant (see blue box, below) and the concentrations of the other species in the reaction (HCO3-, H2CO3, and CO2). Recap of Fundamental Acid-Base Concepts An acid is a chemical species that can donate a proton (H+), and a base is a species that can accept (gain) a proton, according to the common Brønstead-Lowry definition. (A subset of the Brønstead-Lowry definition for aqueous solutions is the Arrhenius definition, which defines an acid as a proton producer and a base as a hydroxide (OH-) producer.) Hence, the conjugate base of an acid is the species formed after the acid loses a proton; the base can then gain another proton to return to the acid. In solution, these two species (the acid and its conjugate base) exist in equilibrium. Recall from this and earlier experiments in Chem 151 and 152 the definition of pH: where [H+] is the molar concentration of protons in aqueous solution. When an acid is placed in water, free protons are generated according to the general reaction shown in Equation 3. Note: HA and A- are generic symbols for an acid and its deprotonated form, the conjugate base. Equation 3 is useful because it clearly shows that HA is a Brønstead-Lowry acid (giving up a proton to become A-) and water acts as a base (accepting the proton released by HA). However, the nomenclature H3O+ is somewhat misleading, because the proton is actually solvated by many water molecules. Hence, the equilibrium is often written as Equation 4, where H2O is the base: The Law of Mass Action and Equilibrium Constants Using the Law of Mass Action, which says that for a balanced chemical equation of the type in which A, B, C, and D are chemical species and a, b, c, and d are their stoichiometric coefficients, a constant quantity, known as the equilibrium constant (K), can be found from the expression: where the brackets indicate the concentrations of species A, B, C, and D at equilibrium. Equilibrium Constant for an Acid-Base Reaction Using the Law of Mass Action, we can also define an equilibrium constant for the acid dissociation equilibrium reaction in Equation 4. This equilibrium constant, known as Ka, is defined by Equation 7: Equilibrium Constant for the Dissociation of Water One of the simplest applications of the Law of Mass Action is the dissociation of water into H+ and OH- (Equation 8). The equilibrium constant for this dissociation reaction, known as Kw, is given by (H2O is not included in the equilibrium-constant expression because it is a pure liquid.) Hence, we can see that increasing the OH- concentration of an aqueous solution has the effect of decreasing the H+ concentration, because the product of these two concentrations must remain constant at a given temperature. Thus, in water, the equilibrium in Equation 8 underlies the equivalency of the To more clearly show the two equilibrium reactions in the carbonic-acid-bicarbonate buffer, Equation 1 is rewritten to show the direct involvement of water: The equilibrium on the left is an acid-base reaction that is written in the reverse format from Equation 3. Carbonic acid (H2CO3) is the acid and water is the base. The conjugate base for H2CO3 is HCO3- (bicarbonate ion). (Note: To view the three-dimensional structure of HCO3-, consult the Table of Common Ions in the Periodic Properties tutorial from Chem 151.) Carbonic acid also dissociates rapidly to produce water and carbon dioxide, as shown in the equilibrium on the right of Equation 10. This second process is not an acid-base reaction, but it is important to the blood's buffering capacity, as we can see from Equation 11, below. The derivation for this equation is shown in the yellow box, below. Notice that Equation 11 is in a similar form to the Henderson-Hasselbach equation presented in the introduction to the Experiment (Equation 16 in the lab manual). Equation 11 does not meet the strict definition of a Henderson-Hasselbach equation, because this equation takes into account a non-acid-base reaction (i.e., the dissociation of carbonic acid to carbon dioxide and water), and the ratio in parentheses is not the concentration ratio of the acid to the conjugate base. However, the relationship shown in Equation 11 is frequently referred to as the Henderson-Hasselbach equation for the buffer in physiological applications. In Equation 11, pK is equal to the negative log of the equilibrium constant, K, for the buffer (Equation 12). where K=Ka/K2 (from Equation 10). This quantity provides an indication of the degree to which HCO3- reacts with H+ (or with H3O+ as written in Equation 10) to form H2CO3, and subsequently to form CO2 and H2O. In the case of the carbonic-acid-bicarbonate buffer, pK=6.1 at normal body temperature. Derivation of the pH Equation for the Carbonic-Acid-Bicarbonate Buffer We may begin by defining the equilibrium constant, K1, for the left-hand reaction in Equation 10, using the Law of Mass Action: Ka (see Equation 9, above) is the equilibrium constant for the acid-base reaction that is the reverse of the left-hand reaction in Equation 10. It follows that the formula for Ka is The equilibrium constant, K2, for the right-hand reaction in Equation 10 is also defined by the Law of Mass Action: Because the two equilibrium reactions in Equation 10 occur simultaneously, Equations 14 and 15 can be treated as two simultaneous equations. Solving for the equilibrium concentration of carbonic acid gives Rearranging Equation 16 allows us to solve for the equilibrium proton concentration in terms of the two equilibrium constants and the concentrations of the other species: Because we are interested in the pH of the blood, we take the negative log of both sides of Equation 17: Recalling the definitions of pH and pK (Equations 2 and 12, above), Equation 18 can be rewritten using more conventional notation, to give the relation shown in Equation 11, which is reproduced below: As shown in Equation 11, the pH of the buffered solution (i.e., the blood) is dependent only on the ratio of the amount of CO2 present in the blood to the amount of HCO3- (bicarbonate ion) present in the blood (at a given temperature, so that pK remains constant). This ratio remains relatively constant, because the concentrations of both buffer components (HCO3- and CO2) are very large, compared to the amount of H+ added to the blood during normal activities and moderate exercise. When H+ is added to the blood as a result of metabolic processes, the amount of HCO3- (relative to the amount of CO2) decreases; however, the amount of the change is tiny compared to the amount of HCO3- present in the blood. This optimal buffering occurs when the pH is within approximately 1 pH unit from the pK value for the buffering system, i.e., when the pH is between 5.1 and 7.1. However, the normal blood pH of 7.4 is outside the optimal buffering range; therefore, the addition of protons to the blood due to strenuous exercise may be too great for the buffer alone to effectively control the pH of the blood. When this happens, other organs must help control the amounts of CO2 and HCO3- in the blood. The lungs remove excess CO2 from the blood (helping to raise the pH via shifts in the equilibria in Equation 10), and the kidneys remove excess HCO3- from the body (helping to lower the pH). The lungs' removal of CO2 from the blood is somewhat impeded during exercise when the heart rate is very rapid; the blood is pumped through the capillaries very quickly, and so there is little time in the lungs for carbon dioxide to be exchanged for oxygen. The ways in which these three organs help to control the blood pH through the bicarbonate buffer system are highlighted in Figure 3, below. This figure shows the major organs that help control the blood concentrations of CO2 and HCO3-, and thus help control the pH of the blood. Removing CO2 from the blood helps increase Why is the buffering capacity of the carbonic-acid-bicarbonate buffer highest when the pH is close to the pK value, but lower at normal blood pH? The answer to this question lies in the shape of the titration curve for the buffer, which is shown in Figure 4, below. It is possible to plot a titration curve for this buffer system, just as you did for your solution in the acid-base-equilibria experiment. In this plot, the vertical axis shows the pH of the buffered solution (in this case, the blood). The horizontal axis shows the composition of the buffer: on the left-hand side of the plot, most of the buffer is in the form of carbonic acid or carbon dioxide, and on the right-hand side of the plot, most of the buffer is in the form of bicarbonate ion. Note that as acid is added, the pH decreases and the buffer shifts toward greater H2CO3 and CO2 concentration. Conversely, as base is added, the pH increases and the buffer shifts toward greater HCO3- concentration (Equation 10). This is the titration curve for the carbonic-acid-bicarbonate buffer. Note that the pH of the blood (7.4) lies outside the region of greatest buffering capacity (green). Note: The percent buffer in the form of HCO3- is given by the formula: The slope of the curve is flattest where the pH is equal to the pK value (6.1) for the buffer. Here, the buffering capacity is greatest because a shift in the relative concentrations of bicarbonate and carbon dioxide produces only a small change in the pH of the solution. However, at pH values higher than 7.1, the slope of the curve is much higher. Here, a shift in the relative concentrations of bicarbonate and carbon dioxide produces a large change in the pH of the solution. Hence, at the physiological blood pH of 7.4, other organs must help to control the amounts of HCO3- and CO2 in the blood to keep the pH relatively constant, as described above. Other buffers perform a more minor role than the carbonic-acid-bicarbonate buffer in regulating the pH of the blood. The phosphate buffer consists of phosphoric acid (H3PO4) in equilibrium with dihydrogen phosphate ion (H2PO4-) and H+. The pK for the phosphate buffer is 6.8, which allows this buffer to function within its optimal buffering range at physiological pH. The phosphate buffer only plays a minor role in the blood, however, because H3PO4 and H2PO4- are found in very low concentration in the blood. Hemoglobin also acts as a pH buffer in the blood. Recall from the "Hemoglobin" tutorial from Chem 151 that hemoglobin protein can reversibly bind either H+ (to the protein) or O2 (to the Fe of the heme group), but that when one of these substances is bound, the other is released (as explained by the Bohr effect). During exercise, hemoglobin helps to control the pH of the blood by binding some of the excess protons that are generated in the muscles. At the same time, molecular oxygen is released for use by the muscles. The above discussion treats changes in pH quantitatively. These changes in pH can be described qualitatively, also. A qualitative view is very useful for predicting how the pH will change in response to external conditions (such as exercise). The principle used for this qualitative view is known as Le Châtelier's Principle. When a reactant or product of an equilibrium reaction is added to a solution that is at equilibrium, the added species will react to change the concentrations of the reactants and products in the solution until a new equilibrium is established (but the ratio of the concentrations given in the mass action expression (Equation 6) is the same, because the equilibrium constant, K, is a constant at a given temperature). This process is known as a shift in the equilibrium. In 1884, Henri Le Châtelier developed a rule to predict how a system in equilibrium will shift when the conditions of the system are changed. Although this rule can oversimplify the changes that occur in certain situations, it is a powerful and useful tool for predicting the direction of an equilibrium shift. Le Châtelier's Principle states that "if a change in conditions ([an external] 'stress') is imposed on a system at equilibrium, the equilibrium position will shift in a direction that tends to reduce that change in conditions" (Zumdahl, 208). For example, if the concentration of one of the products of an equilibrium reaction is increased in a solution that was at equilibrium (prior to the concentration increase), the equilibrium will shift so as to reduce the concentration of the product, i.e.,more reactant will be generated. Of course, the reverse equilibrium shift would occur when the concentration of a product is decreased. The effect of a temperature change can also be predicted by Le Châtelier's Principle. (In the case of a change in temperature, the equilibrium constant actually changes.) If a reaction is exothermic, "heat" is treated as a "product" (e.g., A + B -> C + D + "heat"). If a reaction is endothermic, "heat" is treated as a "reactant" (e.g., "heat" + A + B -> C + D). Increasing the temperature can be thought of as increasing the amount of "heat" in the reaction. Examples of external stresses and the equilibrium shifts predicted by Le Châtelier's Principle are shown in the purple table below. Predicted Equilibrium Shift |Change in pressure||Affects gases only.| |Concentration of reactant(s) increased||Equilibrium shifts toward products (to the right).| |Concentration of product(s) increased||Equilibrium shifts toward reactants (to the left).| |Equilibrium shifts toward reactants (to the left).| |Equilibrium shifts toward products (to the right).| Le Châtelier's Principle can be used to explain how the kidneys help prevent excessively high pH (a condition known as alkalosis). When the pH of the blood is too high, the kidneys remove bicarbonate ion (HCO3-) from the blood. As the kidneys decrease the blood's concentration of HCO3-, the equilibrium reaction in Equation 10 is shifted toward the left to compensate for the loss in HCO3-, according to Le Châtelier's Principle. When the equilibrium shifts to the left, more H+ ions are generated together with HCO3- ions. As a result, the pH decreases. Questions on Equilibrium Shifts: A Qualitative View When you exercise, many of the processes that we have discussed in this and in previous tutorials work together to determine how the pH of the blood will change (Figure 5). This diagram shows the diffusion directions for H+, CO2, and O2 between the blood and the muscle cells during exercise. The resulting concentration changes affect the buffer equilibria, shown in the upper right-hand corner of the diagram (yellow). The following steps outline the processes that affect the buffers in the blood during exercise. Hence, the body has developed finely-tuned chemical processes (based on buffering and acid-base equilibria) that work in combination to handle the changes that exercise produces. Brown, Lemay, and Bursten. Chemistry: the Central Science, 7th ed. p. 631. Vander, A. et al. Human Physiology, 6th ed. WCB McGraw-Hill, Boston, 1994, p. 463-466, 492-3, 552-6. Zumdahl. Chem. Principles, 4th ed.p. 192-5, 208-214. The authors thank Dewey Holten, Michelle Gilbertson, Jody Proctor and Carolyn Herman for many helpful suggestions in the writing of this tutorial. The development of this tutorial was supported by a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, through the Undergraduate Biological Sciences Education program, Grant HHMI# 71195-502005 to Washington University. This page was updated 9/5/08

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"We pirates set sail for new shores into a world of adventures. Breaking out of structured obedience, preset orders and moral unities. We plunge into unpredictability, danger, excitement, dance, song and everything that strong, free, cheerful action implies. A pirate has developed her own kind of pirate life, determined by herself and no other." Cheng I Sao Nemesis destroying junks in Ansons Bay in 1841. The Nemesis was a steam-driven paddleship owned by the East India Company and took part in the Royal Navy's antipiracy operations. The superior firepower of the steamships and their ability to outmaneuver the sailing junks enabled the British commanders to wreak havoc when they cornered the pirate fleets along the South China Sea coast. One of the master pirates of all time, Cheng I created a powerful confederation controlling the sea lanes from Hong Kong to the Vietnamese border. Born into a family practicing piracy for many generations, Cheng fought with rebel forces in Vietnam. When he returned to China in 1801, he made himself leader of the pirates in the Kwang-tung Province. Cheng's confederation set up permanent bases at coastal villages and on uninhabited islands. The pirates' organized squadrons devastated trading boats and fishing craft and easily captured large ocean-going junks. They plundered villages, markets, and government forts, seizing cannon and gunpowder. By 1806, virtually every Chinese vessel passing the coast paid protection money. Although Cheng's corsairs avoided large European vessels, they captured foreign sailors and held them for Cheng died at the height of his success in 1807. One story relates that he was blown overboard and drowned in a gale. In another version, he was killed while fighting to recapture Vietnam for his former allies. His wife, Cheng I Sao, succeeded him as commander of the Red Flag Fleet and leader of the pirate confederation. Examples of Chinese ransom or extortion notes from the nineteenth century. The Chinese pirates were highly organized and even bureaucratic, keeping records and drawing up contracts. Once the victim paid after receiving threats, the pirates issued protection documents. Merchants were an obvious target, but so were coastal villages that were often threatened with dire retribution if they failed to pay. Mrs. Cheng (Cheng I Sao) in action, the famous woman pirate chief who took command of the federation on the South China Sea coast in 1807. She led a community of fifty thousand pirates. This fanciful depiction is from the History of the Pirates of all Nations published in 1836. Power passed uncontested to the hands of Cheng's wife, Cheng I Sao. She had participated fully in her husband's piracy, and she had created relationships that would legitimatize her status and allow her to exercise authority. what ultimately secured her position at the top of the pirate hierarchy was the need of a new leader to replace her husband as the commander of the most powerful Red Flag Fleet. For this she needed a loyal man she could trust one who would have a great deal of authority in the operation of the entire fleet, and in giving orders to the other pirate leaders. one person could fill this position the young captive Chang Pao. Chang Pao was a fisherman's son who had joined the pirates at age of fifteen, after being captured by Cheng I. Ultimately, Cheng I adopted Chang Pao as a son. In 1807, when Mrs. Cheng needed a lieutenant, the twenty-one-year-old Chang Pao was a natural choice. Since he had come into the confederation as an outsider, he had developed no prior loyalties to other leaders, but had shown qualities of leadership. Mrs. Cheng and Chang Pao furthered their alliance with a relationship of their own. Within weeks they two became lovers, and later they married. Chang Pao was a flamboyant young rogue, and often dressed in a purple silk robe and black turban. When Mrs. Cheng became leader, she issued a code of laws that added even more power to the pirate confederation. The code was short and severe. Anyone caught giving commands on his own or disobeying those of a superior was to be decapitated. It was a capital offense to pilfer from the common treasury or steal from the villagers who regularly supplied the pirates. Desertion or absence without leave resulted in a man's ear being cut off and his being paraded through his squadron. Raping female captives was also a capital offense, and if there was fornication by mutual consent, the pirate was to be beheaded and the female captive cast overboard with a weight on her legs. Westerners often saw pirates who had violated the code flogged, put in irons, or quartered. According to one Western captive, the pirates' code was strictly enforced and violators punished with an efficiency that seemed Mrs. Cheng created the financial and military structures that were indispensable for the pirates' survival. In contrast to the petty pirates who were entirely dependent on the chance seizure of vessels at sea, the confederation was a business with sophisticated financial operations. These professionals could overpower even large oceangoing junks by force, and operated freely in the inshore waters of South China. Mrs. Cheng also led the forces in attacks on shore, plundering villages, markets, rice fields, and small forts. The pirate confederation was so strong that for years it held power over the Chinese military along the coast. They had so reduced the defense ships of Canton as well as the government forces that the navy had to bolster its ranks by the temporary hiring of private fishing vessels. At one point, they forced five American schooners to run for safety within gunshot range of Macao. They also captured a brig belonging to a Portuguese governor, and blockaded the mouth of the Pearl River against a tribute mission from Siam. The pirates' actions forced the Chinese government to play their last card alliances with foreigners. Finally, the East India Company equipped a ship with twenty cannons and fifty American volunteers, and set sail. At the same time, the Portuguese agreed to lease out six men-o'war to sail with the Cantonese navy for six months. On November 19, 1809, the pirates, harbored in a bay, awoke to find themselves surrounded. The barrage lasted several hours. Thereafter, combined government and Purtuguese forces maintained a blockade meant to spell the end of the pirates. Westerners as well as the Chinese had been unable to destroy the confederation. For all their boasts about being able to overthrow the state, the pirates did not come close. In the end, they were unable to win over any significant number of the governing elite, whose support was necessary to establish Chinese political power. The pirate leaders of the Six Flags had such strong leaders that for over a decade they outperformed the state's ability to control the local economy. When its leaders retired, the confederation folded. Mrs. Cheng commanded an immense fleet said to include between 1,500 and 1,800 ships and 80,000 pirates. Little is known about her retirement or demise. Women Pirates & Warriors| A series by Tiramisu Cheng I Sao ©8/27/99 Pictures for Cheng scanned by Tira Web page by Cytheria| *All rights reserved* 'Twas a proud and stately castle in the years of long ago When the dauntless Grace O'Malley ruled a queen in fair Mayo. And from Bernham's lofty summit to the waves of Galway Bay And from Castlebar to Ballintra her unconquered flag held sway. c1798, sung in Leitrim by Mayo survivors of the Ballinamuck Battle between Franco-Irish and English forces Book cover image from O'Brien Press for Granuaile by Catherine Sweeney and Mary Moriarty Although a surprising number of women have gone to sea on merchant ships or joined the navy disguised as men, very few women became pirates. Grace OMalley was one of the most famous of the female pirates, and her history is well-documented. Grace was born during a violent time in Ireland, about 1530. The Gaelic way of life was one of turmoil and strife. Cattle raids and bloody battles among neighboring clans were common. The brehon system of law was still honored, and lords were entertained at magnificent feasts by bards and poets. King Henry VIII of England began his infamous Surrender and Re-Grant policy over the chaotic Ireland, which meant that Irish noblemen who submitted to English rule would be given English titles and could lawfully hold their lands. This didnt sit well with the proud Celts, and many rebelled against Henrys high-handed Clew Bay area, cropped from larger map of Ireland in U.of Texas Library. The OMalleys had castles at Belclare and on Clare Island. Graces father was a local chieftain, a descendant of an ancient Irish family which for centuries had ruled the area around Clew Bay. The family owned galleons and three-masted caravels, and traded regularly with Scotland and Spain. Grace wanted desperately to go to sea with her father, but family discouraged her. She cut off her hair and dressed as a boy, then joined a crew sailing for Spain. Her family did not punish her when she returned, but were greatly amused an gave her the nickname of Grainne Mhaol, meaning Bald Grace. This was later shortened to Granuaile. Granuailes family had become wealthy mainly through fishing and trade. Later in her life, she took up piracy by taking on Turkish and Spanish pirate ships and even the English fleets. Her estate grew to include a fleet of ships as well as several islands and castles on the west coast of Ireland. Another Granuaile-related castle is Ballynahinch (Baile na h-Inse - the dwelling on the island). Nestling in the shadow of Benlettery Mountain, this castle is where she married the warlike Donal O'Flaherty in 1546. The castle is now near the site of the Ballynahinch Castle Hotel. She spent her young life learning the ways of the sea. While still a child, she joined her father on trading missions overseas. Her father had instructed her to go below decks if they were ever attacked. But once, when they were returning from Spain, they were attacked by an English ship. Granuaile climbed up onto the sail rigging. Watching the battle from above, she saw an English pirate sneaking up behind her father, ready to stab him in the back. Granuaile screamed, leaping off the rigging onto the pirates back. This distracted the pirates enough for her fathers crew to regain control of the ship and defeat At 16, Granuaile married Donal OFlaherty, and moved to her husbands castle at Bunowen, about thirty miles south along the coast. They commanded the OFlaherty fleet of ships. After nineteen years of marriage her husband died. He had a reputation as a hot head and his temper cost him his life in a battle against a rival clan. Granuaile returned to her fathers domain and took command of the OMalley fleet. By now, she had built a reputation as a bold and fearless sea She later married Richard Burke, another local chieftain, and moved to Rockfleet Castle in County Mayo. This became the base for her seafaring operations and was her home for the remaining thirty-seven years of her Rockfleet Castle, (Carraig-an-Cabhlaigh), also known as Carrickahowley Castle, stands at the mouth of a small inlet on the northern shores of Clew Bay by Westport. Granuaile inhabited the castle in the latter part of the 16th century. Legend has it that Granuaile traveled to the Castle Rockfleet, knocked on the door and proposed marriage to Richard for a period of one year. She explained that the marriage would enable both clans to withstand the impending invasion by the English, who were slowly taking over the Irish lands around them. After one year, Granuaile said to Richard, I release you, apparently offering him the option to end the marriage. He must have fallen hard for her, because they remained married until he died seventeen years later. Granuaile had a total of four children. She had three by Donal, two boys and one girl. Their sons were Owen and Murrough and daughter Margaret. Later, when Granuaile married Richard, they had a son, Tibbot (or Theobald of the Ships). One story is that she gave birth to one of her sons while out to sea. The next day, the ship was attacked by Turkish pirates. Though exhausted from giving birth, she grabbed a gun, went on deck, and fought viciously with her men against the Turks, forcing their retreat. Her sea activities became so scandalous that on March 8, 1575, an Englishman, Captain William Martin, led a force of ships and troops against her. He laid siege to Rockfleet Castle, and after eighteen days during which Granuaile turned her defense into a devastating attack Martin beat a hasty retreat. At 44, Granuaile was one of the most infamous women in Ireland. Another story is that when she was over 60, late one night on a return from a trading mission from Spain, her ship was attacked by Turkish pirates. Granuaile grabbed her gun and raged on deck in her nightgown, her scarred face vivid and gray hair flying. The Turkish thought she was a fiend and retreated in fear! Granuaile remained rebellious against the English for a long time, eventually she, to, was forced to submit even if it was only lip service. In 1577, she went to meet Sir Henry Sidney in Galway. Here is a portion of what he wrote about that meeting: "There came to me a most famous feminine sea captain called Grany Imallye and offered her services unto me, wheresoever I would command her, with three galleys and 200 fighting men, either in Scotland or Ireland....This was a notorious woman in all the coasts of Ireland." On her return from England, Granuaile stopped to stock up on supplies in Howth, the main port of Dublin at that time. According to the Gaelic custom, she went directly to the castle's lord, Christopher St. Lawrence, to ask for hospitality. She found the gates of the castle locked and the servants would not let her in; they said the lord was at dinner and could not be disturbed. Furious, Granuaile seized the heir of Howth on her way back to her ship and took him to Connacht. St. Lawrence traveled to Connacht personally to seek the return of his son, intending to bargain for any ransom. Granuaile scorned the offer of ransom and instead demanded of the lord that the gates of Howth never be closed to anyone asking hospitality, and that an extra place should always be set at the table. This practice in Howth continues to this day. Granuaile's contempt for cowardice is also legendary. A tale is told of once when she was fighting the Stauntons of Kinturk Castle. In the midst of battle, her son Theobald faltered in fear and hid himself behind his mother. Granuaile's response was sharp and to the point: "Is it trying to hide behind my backside you are... the place you came from?" Humiliated, Theobald stood his ground and the Stauntons were eventually forced to surrender. Despite her technical submission to the English, Granuaile was captured in 1577 while raiding the Earl of Desmond. Lord Justice Drury said of her: "Grany O'Mayle, a woman that hath impudently passed the part of womanhood and been a great spoiler, and chief commander and director of thieves and murderers at sea to spoille this province, having been apprehended by the Earl of Desmond this last year, his Lordship hath now sent her to Lymrick where she remains in safe keeping." Later, Granuaile was transferred to the dungeons of Dublin Castle to await execution but managed to use shrewd political bargaining to gain her release. Giving her promise of good behavior, Granuaile returned to Connacht. In 1583, her husband Richard died of natural causes, leaving Granuaile in a position of great political power among the tribes. The next year, Sir Richard Bingham took over as Governor of Connacht. He was a ruthless man, determined to eradicate Gaelic customs and the whole Celtic way of life. He intended to use force to replace the Gaelic tradition with English customs. One of his main goals was to end Granuailes career once and for all. He captured Granuaile and members of her clan in 1586. The prisoners were to be executed, so he ordered a gallows to be built. Granuaile was determined to die with dignity. But at the last minute, her son-in-law, known as Devils Hook, offered himself as a hostage in exchange for Granuailes freedom. Bingham extracted a promise from Granuaile that she would never return to her rebellious ways and set her free. He also confiscated 1,000 cattle and horses and much of her fortune, forcing her into poverty. Bingham also plotted the murder of Granuailes son, Owen, and had eighteen of Owens followers hanged without trial. Owen was murdered, stabbed twelve times by an unknown assassin, but Granuaile suspected the death was at Binghams orders. The governors cruelty inspired her to continue her rebellion against the English for the next several Her son Murrough OFlaherty sided with Bingham against Granuaile at one point. Infuriated, she sailed to Murroughs town of Ballyhenchy, burned it to the ground, stole his cattle and killed the few people who resisted. Granuaile did not take personal betrayal lightly. By the 1590's, Granuaile was penniless due to Binghams constant controlling efforts. A large rebellion against the English was brewing, and Bingham feared that Granuaile would aid the rebels. He wrote in a letter that she was, a notable traitoress and nurse to all rebellions in the province for 40 years. Granuaile decided to try a more political approach. She wrote to Queen Elizabeth I, asking for justice in a clever bid to avoid the restrictions imposed by Bingham. Elizabeth responded by sending 18 Articles of Interrogatory, a list of questions to be answered by Granuaile. Before she could respond, Bingham arrested her son, Theobald, and her brother, Donal-na-Piopa, and imprisoned them. was the final straw. Granuaile set sail for London in late July of 1593, managing to avoid patrol boats and sought a personal audience with the Queen. Exactly why Elizabeth agreed to this meeting is not known, for she must have known of the Irishwomans reputation. The meeting took place in Greenwich Castle. There is no formal record of this meeting between these two queens the most powerful woman in England and an Irish pirate. However, Granuaile impressed Elizabeth, for she ordered Bingham to release his prisoners and return her rightful inheritances. In exchange for Elizabeths help, Granuaile swore to use her strength and leadership to defend the Queen against her enemies, both on land and sea. An interesting story about Granuailes meeting with Elizabeth is that Granuaile sneezed in the presence of the Queen, her lords and ladies. A member of the court politely handed Granuaile an expensive lace handkerchief and the Irishwoman blew her nose loudly then tossed the delicate cloth into a blazing fireplace. The court was aghast that Granuaile would be so rude, and Elizabeth scolded her, saying the handkerchief was meant as a gift and should have been put into her pocket. Granuaile responded that the Irish would never put a soiled garment into their pocket and added that they had a higher standard of cleanliness than the English. Silence descended, during which the members of court confidently expected that Elizabeth would have the rude Irishwoman executed. However, Queen Elizabeth was amused, and laughed heartily. Bingham released Theobald and Donal but managed to avoid obeying the remainder of the Queen's instructions through inaction. He complained in a letter to Lord Burghley, "I have enlarged Grany O'Malley, her son Tibbot and brother Donell na Pipee, upon such slender sureties as they gave us, the woman urging it some importunely swering that she would elles repair presently to England." Although Granuaile went to sea to continue the Queen's "quarrel with the world," Bingham was determined that she not return to her old ways. Contrary to the laws of the Composition, he forced Granuaile to billet an oppressive number of soldiers and ordered one of his own captains accompanied by an appropriate number of armed men to go with her on all sea voyages. The hardships that Bingham imposed on Granuaile finally forced her to flee Munster and stay with Thomas, Earl of Ormand and an old friend. Eventually, she returned to Rockfleet. Her lands were overrun in late 1598, and in 1600 the clans Neill and ODonnel captured Connacht and almost all of Munster. Granuaile is said to have died in Rockfleet Castle around 1603. She may have lived just long enough to learn of the defeat of her one-time friends, ONeill and ODonnel, at the battle of Kinsale. After refusing to surrender to hardships, trials and tribulations that had plagued her throughout her life, Granuaile at last gave up to the peace of death. She was seventy Granuaile OMalley, the Pirate Queen of Connacht wife, mother, politician, pirate. During her long career, Granuaile played many roles, took many risks and gambles, diced with Fate and won. Her life story is one of triumph and tragedy, pain and perseverence, and ultimately, the willingness to endure. That sunburnt brow did fearless thoughts reveal and in her girdle was a skeyne her crimson mantle a gold brooch did bind her flowing garments reached unto her heel Her hair part fell in tresses unconfined and part, a silver bodkin did fasten up behind. Partial text of a song from the Elizabethan period that speaks about Granuaile's appearance at Elizabeth's court. Women Pirates & Warriors| A series by Tiramisu Granuaile-Grace O'Malley ©9/13/99 Web page by Cytheria| *All rights reserved*

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High School Course Descriptions - Hermeneutics and Spiritual Formation Bible I (1st semester) – The first half of this course will examine the basic structure of the Bible, with a strong emphasis on biblical hermeneutics. Students will have the ability to interpret different passages based upon authorship, date, historical context, literary context, and textual context. Students will understand foundational Bible study skills, including map skills, biblical languages, how-to-use commentaries and concordances, etc. The second half will provide students with a guide to spiritual formation. They will learn to pray biblically, study the Bible devotionally, fast with a purpose, evangelism, worship, service, silence, stewardship, journaling, and learning. - Attributes of God and World Missions/Evangelism Bible I (2nd semester) – The first half of this course will analyze the numerous attributes of God, according to the biblical scriptures. Students will study these attributes of God: holiness, righteousness, immutability, supremacy, grace, mercy, wrath, contemplation, foreknowledge, etc. In order to progress to more spiritual depth and rigor, students must first understand the nature of God, the Supreme Being. The second half of the course will focus on missions. Students will understand the importance for global missions by seeing the spiritual desolation found within un-reached people groups. This will also include studying in depth the biblical call to missions and evangelism. Students will study heroes of the faith from the past who gave up all for the Gospel of Jesus. Students will be provided with resources for accomplishing the Great Commission. - Old Testament Survey I Bible II (1st semester) – In this course, students will study the general background of the Old Testament, including dates and geography. Students will study the Pentateuch (Genesis – Deuteronomy) and the History of Israel (Joshua – Esther). The content will mainly focus on authorship, date, theme, motifs, and notable expositions of key passages found within each book of study. Students will also have a basic understanding of noteworthy debates among biblical scholars over issues like the authorship of the Pentateuch, young or old Earth creationism, global or local flood, etc. Students will understand those debates because they will undoubtedly experience them on the collegiate level. - Old Testament Survey II Bible II (2nd semester) – This course will continue the expository study of the Protestant Old Testament from the 1st semester of Bible II. Students will examine the Wisdom Literature (Job – Song of Solomon) and the Prophets (Isaiah – Malachi). Students will be able to identify different types of Psalms (thanksgiving, lament, community/individual, etc.) and gain spiritual nourishment from the Psalms. Students will study in the Prophets major themes, prophecies about Jesus, biblical characters, etc. Students will be able to see, in history, for the “setting of the stage” for the birth of the Messiah. - The Life of Jesus & the Early Church Bible III (1st semester) – The Life of Jesus is an extensive study of the four Gospels. Attention is given to the unique contributions of each Gospel writer and the Sermon on the Mount. The life of the early church and specifically the life of Paul are studied from the Acts of the Apostles. - The New Testament Letters Bible III (2nd semester) – All of the New Testament letters are studied in their historical context with emphasis given to practical application. - Apologetics & Comparative Religions Historically, Philosophy of Religion has explored answers to three primary questions: - Is there a God? - If there is, what characterizes this God? Or what is God like? - What is the meaning of life? This course will consider the major responses to these questions from various perspectives of monotheism, polytheism, pantheism, deism, atheism, and agnosticism. - Developing a Christian Worldview Worldviews are compared: naturalism, nihilism, existentialism, eastern monism, and postmodernism will be considered. Reading: The Universe Next Door; A Basic Worldview Catalog by James Sire Major world religions addressed include: Hinduism, Buddism, Confucianism, and Islam (Sunni, Shiite, & Wahhabism). Other smaller religious groups include Taoism, Shintoism, Judaism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, and indigenous tribal practices. - Computer Keyboarding Basics Computer Keyboarding Basics is an introductory course designed for beginning students and those who desire to learn keyboarding for personal use. An introduction to the computer, computer keyboard skills, proofreading skills, and creation of business and letter formats are taught. After the students show proficiency in keyboarding skills and accuracy in timed writings, the proofreading skills and formatting skills will be introduced. (Prerequisite: None) - Computer Software Applications Computer Software Applications is a course that provides students with computer skills that will make them marketable in the workplace and successful in utilizing their computer ability as a useful, valuable tool in furthering their education. The course teaches students computer software and applications software: Microsoft Office XP, which includes Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet, and Microsoft Access Database Manager. The students will interact with a variety of software packages working on activities, projects, and labs that will help prepare them for their futures. (Prerequisite: Demonstrated Keyboarding Proficiency) - English as a Second Language – ESL ESL provides instruction in the four communication skills; reading, writing, listening and speaking for non-native speakers of English whose proficiency is below what is needed for successful performance in a regular academic classroom. The three block courses cover topics such as Basic English grammar, vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, conversation and pronunciation, academic writing, and reading strategies. Language acquisition is related to the total community life of the academy, and interaction with native English speakers in daily life or on a school sponsored sport or academic team is strongly encouraged. Entry and exit levels for these classes are determined by a standardized assessment tool provided from the curriculum, NorthStar, by Longman publishing. - English I Class Description: English I is an introductory course in literature that integrates reading, writing, grammar, speaking, and study skills. There will be reading both in and out of class, writing exercises, grammar reviews, vocabulary study, prepared and informal discussions. By the end of the year, students should be able to read grade level literature independently, recognize themes in units and individual works, use context clues to learn new vocabulary, write narratives and essays that are grammatically correct and well formulated, and speak with confidence in various situations. - English I Honors Class Description: The goal of this class will be to maintain a pace that will stimulate and challenge high-performing English students and will prepare them for success on college entrance exams. There will be extensive independent reading out of class as well as various major papers. By the end of the year, students should be able to interpret above grade level literature literally and symbolically, use context clues and inductive reasoning to learn challenging vocabulary, demonstrate creativity and originality in a variety of writing projects, and speak with confidence and persuasive ability in prepared narrations and informal discussions. - English II English II is designed to reinforce the literary knowledge gained in English I and apply it to extended literary studies. This class will continue the transition from teacher-directed to independent work. Students will read independently but will be evaluated frequently to reinforce good time management. Students will also experiment with writing styles of all genres. In addition, students are led in basic interpretive discussion and studying Christian decision-making in today’s world. The literature is supplemented by a variety of writing assignments. In order to learn the necessary content of this course, students will participate in outside reading, journals, discussions, and research projects. Students should leave English II with the tools for thoughtful literary criticism and clarity in written communication. (Prerequisite: English I or English I Honors) - English II Honors As in English I Honors, the goal of this class will be to maintain a pace that will stimulate and challenge high-performing English students and will prepare these students for success on college entrance exams. There will be extensive reading out of class. Writing will be taught in a workshop format and students will submit to both peer and teacher review. Each student will take an active role in reading from the text, reporting on supporting data to supplement the text, and engaging in critical evaluation and discussion. Grading will reflect initiative, critical thinking and creativity in written and verbal communication rather than the ability to memorize data for quizzes or worksheets. By the end of the year, students should be able to demonstrate verbally and in writing a basic overview of the history of British literature, read orally a variety of literature, including different forms of poetry, with clarity and expression, engage in literary analysis verbally and in writing, demonstrate excellence in all stages of the writing process, and speak with confidence and persuasive ability in defending an intellectual position while simultaneously respecting opposing points of view. (Prerequisite: English I Honors or permission of the instructor) - English III English III surveys American Literature from the early works of the American Indians to the beginning of Modernism in the 20th century. Students will study America’s earliest historical documents in an effort to understand the relationship between history and literature. Students will complete a major research project in the first semester and a major creative writing piece in the second, in addition to short essays throughout the year. Writing assignments will emphasize clarity and thesis formation to prepare the class for English IV and college-level papers. Vocabulary, spelling, and grammar will be assessed through weekly vocabulary tests and grammar homework. - English III Honors/Advanced English English III Honors, like English III, focuses on American Literature, but will reach further toward the present and cover a few works outside of the canon of American work. The focus is on reading, with regular homework and reading quizzes to maintain the pace necessary to cover several books. Students will complete a major research project in the first semester and a major creative writing piece in the second, in addition to short essays throughout the year. Writing assignments will emphasize clarity and thesis formation to prepare the class for English IV and college-level papers. Vocabulary, spelling, and grammar will be assessed through weekly vocabulary tests and grammar homework. - English IV English IV is a college preparatory course designed to emulate both a [college] freshman-level composition section, as well as a specific genre-study class. Through this course, students will demonstrate knowledge of significant works of British literature from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present and make relevant comparisons. Along with these sections, students will participate in a variety of standardized test-taking preparations, vocabulary development exercises, and grammar lessons. Students will use literary selections as the basis for Christian decision-making discussions. The course requires the completion of two lengthy projects: the Senior Thesis, a lengthy work of analytical research, and the Senior Experience. In line with The King’s Academy’s initiative to encourage its students to further explore their own lives and the communities around them, the Senior Experience will be used to supplement the students’ classroom knowledge with a wide range of experiences which seek to move the learner from a passive absorber of knowledge to a scholar who explores his faith and knowledge proactively. The purpose of this course is to understand God’s purpose for art and its place in history, in society today and in the student’s life; and to develop skills through the study of the elements and principles of design that will enable a student to create works of art that express his or her thoughts, feelings, and experiences. (Prerequisite: None; open to all high school grade levels.) - Advanced Art I, II, III The purpose of this course is to intensify the development of technical skills and understanding of art criticism to enable the students to assess their art and others’ based on an understanding of the organizational components and expressive qualities of the art work; and to develop a portfolio they will continue to add to as they mature in their work. (Prerequisite: Art) Students will study and perform music of a diverse repertoire of vocal/choral music. Through varying levels of study, the student will be instructed in proper vocal technique, musicianship, theory and the cultural and historical context of choral literature. Music is a creation of God for the expression of human emotion as well as the communication of spiritual truths through “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, and making melody in your heart to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:19). For this reason, part of the purpose of the choir will be to aid in the worship of God through several performances at churches, community groups, and school. (Prerequisite: Audition; open to all high school grade levels) Students will study and perform music of a diverse repertoire of instrumental music. Through varying levels of study, the student will be instructed in theory, musicianship, proper technique, and cultural and historical content. Students have opportunities to perform at churches, community groups, and school. (Prerequisite: Audition; open to all high school grade levels) - Chinese I This course is an introduction to the Chinese language and culture. Students will start with the Pinyin system and acquire oral language skills through a variety of activities. This course will focus on oral proficiency and students will learn to recognize, read and write at least 150 basic simplified Chinese characters in context. At the end of the school year, students will reach ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Beginning- Mid Level of oral proficiency, which is equivalent to HSK Level 1, (Chinese Proficiency Test) and will acquire the basic communication skills: asking and answering questions, describing likes and dislikes; making short presentations in Chinese and engaging in short reading and writing activities. These skills will be employed within the topics such as family, friends, leisure activities, home and school. Chinese movies, songs and videos will be integrated into the course for the purpose of bringing students insights of Chinese family and school life. - Chinese II This course is a continuation of Chinese I, focusing on building students’ command of oral communicative structures in more sophisticated contexts. In class, we will work on building oral fluency and their confidence in communicating with Chinese speakers. We will aim at conducting the class mostly in Chinese in second semester. Reading and grammar skills will be developed through reading. Students are expected to become more proficient in both handwritten as well as word-processed Chinese writing. Students will be able to recognize at least 300 basic Chinese characters, and reach the ACTFL beginning-high oral proficiency level (which is equivalent to HSK level 2) at the end of the course. - Greek II Year two of this course continues the student’s study of Greek vocabulary, grammar, and translation. The format of Greek II is very similar to the first year, with weekly memory verses, daily lessons, and integrated reviews. At this level, students will continue to grow in the knowledge of the Greek language as they learn how to use two more noun cases, two verb conjugations, and various prepositions and pronouns. The work is slightly more challenging than in Greek I. By the end of the year student will know about half of the word occurrences in the New Testament. - Spanish I (two-semester course) An introduction to the language and culture of the Spanish-speaking community. Emphasis is on listening and speaking skills, with the goal of incorporating basic grammar, verb structure, and survival vocabulary into actual communicative situations. Students should complete the course with an appreciation of the linguistic and cultural commonalities shared by Spanish and English, and an enhanced awareness of the growing opportunities for cultural exchange in their immediate environments. (Prerequisite: None; open to all high school grade levels) - Spanish II (two-semester course) With an increased emphasis on reading and writing, the course continues to build on the listening and speaking skills acquired in Spanish I. Communicative functions include relating knowledge, expressing feelings, making requests, and asking and answering questions in the target language in a variety of tenses. Topics for study include aspects of Mexican culture and history, as well as translation and application of Spanish Scripture. Integrating new vocabulary into more spontaneous and personal forms of expression is a course goal. (Prerequisite: Spanish I) - Spanish III (Available as Dual-Enrollment) (two-semester course) Designed for students on a college-preparatory track seeking advanced placement, career advantages, and/or mission and relational opportunities. Topics in all four communication skills relate to culture, literature, current events, and personal experience. Content includes use of the subjunctive forms, idiomatic and figurative expressions, and an overview of the geography, culture, and history of Spain. Students are encouraged and given opportunities to develop their language skills with native speakers. (Prerequisites: Spanish I and Spanish II) - Spanish IV (Available as Dual-Enrollment) (two-semester course) Advanced language course for students working toward fluency. In-class activities focus on native-speaker listening practice and application of vocabulary to” round-table” discussions. Course requirements for the year include the reading of a Spanish novel and weekly cultural listening assignments. Students continue in-depth study of the subjunctive mood, idiomatic language, and theme-specific vocabulary. In the final unit, students examine Don Quijote, the great literary work of Spain. (Prerequisites: Spanish I, II, and III) - Algebra I This course is a preparatory class for the rest of the students’ high school mathematics career. Students who take Algebra I as a freshman will be on track to take Bridge Math, Statistics/Probability or Pre-Calculus their senior year. Algebra I places an emphasis on the systematic development of the language through which most of mathematics is communicated. This course provides the mathematical understanding to operate with concepts at an abstract level, and then apply them in a process that fosters generalizations and insights beyond the original content. Topics covered are properties of the number system, linear functions, inequalities, operations on real numbers and polynomials, exponents, radicals, and quadratics. Successful completion of this course prepares students for Algebra II their sophomore year. (Prerequisite: None) - Honors Algebra I This course is a preparatory class for the rest of the students’ high school mathematics classes and designed for students who wish to pursue careers in science, technology, or medicine. Students who take Honors Algebra I as a freshman and show great success will be recommended to take Honors Algebra II their sophomore year. Algebra I places an emphasis on the systematic development of the language through which most of mathematics is communicated. This course provides the mathematical understanding to operate with concepts at an abstract level, and then apply them in a process that fosters generalizations and insights beyond the original content. Topics covered are properties of the number system, linear functions, inequalities, operations on real numbers and polynomials, exponents, radicals, and quadratics. Topics found in standard algebra are covered with increased emphasis placed on problem solving, writing skills (especially in writing algebraic proofs), and algebraic applications. Students enrolled in this course have demonstrated a high degree of success and interest in mathematics. Because this is an honors course, it will include extended reading assignments as well as research writing based on content material. Projects will apply algebra to real-world situations. The pace of the course will be faster than College – Prep Algebra I. (Prerequisite: Pre-Algebra and/or teacher recommendation) - Algebra II This course helps the students think logically using deductive reasoning, inspiring them to organize their ideas in other courses by using simple facts and logic to achieve positive results, and it also includes an understanding of the wide range of applications in other fields like astronomy, engineering, geology, biochemistry, and others. (Prerequisite: Algebra I) - Honors Algebra II This course is a bridge between the concepts learned previously in the students’ Honors Algebra I class and more advanced mathematics such as Honors Geometry, Honors Pre-Calculus, and Calculus I and II. Students who take Honors Algebra II and show great success will be recommended to take Honors Geometry or the next appropriate honors math course during the next school year. Algebra II continues to place an emphasis on the systematic development of the language through which most of mathematics is communicated. This course also provides the mathematical understanding to operate with concepts at an abstract level, and then apply them in a process that fosters generalizations and insights beyond the original content with an emphasis on deductive reasoning skills to ready students for geometry. Topics covered are Linear Relations and Functions, Systems of Equations and Inequalities, Matrices, Polynomials, Quadratic Functions and Inequalities, Polynomial Functions, Conic Sections, Rational Expressions and Equations, Exponential and Logarithmic Relations, Sequences and Series, and Statistics. Topics found in regular algebra are covered with increased emphasis placed on problem solving, writing skills (especially in writing algebraic proofs), and algebraic applications. Students enrolled in this course have demonstrated a high degree of success and interest in mathematics. Because this is an honors course, it will include extended reading assignments as well as research projects based on content material and projects related to the real world. The pace of the course will be faster than College Prep Algebra II. (Prerequisite: Honors Algebra I and/or teacher recommendation) - Intermediate Algebra II/A This course is the first year of a two-year sequence, which will bridge the concepts learned previously in the students’ Algebra I class and higher-level mathematics such as Geometry, Bridge Math, and Statistics/ Probability. Students who take Intermediate Algebra II/A this year will complete the course next year in Intermediate Algebra II/B where they will receive their Algebra II course credit. In order to stay on track with the Tennessee State Standards, students enrolled in Intermediate Algebra II/A will also complete their geometry course in the same year. Algebra II continues to place an emphasis on the systematic development of the language through which most of mathematics is communicated. This course also provides the mathematical understanding to operate with concepts at an abstract level, and then apply them in a process that fosters generalizations and insights beyond the original content with an emphasis on deductive reasoning skills to ready students for geometry. Topics covered are: a review of Algebra I concepts to be successful in Algebra II, Solving equations and inequalities, Linear relations and functions, Solving Equations and Equalities, Linear Relations and Functions, Systems of Equations and Inequalities, Matrices, and Polynomials. (Prerequisite: Algebra I) - Intermediate Algebra II/B This course is the completion of the Algebra II course that the students began in Intermediate Algebra II/A. They will receive their Algebra II course credit after successful completion of this course. Algebra II/B continues to place an emphasis on the systematic development of the language through which most of mathematics is communicated. This course also provides the mathematical understanding to operate with concepts at an abstract level, and then apply them in a process that fosters generalizations and insights beyond the original content with an emphasis on deductive reasoning skills to ready students for Bridge Math or Statistics/Probability. Students will take one or both of these courses their senior year. Topics covered are Radical Expressions, Rational Exponents, Radical Equations and Inequalities, Complex Numbers, Quadratic Functions and Inequalities, Rational Expressions and Equations, and Exponential and Logarithmic Relations. (Prerequisite: Intermediate Algebra II/A) - Tennessee Bridge Math This course is a senior year high school math class for students who have successfully completed Algebra I, Algebra II, and Geometry. This course is designed to prepare students for a college algebra course. Tennessee Bridge Math places an emphasis on introducing concepts that the student has previously studied in a new approach. This class focuses on making connections between concepts and allows for a more in-depth understanding of the topics covered. Topics covered are: Essential Mathematics, Essential Algebra and Statistics, Geometry and Reasoning, Measurement; Linear Systems of Equations, Transformations, Quadratic Functions, Advanced Functions and Relations and Trigonometry. (Prerequisite: Algebra I, Algebra II, Geometry) This course helps the students think logically as they learn geometric principles. It also provides them with an understanding of the wide range of geometrical applications in other fields like astronomy, engineering, geology, biochemistry, and others. (Prerequisite: Algebra I) - Honors Geometry This course helps the students think logically as they learn geometric principles. It guides them in connecting various concepts in algebra and geometry with each other. It also provides them with an understanding of the wide range of geometrical applications in other fields like astronomy, engineering, geology, biochemistry, and others. This course provides students an opportunity for greater knowledge of the history of mathematics. (Prerequisite: Algebra I) - Honors Precalculus This course is designed for students planning to enroll in a college calculus course. It entails a study of elementary functions – polynomial, exponential, logarithmic, trigonometric, rational – their graphs, and applications. (Prerequisite: Algebra II, Geometry) - Honors Calculus I (Available as Dual-Enrollment) This course is a college preparatory course for students who anticipate pursuing a technical career such as science, engineering, computer science, architecture, mathematics, or medicine. Calculus is a course of higher mathematics that can be defined as a reformation of elementary mathematics using a limit process. It plays a great role in shaping our lives through wide applications in almost every aspect that has any technical necessity by the use of the maximum and minimum concepts in financing, space adventure, construction, science, medicine, statistics, and many others. (Prerequisite: Pre-Calculus with a minimum grade of B) Statistics is an advanced mathematics course that uses meaningful problems and appropriate technologies to use statistical concepts developed in previous courses to develop more advanced means of statistical analyses, interpretations, and predictions. (Prerequisite: Algebra II) - Physical Education: Weight-Training This course is designed for students who would like to know how weight training can help them achieve their goals and how to design a personal weight-training plan. The student begins by setting goals and designing a weight training plan specific to his own individual needs. During the year, the student follows the training plan, and learns new techniques & lifts. In addition, the student will learn about eating habits and the potential long-term effects. (Prerequisite: Wellness; designed for juniors and seniors) - Physical Education: Individual Fitness This course is designed for students who would like to live a healthy lifestyle. This Individual Fitness program will be tailored to specific needs and goals. The student will learn to shed fat, lose inches, and increase strength and stamina by exercising and making healthy choices. By the end of the course, he or she will have the knowledge to maintain that healthy lifestyle. (Prerequisite: Wellness; designed for juniors and seniors) This course is designed to develop personal health practices that are conducive to sound mental, social as well as physical health. To assist in the physical development of the student, the teaching of strength and conditioning activities and individual sports skills will be an integral part of the course. Christian perspectives are presented as they pertain to competition, egoism, coed participation, and athleticism. (Prerequisite: None; open to all high school grade levels) - Anatomy & Physiology Anatomy & Physiology is a course to study God’s greatest creation, the human being. The course includes the structure, function, and disorders of all organs in the eleven-organ system, frequently used anatomical terms, and clinical applications of the body. Students will learn how their bodies are constructed and the responsibility of caring for their bodies as the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. (Prerequisite: Biology) - Human Biology/Advanced Anatomy & Physiology (Available as Dual-Enrollment) Introduction to the structure and function of the human body with emphasis on human health and welfare. This course is offered for dual enrollment through Carson-Newman College and serves as a general education credit. It will not fulfill general biology requirements for science majors in college. (Prerequisite: Biology I) - Biology I Biology is a study of God’s creation. Students will learn to use the scientific method and inquiry to evaluate scientific theories as well as develop their own theories. Students will explore and critically analyze the scientific issues related to creation, intelligent design, and evolution. Cellular and molecular biology will be discussed with an emphasis on human heredity. The students will also survey the five kingdoms. (Prerequisite: None; open to all high school grade levels) - Honors Biology I Biology is a study of God’s creation. Students will learn about the scientific process, cellular anatomy and reproduction, genetics, ecology, and will critically analyze the scientific issues related to creation, intelligent design, and evolution. Hands-on activities will emphasize the development of important skills such as detailed observation, accurate recording, experimental design, and data interpretation and analysis. Students will develop critical thinking skills through their own research and class discussions concerning issues that relate to current advancements in Biology. (Prerequisite: None; open to all high school grade levels) - Chemistry I Chemistry I is the systematic study of matter and energy as they relate to chemical changes. Topics covered include the structure of matter, techniques used to denote chemical changes, organic and nuclear chemistry. Laboratory exercises and use of chemical reactions, and the study of acids, bases, salts, electro, thermo, organic, and nuclear chemistry. Laboratory exercises are used to illustrate the concepts explained and used in the classroom. (Prerequisite: Algebra I) - Honors Chemistry I Chemistry I is the systematic study of matter and energy as they relate to chemical changes. Topics covered include the structure of matter, techniques used to denote chemical changes, organic and nuclear chemistry. Laboratory exercises and use of chemical reactions, and the study of acids, bases, salts, electro, thermo, organic, and nuclear chemistry. Laboratory exercises are used to illustrate the concepts explained and used in the classroom. Students in Honors Chemistry I will explore chemistry topic of their choice in depth and share this new knowledge as a research project and presentation. (Prerequisite: Algebra I) - Conceptual Physics Conceptual Physics is a laboratory science course that studies the relationships between matter and energy. Students explore physics concepts through an inquiry-based approach along with appropriate algebra-based mathematics. Topics in this course include mechanics, waves and optics, electricity and magnetism, and atom. This course is designed for students who elect to take this course prior to taking biology and chemistry. - Honors Physics (Available as Dual-Enrollment) Physics is the systematic study of the physical world using a small number of basic concepts, equations, and assumptions. Topics covered include motion and vectors, work and energy, momentum and collisions, statics and dynamics, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, waves, optics, electricity, magnetism, atomic, nuclear, and particle physics. Laboratory exercises are used to illustrate the concepts explained and used in the classroom. (Prerequisites: Algebra II with a minimum grade of B, geometry with a minimum grade of B, completed or enrolled in Pre-Calculus). - Personal Finance Personal Finance is a required course that will teach students how to save money, negotiate deals, establish a budget, identify and understand different types of investments and achieve financial and career goals, describe the danger of debt, recognize the advantages of renting and owning a home, become an aware consumer, and understand the different types of insurance. Financial Peace by Dave Ramsey is the curriculum used for the class. (Prerequisite: None) - United States Government/Economics This course is designed to study the creation of the United States as a political power, supplementing traditional fields of study and knowledge with a Christian overview: the men who laid the foundation and the Biblical principles by which they lived. The course in economics supplements text work with practical “real-world” units, such as “buying a car” and “real world costs.” Daily current events discussions fall also within the framework of the class. (Prerequisite: None) - United States History The historical parameters of this course examine the origins and settlements of the first people of the United States from around the 1700’s to the present. Textbook assignments will be supplemented with other texts, videos, worksheets and field trips. Each assignment and experience in and out of class will provide for learning through knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis and evaluation from a Judeo-Christian worldview. (Prerequisite: None) - World Geography The course in World Geography combines various elements of geography, including physical and regional. Emphasis is placed on scripture and biblical philosophy. Students will see the relationship between physical geography and economic features of countries and the way of life of the people. Students will also gain a new approach for the wonders of God’s creation. (Prerequisite: None)

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In 1920 Ernest Hemingway lived his bachelor life at 1230 North State Street, Chicago, until he was offered an apartment 100 East Chicago Street. Many of the apartments were occupied by writers, including Hadley Richardson's friend, Kate Smith, who later married John Dos Passos. Another of the apartments was occupied by the painter, Kenley Smith, and it was when Kate Smith invited Hemingway to a party in Kenley's apartment, that he spotted Hadley Richardson - a young woman he'd seen playing the piano at a recital some years before. The couple hit it off immediately, and both of them soon realised they had met the person they wanted to marry. Maybe both saw in the other the renegade in themselves and a kindred spirit. They both had a love of literature, art, and music, and were looking for a secure place to deposit their emotions. But they were also bursting with sexual desires and frustrations. Hadley was eight years older than Hemingway and a woman who, at first sight, was of rather conventional looks, but a woman with an aura of oozing sensuality. She also looks remarkably like Hemingway's mother. Hadley was born in St.Louis on the 9th of November, 1891, and was the youngest of four children. Her father, James, as Bernice Kert, describes him: “ ...was a genial man who had reluctantly assumed an executive position with the family drug company. Her mother, Florence, was a talented musician who often accompanied her husband on the piano as he sang out in his fine baritone voice. But in other important ways, they were incompatible. Florence had a driving intellectual curiosity, was never at ease in a frivolous setting, and was intensely interested in religion.” After a serious childhood fall from a second-floor window – after which she spent many months in bed - her parents became somewhat over protective, although her father did try to treat her as normally as possible by showing “endless patience for her childish games. ” Not unnaturally a deep bond grew between the two of them, which was shattered when James shot himself due to financial difficulties. As a result of this tragic event (which of course mirrored Hemingway's own experience with his father) Hadley became extremely withdrawn, a situation that was not helped by her mother, who, after moving to a smaller house, created a household were alcohol, and any form of light-heartedness were strictly forbidden. Only after leaving school, and moving to Bryn Mawr College, was Hadley able, at last, to start making friends and enjoy herself. But that was soon brought to an end when Florence convinced Hadley she was not well enough to attend the college, and that she must come home. After the death of her elder sister, Dorothea, Hadley took up an earlier passion for music, and began to take piano lessons with a teacher called Harrison Williams, who quickly became her male ideal. He was also a good teacher, and encouraged Hadley to play professionally. Hadley's mother did not approve, and wished only that her daughter stay home to look after her. Toward the end of 1920 Florence died after contracting Bright's Disease. Suddenly Hadley found herself on her own. Kate Smith's letter asking Hadley to come to Chicago was a Godsend, which brings us back to Ernest. Over the winter of 1920 - 21 Hadley and Hemingway wrote to each other every day. Hadley often called Ernest 'Dearest Nesto' and coined the adjective 'Ernestoic', to describe his inability to talk about his experiences in the war. He wrote about his friends, about fishing, and about his writing, and that he guessed he 'loved her well enough'. But by the spring of 1921 the talk - if not the letter writing - was all about marriage and how they might spend Hadley's inheritance. Sherwood Anderson suggested they live cheaply in Paris among the famous expatriates on the Left Bank. But Hadley wasn't so sure and thought they might settle down firstly in Chicago before deciding on their future. Finally, an apartment in Chicago was found, with a wedding date of September 3rd 1921 finally agreed upon. Ernest took a three day fishing trip up the Sturgeon River with old friends, Howie Jenkins and Charlie Hopkins, as an extended stag night, showing up bleary eyed at the little Methodist country church at Horton Bay on the day of the wedding. A Methodist church had been chosen because Hadley was an Episcopalian and Ernest a Congregationalist. A Methodist church wedding seemed the best compromise. The day of the wedding was clear and sunny. Hadley was a little late in reaching the church as she'd gone swimming in the morning and her hair had taken rather longer to dry than anticipated. Hemingway stood waiting for her with a pounding head and the faint smell of fish about him. When Hadley eventually arrived on the arm of old family friend, George Breaker, Hemingway's head cleared completely, until Hadley's sister held up the proceedings by insisting the word 'obey' be omitted. After the ceremony, and a chicken dinner at Liz Dilworth's place, Hemingway rowed Hadley across Lake Wolloon to the Hemingway holiday cottage and a two week honeymoon. On day two they both came down with food poisoning and heavy colds. Sex was the last thing on their minds. In 1922 the Hemingway's arrived in Paris, with Ernest now working for The Toronto Star, which gave the opportunity to travel throughout the continent of Europe. In March 1923 the couple travelled to a Germany rattled by horrendous inflation and violent confrontations between opposing political ideologies and their cohorts of thugs. The German mark was on its way to becoming utterly worthless, and just before inflation reached its peak in late 1923, wheel barrows and horse-drawn carts were needed to carry the money around to simply buy a loaf of bread, if you could find a loaf of bread. When Hemingway and Hadley arrived at the German border that cold wet March day they were met by two of the 'meekest and most discouraged looking German soldiers you have ever seen.' The soldiers were unarmed, ill-fed and badly clothed, in stark contrast to the heavily armed, well fed, French guards who strutted up and down their sector of the frontier wearing steel helmets and well cut uniforms. The victor and the vanquished. The trouble was the vanquished had not been beaten militarily. There was a score to be settled. Hemingway and Hadley tried to exchange some money in the bank at Strasbourg before crossing the border but were told the mounting exchange rate had cleaned them out days ago. They eventually exchanged ten French francs - about 90 cents - at the railway station for 670 marks. hat 90 cents gave the Hemingways a day of 'heavy spending' and still left them change of 120 marks! A couple of days later, from the banks of the Rhine, the couple witnessed a group of angry young men fighting six policemen on a bridge. Five of the policemen were thrown from the bridge into the fast moving river leaving one hanging from the rail of the bridge 'like a puppet' until one of the men chopped off the policeman's hands with an axe. The policeman fell to his certain death in a black and freezing Rhine. Then Pauline Pfeiffer came into their lives. The short, slim, dark haired Pfeiffer, who, as a journalist working for the Paris edition of Vogue, in the early 1920s, was one of the first critics to give Ernest Hemingway a good write-up for his worst book, 'The Torrents of Spring', and soon made her alluring, and very wealthy presence, known to the handsome and aspiring novelist. Pauline Pfeiffer was born in Parkersburg, Iowa, on July 22nd 1895. In 1901 the family moved to St Louis - a city that was responsible, one way or another, for most of the women in Hemingway's life - where Pauline's father, Paul Pfeiffer, established the family pharmaceutical business. The family prospered, and by 1913 had a chain of several hundred drug stores across America. In 1913, after Pauline graduated from the Academy of the Visitation in St Louis, the family were on a train journey to California when the locomotive broke down at Greenway, Arkansas. Paul stepped down from the train and took a stroll in the fresh air along the track toward the town of Piggott. In fact he stayed out all night, and by morning had calculated how much money he could make by converting the newly de-forested land into prime, cotton producing acreage - and with land selling for a dollar an acre it was an exciting prospect. The Pfeiffer family never made California, but settled in Arkansas instead, and over the next few years bought in excess of 60,000 acres. To achieve his aims Paul Pfeiffer hired over 200 people to prepare those 60,000 acres for cotton, corn, wheat, and the new miracle crop of soybeans. Eventually Pfeiffer's representatives would travel as far as Iowa and Illinois to recruit tenant farmers, eventually owning the cotton gin and the local bank, exerting an influence “that was virtually feudal.” To quote from Bernice Kert's 'The Hemingway Women': “ The Pfeiffer house in Piggott was a sprawling white frame structure, set in a grove of oak trees, surrounded by wide, shady porches, furnished with massive, German-style furniture, and filled with objects and art from St Louis galleries. There were five family bedrooms, maids quarters, good well water, and a red barn for the rubber-tired family buggies. Paul Pfeiffer converted one room of the house into a chapel for his wife, Mary Downey, who was a devout Catholic. Himself an agnostic, he left the religious instruction of his children to her.” Although sounding a bit like the set description for Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, this was not an untypical, upper middle class house of its time, and could just as easily be a description – perhaps minus the oak trees - of either the Hemingway house in Oak Park, or the Gellhorn home in St Louis. During the years of the First World War Pauline attended the University of Missouri, where she majored in journalism, which was no mean achievement for a woman in America at that time. By the time Hemingway was being ministered to by Agnes in Milan Pauline was working as a reporter for the Cleveland Star. By 1919 she had moved to New York and was on the staff of the Daily Telegraph, before finally moving to the arts and fashion magazine, Vanity Fair, where she worked as a fashion reporter and publicist. Of course, Pauline didn't have to rely on her journalist's salary, receiving a generous allowance from her father, and the use of a family apartment in New York. But she could write, and had a good eye for the latest fashion trends, and before long was offered the position of assistant to the editor of the Paris edition of Vanity Fair's sister magazine,Vogue. Naturally she accepted. Pauline sailed to France with her sister Virginia, and within days of arriving in Paris had become the exciting new members of the American ex-pat set. As with Martha, twelve or more years later, Hemingway set his sights on Pauline Pfeiffer, and she responded. Hemingway and Hadley, and the two Pfeiffer sisters, were soon seen out together in Paris, usually dancing at the many bal musettes, then on holiday at the famous skiing resort of Shruns. Then suddenly Virginia and Hadley were out of the circle, with Hemingway and Pauline taking afternoon walks together. Then Ernest started visiting Pauline's apartment in the rue Picot. They could be seen eating in obscure bistros, and be overheard talking about literature, history and art. They went to the galleries and art shows, Ernest even accompanied Pauline to several fashion shows, and through all of this Hadley stayed at home looking after Bumby, and still considered Pauline to be her friend when she knew deep down she was not, that she was stealing her husband away, but she did nothing. Ernest then sailed back to the States to see Max Perkins at Scribners, and on his return he and Hadley, and a group of old friends, went to Spain for the bullfighting, and Pauline kept in touch by letter, and Hadley knew she did, but again she did nothing. Hadley then took Bumby to the south of France to stay with Gerald and Sara Murphy, and Hemingway did nothing to stop the affair with Pauline, and Pauline did nothing except worry about the dreadful sins she was, as a devout Catholic, committing. Then, in 1926, the arguments between Hadley and Ernest began to grow, and Hadley simply couldn't hold her anger and her disappointment in any longer. Hemingway left and moved in with Pauline. Hemingway's divorce from Hadley (on the grounds of desertion by Ernest) was finalised in Paris on January 27th, 1927. Ernest and Pauline were married in Paris four months later, on May 10th, 1927. Hemingway first set eyes on Martha Gellhorn in Sloppy Joe's late in 1936, when, as Kert writes: “...a trio of tourists walked in . One was a young woman with beautiful hair- -tawny gold, loosely brushing her shoulders. She wore a plain black cotton sundress whose simplicity called attention in a well-bred way to her long shapely legs. Ernest listened with interest to her eastern seaboard diction and the low, husky tone of her voice. He formed the hast conclusion that she was married to the young man with her and that the older woman was her mother.” Write and wrong. The young man was her brother, and the older woman was indeed her mother. The three had decided to spend a short holiday in Florida. Hemingway soon introduced himself. Now, Martha Gellhorn could never be described as shy, and in Hemingway's company she sparked with witty conversation from the start. So much so that in the New Year she stayed on when her mother and brother returned home. Hemingway saw her as much as he could, and as they drove back along the causeway one January day in 1937 - after having lunch in Key Largo - they talked about his books, and her books, about the so called Cuban revolution of 1934 that brought a young politician-cum-soldier called Batista into power. They also talked about the Spanish Civil War, and about Hurricanes, and about the threat to democracy. When they reached Key West they picked up a very disgruntled looking Pauline and drove back to the house. Although Martha, her mother and brother, had been briefly introduced to Pauline a few days earlier, Martha recalled that Hemingway seemed ill at ease to be found in Martha's company by his wife, and retaliated rather cruelly toward Pauline, who, nonetheless was courtesy itself to Martha - and if she was jealous of the younger woman she didn't show it. The Hemingway home was a two-storey, square concrete mansion with a covered veranda that bordered the entire ground and first floors, which had been constructed in the 1860s to withstand hurricanes and probably a siege by a three masted fifty gunner of the Union Navy. In 1937, as now, it stood on a corner plot with flat open lawns to the front, surrounded on all sides by a tall iron fence and palm trees. Hemingway's nearest neighbours lived in small, weathered, grey paint-peeling timber houses that looked, according to writer Arnold Samuelson, as if they would be the first victims of any hurricane that might - and regularly did – come their way. It was a house that spoke of wealth and power. Of course, when the Hemingways moved there in the late 1920s it was Pauline's money that purchased it, paid for its upkeep and its staff. Although Ernest had a good advance on his novel, A Farewell to Arms, it was still Pauline's money that bought the food and the drink, and the motor cars. But by 1937 Hemingway was one of the biggest grossing writers in the world, and no doubt at last made a significant contribution to the household budget, as well as buying his beloved boat Pilar, and keeping Sloppy Joe's in business almost single-handedly. As Arnold Samuelson reminds us in his 1985 memoir “Hemingway's workshop was over the garage in back of the house. I followed him up an outside stairway into his workshop, a square room with a tile floor and shuttered windows on three sides and long shelves of books below the windows to the floor. In one corner was a big antique flat-topped desk and an antique chair with a high back. E.H. took the chair in the corner and we sat facing each other across the desk.” Samuelson was there to meet his hero and get some advice about writing, which Hemingway gave freely and generously. Martha Gellhorn needed no advice about writing, not from Hemingway or anybody else. And, sitting in a cane chair on the first floor veranda (Pauline had excused herself and gone to bed early saying she didn't feel well), wearing one of Ernest's sweaters against the chill, and sipping whisky with Ernest after a dinner of steak and mashed potatoes served by Hemingway's black servant, Louis, Martha told him about herself and her family, about her early career as a reporter, and later as a writer in Paris, and about Eleanor Roosevelt, and the President, and the many times she'd stayed at the White House, and the awful food served there, and the lack of anything to drink apart from one glass of wine at dinner, and that a very poor Californian that was too sweet and served warm instead of cold. Hemingway then recounted his experiences in Italy in 1918, and told her, at length, about Agnes, and about Paris and his marriage to Hadley, and falling in love with Pauline and the break-up of his marriage, and how he became a Roman Catholic, and his marriage to Pauline, and their two sons, and about Morley Callaghan, and then about his stories and novels, and the awful films that had been made of his books, and about money, and the six day cycle races, and fishing in his new boat, and boxing: “ Do you like boxing, daughter? You don't mind if I call you daughter?” “ No, I don't mind. Boxing? It's okay, seen a few fights.” “ Not what it was. Joe Louis is okay, but he was too heavy and slow against Schmeling. Capentier was a great boxer, greater than Dempsey and quick on his feet for a heavyweight. There are some good fighters around here too, but they've no stamina, don't eat properly, and drink too much rum. Used to box back in Paris, I was pretty damn good, so was Morley, floored me once.” Hemingway re-filled Martha's glass and asked: “ Have you ever been to a bullfight, daughter?” “ Are you afraid of going?” “ Then we will go.” Hemingway suddenly left the veranda, leaving Martha to wonder what the hell she was doing there. Why not get up and leave? She couldn't, she knew she had to stay. There was something about this big, gentle man... “ Penny for your thoughts?” “ Oh, I was just thinking about life, about never knowing what's around the corner, who you might meet.” “ I knew when I first saw you, on that day you arrived with your mother and your brother, that you were the woman I had been waiting for, the woman I had to marry.” “ Nonsense. You probably felt the same about Pauline, and Hadley, and Agnes, and for all I know said the same?” “ No, not the same. But I know I have to, must marry you.” “ That is...” “ That is the truth.” “ How can it be? It is everything but the truth. It is the worst Hollywood line I have ever heard.” Without further words Ernest took Martha in his arms and kissed her gently, softly, openly, on the mouth. Martha pushed him away violently, then relented and folded into his arms where he kissed again and again"¦ “ Please stop. Pauline?” “ Don't worry about Pauline, she'll be fast asleep.” Martha broke away. “ Pour me another whisky, please.” Hemingway did so, and they both resumed their positions as if nothing had happened. Martha then spotted the book on the small table between them. “ What's the book?” “ Death in the Afternoon. I've signed it, it's for you.” Martha picked up the book and opened it. It was signed - ' For the woman I am going to marry. Ernest. Key West, 1937'. “ We must go to Spain, Ernest. The war there is just the start. Whatever happens there will happen in the rest of Europe sooner or later, and I fear sooner. I intend to go as soon as I can get the paperwork sorted. Why not come with me? Say you'll come with me?” “ Yes, I'll come with you.” “ I really must be going.” “ Thank you for the book. I shall treasure it.” “ Well, as long as you read it.” Hemingway walked Martha back to her hotel, kissing her again before she entered. “ Goodnight, daughter.” Martha found it hard to sleep that night. In the end she gave up and started to read Death in the Afternoon, and soon became enthralled by the beautiful descriptions of rural Spain, of the bull farms and the black proud bulls themselves, and the fights, and the heroics of such matadors as Juan Belmonte, Rodolfo Gaona - and the Gaonera Pass he invented - of the elegance of Vicente Barrera; and the grace under pressure of Nicanor Villalta, who could mesmerise a bull to a standstill; and of course the incredible Manuel Garcia Maera who was the star of the circuit. The book was a revelation in how to write about something so intricate and brave, and beautiful, yet violent and cruel. It was a masterpiece of its kind, Martha realised that, and she also realised that Hemingway was being absolutely truthful when he said he was going to marry her. Martha also knew, finally falling asleep, that she wanted it too. Martha left Key West toward the end of January, leaving behind a letter for Pauline thanking her for her hospitality, and referring to Hemingway as “Ernesto”, and his work as the “tops”, which must have pleased Pauline no end. After her departure, Hemingway also left Key West, finally catching up with Martha in New York where he 'phoned her hotel room every few minutes because he was feeling “dreadfully lonely.” And as Martha and Ernest covered the Spanish Civil War together – and spoke of marriage - his marriage to Pauline began to go down hill, although it would not be until 1940 that Pauline and Hemingway agreed to a divorce, hammering out a financial agreement that ensured their sons came out of things well provided for financially, with Ernest given full access to his sons. Pauline and Ernest were divorced on November 4th, 1940. Ernest and Martha married sixteen days later, on November 21st, in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Soon after the Hemingways discovered the Finca in Cuba, which became their home until they both headed off to cover the war in China, and some time later the latter stages of World War Two. And it would be war – personal and global - and another female journalist, that would break-up Martha's and Ernest's marriage. Mary Welsh was a journalist from northern Minnesota whose father had once owned a paddle steamer, called the Northland, which he'd piloted around Leech Lake picking up loggers. She was, unlike Martha Gellhorn, a diminutive blond with the features of a handsome boy, and to quote “ In contrast to Martha's aristocratic dress and manner, Mary's style was hopelessly unchic and middle class. Like his previous wives Mary had been to college (Northwestern). She resembled the actress Mary Martin; and had a sharp little face, a good figure, short curly blond hair. Though not beautiful or even pretty, she was a cute and attractive woman. Hemingway was the first husband of his first three wives; but Mary had been married twice before: to Lawrence Cook, a student at Northwestern, from 1929 to 1931 and to Noel Monks, an Australian journalist, from 1938 to 1946. Hadley had lasted six years, Pauline fourteen, Martha seven; but Mary endured for seventeen years.” Mary came to London first in the 1930s to work for Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express. With the outbreak of the war in 1939 she transferred to the London Bureau of Time, Life and Fortune. Apart from a short spell in New York, in 1942, Mary had been in London throughout the war. Like Martha Mary enjoyed the good life, and when she met Hemingway in 1944 she lived at 31 Grosvenor Street - a very fashionable area, then as now - just around the corner from the American Embassy and the Dorchester Hotel. Mary Welsh was easily bored and loved the company of men. She had been a fan of Hemingway for years and couldn't resist going to see the famous novelist in hospital after he'd suffered head wounds in a car crash. She took him some daffodils wrapped-up in newspaper. He seemed genuinely pleased to see her, and at the end of the visit he said: “ I'll be back at the Dorch in a day or two, come and see me.” “ I will.” “ Thank you for the flowers.” “ Flowers are good for everybody.” “ You're good for me.” Hemingway's marriage to Martha had gone down hill, due, in no small measure, to professional rivalry, and probably to the fact that Martha didn't want children, preferring to lead the life of the war correspondent; and World War Two did separate them, and Hemingway hated being separated from his women for too Mary was an ideal companion: she listened to Ernest, and was, unlike Martha, prepared to play second fiddle, which was how Hemingway liked it. In fact they were a very good match, which doesn't mean to say that, during WWII, Mary didn't play her part. She did travel to Europe after D-Day, where she wrote convincingly about the horrors of war, and how the GIs were coping. But, as a journalist, she was no Martha Gellhorn, and knew it. Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn were divorced on December 21st, 1945. Ernest and Mary married in Cuba on March 14th, 1946. Hemingway stayed on reasonably good terms with all his ex-wives, especially with Hadley, who re-married a rancher, and with Pauline, who got on very well with Mary, as did his sons from his first two marriages. Sadly, Ernest and Mary had no children of their own, although Mary did suffer an ectopic pregnancy in the late 1940s that could easily have resulted in her death had Ernest Hemingway not been the son of a doctor. Hadley died in 1979, Pauline in 1951, Martha in 1998, and Mary in 1986.

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I was reading about non-monarchical forms of government in ancient India. Really I was interested in what they call the “Republics” of ancient India. But that concept is a bit misleading. It has all sorts of Eurocentric connotations, and implicit associations with democracy, egalitarianism, populism, etc. It has those implicit connections even though many European republics were essentially similar to the Indian ones insofar as they had restricted franchise and were basically aristocratic or oligarchic in nature, or merchant guild-based. In Sanskrit they were called Janapadas, Gana Sanghas, or a few other more esoteric words. I suppose one major difference between Indian and European republics is that there is European republics frequently had agents which were said to “represent” the people, implying that “the people” were the sovereign ruler of the society. “The People” generally had an aristocratic definition, but also had the capacity to get quite plebian. It is difficult to tell who was regarded as sovereign in some of the following Indian examples, but if I had to guess I would say that as a general rule the ruling Kshatriya clan, or confederation of clans, was regarded as sovereigs. That said, in other literature I also saw evidence to suggest that sovereignty was also sometimes vested in individual villages, districts, or constituent guilds or corporations which themselves sent representatives to the council. Without copies of their constitutions we don’t know for sure, but I don’t evidence of directly democratic institutions. And why would we? Political egalitarianism is an alien concept to the subcontinent. Given the existence of these republics really amazing that we still think of India as a static land of “Oriental Despotism.” For instance, we think of Buddha as a “Prince” when really he was a prince only insofar as he was the son of the elected leader of the Shakya Republic (to be fair, Buddhist literature inflates Sudhodana’s reputation which confuses this issue as much as the Hegelian/Marxist historiography). Republics are also central to the history of Jainism. Anyway the point is, India had ancient aristocratic republics and that is cool. Below is a large chunk of Chapter 1: Forms and Types of States from the book Aspects of the ancient Indian polity, by Narendra Nath Law, (Oxford, The Clarendon press, 1921.) Apologies for the typographical errors, I tried to clean up the ones which inhibited meaning: “India has seen multitude of forms of government, and her political experience has not been derived from one form alone. Monarchy was the prevailing form of government, but was not the only form. The Arthasastra knows of a constitution in which the sovereign power wielded by family or clan (kula), and states, in connexion with the succession to a vacant throne, that a pure monarchy may pass into constitution of the aforesaid kind by combination of circumstances.1 Kautilya extols this constitution for its safety and efficiency. He also mentions many self-governing clans, viz. Licchivika, Vrjjika, Mallaka, Madraka, Kukura, Kuru, and Pancala, as well as those of Kamboja and Surastra.2 Some of these clans appear in the list of the sixteen independent peoples existing at or shortly before the time when Buddhism arose, viz. Anga, Magadha, Kasi, Kosala, Vajji, Malla, Cetl, Vamsa, Kuru, Paficala, Maccha, Surasena, Assaka. Avantti, Gandhara and Kamboja.1 A few other clans of the time were the famous Sakiyas, Bhaggas of Sumsumara Hill, Bulis of Allakappa, Kalamas of Kesaputta, Koliyas of Rama-gama, and Moriyans of Pipphalivana.2 An insight into the administrative machinery of some of these clans can be obtained from a study of the methods by which they disposed of the business of the state. The administrative– together with the judicial work of the Sakiya clan, for instance, was done in a public assembly —their common Mote-Hall– (Santhagara) at Kapilavastu, where both young arid old met to attend to state-affairs.3 The Mallas had a similar hall where Ananda is said to have gone to announce Buddha’s death,4 and the Licchavis had another where Saccaka went to inform them of his desire to hold a philosophical discussion with Buddha.5 An office-bearer, corresponding to the Greek Archon or the Roman Consul and bearing the title of Rajan, was elected to preside over the meetings and act as the administrative head. Besides the Mote-Hall at the metropolis, there were several minor halls at towns and other important places, as also in every village within the dominion of each clan, where the local people did their share of administrative business.6 The building of Mote-Halls, rest-houses, and reservoirs, the mending of roads between their own and neighbouring villages, the laying out of parks, and such other works of public utility, for instance, constantly exercised the co-operation of the villagers, including women, who were proud to take an active part in these public affairs.1 Thus the people obtained opportunities for exercising their intelligence on village and town affairs which gave them a training in the more difficult work of guiding and controlling larger interests common to many such townships and village- communities. We find an instance of such administration of larger common interests in the local self- government obtaining in the capital of Candragupta Maurya.4 The Vrjjis or Samvrjjis (i.e. United Vrjjis) were a con federation of eight clans, of whom the most important were the Licchavis, with their capital at Vaisali, and the Videhas, with their chief town Mithila. The Vrjjis were all republicans,3 and the Licchavis, we notice, did not elect a single chief, like the other clans already mentioned, but a triumvirate, to conduct their administration.4 The people of Kasi (Benares) had once their republic, which is testified to by their possession of a public hall used as a ‘parliament chamber for the transaction of public business.’ 5 Megasthenes records an Indian tradition that ‘ from the time of Dionysos to Sandrokottos, the Indians counted 153 kings and a period of 6,042 years ; among these a republic was thrice established which, along with the following two passages from the pen of the same authority, points to democracies in ancient India: (i) ‘ At last, after many generations had come and gone, the sovereignty, it is said, was dissolved, and democratic government set up in the cities ‘-1 (2) ‘ Maltecorai, Singhai, Marohai, Rarungai, and Morunoi are free, have no kings, and occupy mountain heights where they have built many cities There are further evidences of non-regal states in ancient India. Arrian says that the Nysaians were free, had president, and entrusted the government of their state to the aristocracy.3 He also refers to the Oreitai4 as an independent tribe with leaders, while Curtius mentions the Sabarcae as a powerful Indian tribe whose form of government was democratic and not regal and the Cedrosii (i.e. Gedrosioi) as a free people with a council for discussing important matters of state.6 Diodoros describes the Sambastai as dwelling in cities with democratic form of administration, and Tauala name which has been restored to Patala as its correct form) as ‘a city of great note with political constitution drawn on the same lines as the Spartan for in this community the command in war was vested in two hereditary kings of two different houses, while a council of elders ruled the whole state with paramount authority.8 The Malloi are simply referred to by Arrian as ‘a race of independent Indians but the Oxydrakai, we learn from him, were attached more than others to freedom and autonomy,which they preserved intact for very long time before Alexander’s invasion.10. The Malloi e. the Malavas) and the Oxydrakai (the Ksudrakas) figure in a few Sanskrit works, e. g. the Kasika-vrtti l and the Mahabharata’ Noteworthy also is the case of the Yaudheyas, 3 a warrior clan, known to Panini, whose existence is attested as late as the time of Samudragupta, and whose coins bear symbols of the military character of the clan. There was also a race in the Punjab living under democratic institutions, viz. the Kathaioi, who formed part of the people known as the Arattas (kingless), described by Justin as robbers and denounced as such in the Mahabharata, and whom Candragupta Maurya used as weapons for wresting for himself the sovereignty of the Punjab.4 The Mahabharata expatiates on the policy that should be followed by the monarch in regard to the Ganas, and by the Ganas themselves for self-preservation. These Ganas appear to have been self-governing communities. Thus in the Santi-Parvan (107. 6.) the word Gana appears rather to refer to self-governing communities than to mere corporations of traders or artisans, or to the ‘aristocracy in a state’, as Mr. Pratap Roy translates though should be noted that the word bears other significations in other contexts. The commentary of Nilakantha very meagre on this chapter, but he seems to have taken the word Gana as meaning self-governing community. The chapter gives some details of its constitution its members are described as the same in respect of jati and kula, and its state affairs as conducted by body of leaders, who are advised to keep among themselves alone the matters they discuss. The commentators of the Vedic Samhitas appear to be right in interpreting the word Gana as “corporation” or “guild” in a few passages.1 Prof. Hopkins remarks2 that the growth of commercial interests led ultimately to the establishment of a sort of trade- unions or guilds. They are mentioned early as of importance (see Manu, viii. 41), though they may belong to a late period in their full development. ‘ Such corporations had their own rules and laws subject to the king’s inspection, the king not being allowed (theoretically) to have established, or to establish, any laws that contradicted those already approved or sanctioned by usage. The heads of these bodies are mentioned together with the priests as political factors of weight, whose views are worth grave consideration. As an informal instance of we find prince (Duryodhana) defeated in battle and ashamed to return home — for what he exclaims, shall have to say to my relatives, to the priests, and to the heads cf the corporations’ Prominence given to the guilds in the later books of the Mahabharata. There also we find corporations of every sort under the name Gana of the members of which the king particularly recommended to be careful, since enemies are apt to make use of them by bribery. But dissension is their weak point. Through dissension and bribery they may be controlled by the king. On the other hand ‘ union is the safeguard of corporations ‘. I should remark that the word ‘ corporation ‘, as used in the above extract, is not a good rendering of Sreni or Gait in its reference to self-ruled communities of military character. Dr. Fleet, after much discussion with Dr. Thomas over the proper rendering of Malava-gana-sthiti, comes to the conclusion 1 that though Gana may have many meanings and has to be translated in each particular case according to the context, it is best rendered in the above expression by ‘ tribe ‘. Dr. Thomas objects on many grounds, one of which is that when ‘ coins are issued by the authority of a Gana (which is the case with the Yaudheyas), or an era is maintained by it (which is the case with the Malavas), plainly the absence of royalty is implied ‘.2 The description of Gana in the Mahabharata (xii. 107) cited above also points to a status of independence, or at least semi- independence, which the word ‘tribe’ does not express. In order to bring out this essential implication of Gana, the word ‘ tribe ‘ should have some qualifying epithet, and for this reason the expression ‘ autonomous tribe ‘ (used by Mr. V. A. Smith) or ‘ self-governing community ‘ is preferable to ‘ corporation ‘ or ‘ tribe ‘. It does not appear clearly whether any oligarchies existed in the Vedic period. According to Zimmer,3 there are traces in a passage in the Rg-Veda 4 that normally there was no king in some states, the members of the royal house holding equal rights. It is compared by him to the state of affairs in early Germany.6 Messrs. Macdonell and Keith, however, are of opinion that the passage depended upon is not decisive for the sense ascribed to though of course the state of affairs perfectly possible and exemplified later in Buddhist times This latter view gains support from the case of Citraratha, who performed a special kind of sacrifice (dviratra), which led to the result that the Caitrarathis were distinguished from other royal families by the fact that ‘the chief of the clan received a markedly higher position than in most cases, in which probably the heads of the family were rather an oligarchy than a monarch (with) his dependants.’1 Megasthenes records that the vox populi was recognized as an effective and potent factor which the responsible officers consulted in cases of failure of heirs in the royal house. On. such occasions, ‘ the Indians ‘, we are told, ‘ elected their ; sovereigns on the principle of merit’.2 We learn from the Ramayana that respect was shown to the opinion of the people in the choice of a successor to the reigning sovereign, as also on the rather rare occasions of failures of heirs in the ruling house. Prof. Hopkins says that the assent of the people was obtained to the succession in the first place. After the king’s death, the priests and people met in the royal court and decided which prince should be king. The chief priest made an address explaining the death of the king and the necessity for having a new king on the throne. The elder son (Rama) being banished, the younger must reign to prevent the many evils of anarchy. The older councillors expressed their assent, saying, ‘ Even when the king was alive, we stood at your orders (sasane) ; proceed, then ; give your orders.’ After this the election was practically over, and only the ceremony remained to be performed.3 There are also traces of the existence of the elective principle in the Vedic times. Zimmer 4 is of opinion that the Vedic monarchy, though sometimes hereditary, can be shown by the several cases in which the descent can be traced,5 was yet elective in the other instances, though it is not apparent whether the people selected from among the members of the royal house or those of all the noble clans. Geldner l argues, however, that the evidence for the elective monarchy is not so strong, as the passages 2 cited are regarded by him not as indicative of choice by the cantons ( Vis) but of acceptance by the subjects. This of course, as Messrs. Macdonell and Keith observe, no proof that the monarchy was not sometimes elective. The practice of selecting one member of the royal family to the exclusion of another less qualified exemplified by the legend of the Kuru brothers Devapi and Santanu referred to in Yaska,3 the value of which .as evidence of contemporary views not seriously affected by the fact that the legend itself of dubious character and validity.4 The power of the people was stronger in those days in proportion to the greater insecurity of the sovereign. There are several references to the latter being expelled5 from their dominions, and to their efforts to be reinstated to their former position. The inviolability of the sovereign’s authority recognized even in the Vedic period, he himself being ‘exempt from punishment’ (adandya), but having the power to inflict on others judicial punishment (danda-vadha).6 The expulsion was the last resort of the people, who could, of course, effect more by the aid of abnormal circumstances than by dint of their unaided will. The sovereign’s immunity from punishment should, therefore, be taken as the normal rule. A few instances of sovereigns deposed or expelled from the realms may be cited here : Dustartu Paumsayana (the first word literally means ‘ hard to fight king of the Srnjayas, was deposed by them from principality that had existed for ten generations, but was restored by Patava Cakra Sthapati in, spite of the resistance of Balhika Pratipiya,1 the Kuru king. Dirghasravas (i.e. ‘far-famed’) was also banished from his kingdom,2 as also Sindhuksit, who had to remain in exile for a long time before he could be restored.3 The case of Vena4 being deposed and killed in later times may also be mentioned. A trace of the deference paid to the will of the people in early times exists also perhaps in the ritual of the Rajasuya called the Ratnahavis, in which offerings were made by the king on successive days in the houses of persons termed Ratnins, including among others Ksatriya, village-headman, and such other individuals, who were either mere subjects, king’s officials, or relatives, to whom, or at least to some of whom, the title of Rajakartr (king-maker) was applied.5 Though in later times the ceremony may have been no more than a mere formality observed during the inauguration, yet in its incep tion in remoter periods was probably associated with the deference shown to the opinion of the people, who then wielded much greater power in the state. Some of the Ratnins were perhaps representatives of the people or certain classes of the subjects turned into mere ceremonial figures in subsequent times by the growth of the royal power. The ordinary form of government in Vedic times, however, was the monarchical, as might be naturally expected from the situation of the Indian Aryans surrounded by hostile races.– There are clear signs that the power of the monarch was curbed by the existence of the assembly which he had to– consult, and concord between them was essential for the prosperity of the former as also of the people at large.6 In the titles assumed by the sovereigns, as well as the epithets by which they are mentioned, we find evidences of higher and lower positions among them. Messrs. Macdonell and Keith remark that the states were seemingly small,1 and there are no clear signs of any really large kingdoms, despite the mention of Maharajas. This may be true, but it does not negative the possibility that there were royal hierarchies among the states of the early Vedic period. The area upon which the Aryans spread themselves in those times was not even the whole of Northern India, and necessarily we cannot expect to have an emperor with a territory extending from sea to sea. Yet among the existing states one or the other rose to a supremacy over some others, which may have prompted its ruler to assume a title indicative of his superiority to the subordinate states. Samraj is the epithet applied to a ‘superior ruler’ in the Rg-Veda as also in later works, expressing a greater degree of power than that of a Rajan (‘ King ‘). Adhiraja* frequently met with in the early Sanskrit literature, signifies an ‘overlord’ among kings or princes.5 Similarly, we have Maharaja}- Rajadhirdja and Ekaraja. From here the text goes into many pages detailing the opposite spectrum i.e. absolute monarchies and emperorship, before talking about constitutional monarchies and again, council based forms of government at the end of the chapter: According to Mr. Kanakasabhai, India has seen not merely Pure democracies or pure .monarchies, but also constitutions in which there were hereditary monarchs between whom and the subjects there were distinct organs to restrict the powers of the former and act as buffers. In this arrangement there was an organized institution of the state to voice forth the people’s views. We find examples of such an organization in each of the three kingdoms of Cera, Cola, and Pandya of the extreme south about eighteen centuries ago. There the hereditary monarch, along with the ‘ Five Great Assemblies ‘ 4 consisting of the representatives of the people, priests, physicians, astrologers, and ministers respectively, wielded the sovereign- power, and not the monarch alone. The first council safe guarded the rights and privileges of the people, the second directed all religious ceremonies, and the third all matters affecting the health of the king and the public. The fourth, like the Roman augurs, fixed auspicious times for public ceremonies and predicted important events, while the fifth attended to the administration of justice and the collection and expenditure of revenue.1 This system of government, there is reason to believe, as Mr. Kanakasabhai says, was not peculiar to the south, but had its original in the Magadhan Empire of the North, from which the founders of the three kingdoms had formerly migrated. An editorial comment after all of that: India’s current Republican form is premised on European notions of socialism, democracy and egalitarianism which developed under dramatically different social, geographic and genetic conditions. India would probably be better served by throwing out its monstrosity of a constitution and replacing it with a modernized aristocratic republic which more suits India’s history, genetic profile, and optimal cultural trajectory.

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Table of Contents The C. elegans genome contains approximately 1300 genes that produce functional noncoding RNA (ncRNA) transcripts. Here we describe what is currently known about these ncRNA genes, from the perspective of the annotation of the finished genome sequence. We have collated a reference set of C. elegans ncRNA gene annotation relative to the WS130 version of the genome assembly, and made these data available in several formats. The C. elegans genome contains approximately 1300 genes that are known to produce functional noncoding RNA (ncRNA) transcripts, as opposed to mRNAs that encode proteins. These known ncRNA genes include about 590 transfer RNA (tRNA) genes, 275 ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes, 140 trans-spliced leader RNA genes, 120 microRNA (miRNA) genes, 70 spliceosomal RNA genes, and 30 snoRNA genes. Based on what is known about ncRNA-directed functions in other animals, there are additional ncRNA genes performing known biochemical functions that have not yet been identified in the worm genome. These include the telomerase RNA and on the order of 100-200 small nucleolar RNA (snoRNA) genes that direct site-specific 2'-O-ribose methylations and pseudouridylations of ribosomal RNAs and other target RNAs. It also seems likely that novel ncRNA genes remain to be discovered. The belated realization that the lin-4 and let-7 regulatory RNA genes are not just worm-specific anecdotes, but instead are members of a huge gene family of microRNAs with important roles in posttranscriptional gene regulation in many eukaryotes (Lee et al., 1993; Lim et al., 2003; Pasquinelli et al., 2000; Reinhart et al., 2000) was a spectacular demonstration that important genes (indeed, whole gene families) can easily escape standard computational and experimental gene discovery methods. There is a tantalizing possibility that the miRNAs foreshadow the discovery of even more RNA-directed functions. Here we describe what is currently known about the ncRNA genes of C. elegans, from the perspective of the annotation of the finished genome sequence (C. elegans Sequencing Consortium, 1998). Based on the literature, Genbank, and on computational searches for homologs of known RNAs and members of known RNA gene families (Benson et al., 2004; Griffiths-Jones, 2004; Griffiths-Jones et al., 2003; Harris et al., 2004; Lowe and Eddy, 1997), we have collated a stable, curated reference set of C. elegans noncoding RNA genes, and their chromosomal coordinates relative to the WS130 version of the genome sequence assembly in Table 1. We have made these data available as annotation tracks for WormBase, and downloadable as HTML tables, GFF coordinate files, or FASTA sequence files. We describe how the reference set has been produced, and summarize what it contains. The 18S, 5.8S, and 26S subunits of rRNA are transcribed by RNA polymerase I from a 7.2 kb rDNA unit that is tandemly repeated ∼55 times at the end of chromosome I (C. elegans Sequencing Consortium, 1998; Ellis et al., 1986; Sulston and Brenner, 1974). The 5S rRNAs are transcribed separately by RNA polymerase III from ∼110 copies of a ∼1 kb tandem repeat unit on chromosome V (Nelson and Honda, 1985; Sulston and Brenner, 1974). The 5S rRNA repeat unit also includes the gene for the SL1 trans-spliced leader; see below. The rRNA genes are systematically underrepresented in the current genome sequence assembly, because tandem arrays are problematic for physical mapping and sequencing. According to WUBLAST searches using the published sequences of the 7.2 kb and 1 kb rDNA repeat units as queries, one copy of the 18S/5.8S/26S rRNA repeat unit is represented in the chromosome I sequence assembly, and fifteen copies of the 5S rRNA gene are included in the chromosome V sequence. Additionally, the mitochondrial DNA contains one 18S rRNA gene and one 23S rRNA gene. We have annotated genes for 569 nuclear tRNAs, 22 mitochondrial tRNAs, and 1072 probable tRNA pseudogenes. The mitochondrial tRNAs were curated from the literature (Okimoto et al., 1992; Wolstenholme et al., 1987). Nuclear tRNAs can be reliably identified by computational methods. We used the programs tRNAscan-SE (Lowe and Eddy, 1997) and ARAGORN (Laslett and Canback, 2004) to identify a combined candidate list of 612 putative tRNA genes and 214 candidate tRNA pseudogenes. These candidate tRNA genes were manually curated to remove an additional 40 putative pseudogenes and 3 false positives, leaving the final set of 569 annotated genes. This gene set is essentially in agreement with the independent analysis of Marck and Grosjean, who identified 529 putative tRNA genes (Marck and Grosjean, 2002). Differences appear to be due to variation in what is called a putative true gene versus a putative pseudogene, and differences in the version of the genome assembly used. As is the case in many eukaryotes, tRNA pseudogenes are numerous in C. elegans. Current tRNA scanning programs only detect pseudogenes that are closely related to true tRNAs. Using WUBLAST, we identified an additional 818 sequences with significant similarity to one or more of the 569 tRNA genes and/or 254 tRNA pseudogenes, and added them to annotate a total of 1072 putative pseudogenes. Many of these overlay four previously identified repetitive sequences (Tc4, CEREP3, CELE45, and NDNAX3_CE) defined by RepBase and RepeatMasker searches. Approximately 70% of C. elegans mRNAs are covalently modified at their 5' end by the addition of 22-nt trans-spliced leader RNA sequences (Blumenthal and Gleason, 2003; Ross et al., 1995; Zorio et al., 1994). Trans-spliced leaders are donated by independently transcribed ∼100-110 nt SL RNAs, which come in two forms, SL1 RNA and SL2 RNA (see Trans-splicing and operons). The most abundant form, SL1, is predominantly trans-spliced to the 5' end of pre-mRNAs, including the first cistron in polycistronic (operon) pre-mRNAs; the rarer form, SL2, is generally trans-spliced to downstream cistrons in polycistronic operons (Blumenthal and Gleason, 2003). The genes for SL1 RNA are part of the same tandem repeat unit that encodes 5S rRNA, occurring in ∼110 copies on chromosome V (Krause and Hirsh, 1987; Nelson and Honda, 1985). Ten SL1 RNA genes are represented in the current genome sequence assembly. The genes for the ∼110 nt SL2 RNAs are dispersed, and show more sequence variation than SL1 RNAs (indeed, some have been named SL3 RNA, SL4 RNA, etc.; we follow the WormBase convention of annotating all as SL2 variants; Huang and Hirsh, 1989; Ross et al., 1995; Zorio et al., 1994). 20 SL2 RNA gene variants are found in the genome sequence, roughly in agreement with the copy number of ∼30 predicted from genomic Southerns (Ross et al., 1995; Zorio et al., 1994). SL RNAs are thought to be transcribed by pol II (Krause and Hirsh, 1987). In Eukarya and Archaea, two classes of snoRNAs direct site-specific base modifications of ribosomal RNA and other ncRNAs. C/D box snoRNAs direct 2'-O-ribose methylations, and H/ACA snoRNAs direct pseudouridylations. The modifications are catalyzed by snoRNA-associated proteins (fibrillarin in the case of 2'-O-ribose methylation, Cbf5/dyskerin in the case of pseudouridylation); the snoRNAs function to guide a snoRNP complex to a modification site by complementary base pairing between the snoRNA and the target RNA. One snoRNA usually targets one or two modifications, and any given modification site can be targeted by more than one redundant snoRNA. The best-studied targets for snoRNA-directed base modification, ribosomal RNAs, have about 40-100 2'-O-ribose methylations and a comparable number of pseudouridylations in eukaryotes such as yeast and human. We expect a similar number of modifications in C. elegans rRNAs, and therefore expect to find on the order of 100-200 rRNA modification guide snoRNAs in the genome (and probably additional snoRNAs that direct modifications of other ncRNAs). However, snoRNAs are difficult to identify from sequence analysis alone, and we have only a partial map of C. elegans rRNA modifications (Higa et al., 2002), so the catalog of C. elegans snoRNA genes is currently incomplete. We can annotate 19 C/D and 6 H/ACA snoRNA genes based on Genbank and the current literature (Higa et al., 2002; Wachi et al., 2004). In vertebrates, almost all known C/D and H/ACA snoRNAs are processed out of introns of host genes, whereas in yeast and plants, snoRNAs are usually independently transcribed (Tycowski et al., 2004). C. elegans likely uses a mix of the two expression strategies. Many of the 2'-O-ribose methylation-guide C/D box snoRNAs are preceded by conserved proximal sequence elements (PSEs) typical of snRNA promoters (Thomas et al., 1990). The H/ACA snoRNAs identified by Wachi et al. were found in the introns of protein-coding genes (Wachi et al., 2004). A small number of additional snoRNAs do not direct nucleotide modifications. An important one is the U3 snoRNA, which is involved in endonucleolytic processing of the 18S/5.8S/26S rRNA precursor. Six U3 snoRNA genes have been identified by sequence similarity searches (TA Jones, SR Eddy, unpublished). We annotated both the putative Drosha-produced pre-miRNA (∼60nt) and the Dicer-produced miRNA (∼21nt) forms of each of 117 microRNAs in the Rfam miRNA Registry database (Griffiths-Jones, 2004). We also annotated 37 of the ∼21-nt "tiny noncoding RNA" (tncRNA) sequences identified by Ambros et al., which appear to be produced in a Dicer-dependent fashion and thus are related to the miRNA/siRNA pathways (Ambros et al., 2003). See C. elegans microRNAs for a thorough description of C. elegans microRNA biology. We have not annotated the ∼700 endogenous small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) found by Ambros et al. (Ambros et al., 2003). These ∼21 nt siRNAs exhibit perfect complementarity to coding regions, and thus may represent post-transcriptional gene regulation by endogenous RNAi. For a description of the RNAi phenomenon in C. elegans, see RNAi mechanisms. The spliceosome contains five different small nuclear RNAs (snRNAs), called U1, U2, U4, U5, and U6. Genes for the abundant spliceosomal RNAs typically occur in multiple copies in higher eukaryotes. The C. elegans spliceosomal RNA genes were studied by Thomas et al., who identified 18 spliceosomal genes (1 U1, 10 U2, 3 U4, 2 U5, and 2 U6) dispersed in the genome, and who estimated copy numbers based on genomic Southerns of 11 U1, 12 U2, 6 U4, 9 U5, and 10 U6 snRNA genes (Thomas et al., 1990). Based on WUBLASTN searches using the Thomas et al. sequences as queries, we identify a total of 72 spliceosomal RNA loci (12 U1, 19 U2, 5 U4, 13 U5, and 23 U6), at least five of which appear to be pseudogenes. Unlike plants and some other animals, C. elegans does not appear to utilize the alternative U12 spliceosome components U11, U12, U4atac, and U6atac; their homologs are not detectable in the C. elegans genome and no ESTs containing characteristic AT/AC splice-junctions have been found. RNase P RNA, which catalyzes the maturation of tRNA 5' ends, is present in a single copy in the C. elegans genome; it was identified by computational homology searches (Klein, 2003; S.M. Marquez and N.R. Pace, unpublished). The ceY RNA is also present in a single genomic locus. The function of its RNP complex with Ro protein is unclear, but may be to act as a 5S rRNA quality control agent (Van Horn et al., 1995). SRP RNA is a component of the signal recognition particle, involved in translocation of nascent proteins across the endoplasmic reticulum. Five SRP-RNA genes have been identified in the C. elegans genome by homology search methods (Regalia et al., 2002). In other metazoans, the 3' ends of histone genes are processed via the interaction of a downstream stemloop with the U7 ncRNA. To date, no C. elegans U7 RNA homologs have been found. The 7SK RNA, a negative regulator of pol II transcription in higher mammals, also has no detectable homolog in the C. elegans genome. The most important ncRNA that has yet to be identified in the C. elegans genome is the telomerase RNA. Similar to almost all other eukaryotes, C. elegans telomeres consist of 1-2 kilobases of six-nucleotide (TAAGGC) repeats (Cheung et al., 2004), which in ciliates, vertebrates, and fungi are known to be synthesized by a telomerase RNP that contains a reverse transcriptase and a telomerase RNA template, in addition to other proteins (Blackburn, 2001). Telomerase RNAs are highly diverged, and we do not expect to be able to identify a homologous RNA in C. elegans by BLAST searches using known telomerase RNAs as queries (and indeed, we do not). More powerful structure-based searches might be productively applied now that a satisfactory consensus secondary structure for ciliate, vertebrates, and fungi has been worked out (Lin et al., 2004). Using 3' SAGE tagging, Jones et al. detected an abundant, apparently noncoding transcript tts-1 which was predicted to contain a plausible telomeric template sequence, leading tts-1 to be suggested as a possible telomerase RNA (Jones et al., 2001). However, this enigmatic transcript seems unlikely to be the true telomerase RNA, as cDNA sequencing has shown that the putative telomeric template region is not part of the major tts-1 transcript (SL Stricklin and SR Eddy, unpublished). Most known C. elegans ncRNAs are well conserved with their C. briggsae homologs: similarity ranges from complete identity (for 5S rRNA, U6 RNA, and SL1 RNA) to 89% identical for RNase P and 75% identical for the ceY RNA. About two-thirds of C. elegans miRNAs are clearly conserved in C. briggsae, but none of the 37 annotated C. elegans tncRNAs (or the immediate genomic context of these ∼21mers) appear to be conserved in C. briggsae. It must be noted that it is not currently possible to systematically identify novel noncoding RNA genes that have no homology to known genes. We do not yet have reliable "genefinding" programs for ncRNAs; current computational ncRNA genefinding approaches are suitable as screens, but not for reliable automated annotation. The best current computational methods use comparative sequence analysis to identify conserved RNA secondary structure (Coventry et al., 2004; Rivas and Eddy, 2001; Washietl et al., 2005). Genome sequencing of several related Caenorhabditis species is beginning to make such comparative ncRNA genefinding approaches increasingly powerful in C. elegans. Systematic gene discovery by cDNA sequencing (and related transcript discovery methodologies such as SAGE and MPSS) is usually done on poly-A+, mRNA-enriched, ncRNA-depleted populations. It is possible to use these transcript discovery approaches on total RNA or ncRNA-enriched RNA populations (Huttenhofer et al., 2004), but to our knowledge such experiments have not yet been published for C. elegans. We also expect that whole-genome tiled expression arrays should soon make it possible to systematically catalog the entire C. elegans transcriptome, including both coding and noncoding transcripts (Kampa et al., 2004; Kapranov et al., 2003). SLS is funded by an NIH NHGRI Genome Analysis Training Program grant. SGJ is funded by the Wellcome Trust. SRE is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, NIH NHGRI, and Alvin Goldfarb. Benson, D.A., Karsch-Mizrachi, I., Lipman, D.J., Ostell, J., and Wheeler, D. L. (2004). GenBank: update. Nucleic Acids Res 32 Database issue, D23–D26. Abstract C. elegans Sequencing Consortium (1998). Genome sequence of the nematode C. elegans: a platform for investigating biology. The C. elegans Sequencing Consortium. Science 282, 2012–2018. Abstract Article Cheung, I., Schertzer, M., Baross, A., Rose, A.M., Lansdorp, P.M., and Baird, D.M. (2004). Strain-specific telomere length revealed by single telomere length analysis in Caenorhabditis elegans. Nucleic Acids Res. 32, 3383–3391. Abstract Article Coventry, A., Kleitman, D.J., and Berger, B. (2004). MSARI: multiple sequence alignments for statistical detection of RNA secondary structure. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 101, 12102–12107. Abstract Article Ellis, R.E., Sulston, J.E., and Coulson, A.R. (1986). The rDNA of C. elegans: sequence and structure. Nucleic Acids Res. 14, 2345–2364. Harris, T.W., Chen, N., Cunningham, F., Tello-Ruiz, M., Antoshechkin, I., Bastiani, C., Bieri, T., Blasiar, D., Bradnam, K., Chan, J., et al. (2004). WormBase: a multi-species resource for nematode biology and genomics. Nucleic Acids Res. 32 Database issue, D411–D417. Abstract Article Higa, S., Maeda, N., Kenmochi, N., and Tanaka, T. (2002). Location of 2(')-O-methyl nucleotides in 26S rRNA and methylation guide snoRNAs in Caenorhabditis elegans. Biochem Biophys Res. Commun. 297, 1344–1349. Abstract Article Huang, X.Y., and Hirsh, D. (1989). A second trans-spliced RNA leader sequence in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 86, 8640–8644. Abstract Huttenhofer, A., Cavaille, J., and Bachellerie, J.P. (2004). Experimental RNomics: a global approach to identifying small nuclear RNAs and their targets in different model organisms. Methods Mol. Biol. 265, 409–428. Abstract Jones, S.J., Riddle, D.L., Pouzyrev, A.T., Velculescu, V.E., Hillier, L., Eddy, S.R., Stricklin, S.L., Baillie, D.L., Waterston, R., and Marra, M.A. (2001). Changes in gene expression associated with developmental arrest and longevity in Caenorhabditis elegans. Genome Res 11, 1346–1352. Abstract Article Kampa, D., Cheng, J., Kapranov, P., Yamanaka, M., Brubaker, S., Cawley, S., Drenkow, J., Piccolboni, A., Bekiranov, S., Helt, G., et al. (2004). Novel RNAs identified from an in-depth analysis of the transcriptome of human chromosomes 21 and 22. Genome Res 14, 331–342. Abstract Article Kapranov, P., Sementchenko, V.I., and Gingeras, T.R. (2003). Beyond expression profiling: next generation uses of high density oligonucleotide arrays. Brief Funct Genomic Proteomic 2, 47–56. Abstract Klein, R.J. (2003). Finding noncoding RNA genes in genomic sequences. Ph.D. Thesis, Washington University in St. Louis. Lim, L.P., Lau, N.C., Weinstein, E.G., Abdelhakim, A., Yekta, S., Rhoades, M. W., Burge, C.B., and Bartel, D.P. (2003). The microRNAs of Caenorhabditis elegans. Genes Dev. 17, 991–1008. Abstract Article Lin, J., Ly, H., Hussain, A., Abraham, M., Pearl, S., Tzfati, Y., Parslow, T. G., and Blackburn, E.H. (2004). A universal telomerase RNA core structure includes structured motifs required for binding the telomerase reverse transcriptase protein. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 101, 14713–14718. Abstract Article Marck, C., and Grosjean, H. (2002). tRNomics: analysis of tRNA genes from 50 genomes of Eukarya, Archaea, and Bacteria reveals anticodon-sparing strategies and domain-specific features. RNA 8, 1189–1232. Abstract Article Okimoto, R., Macfarlane, J.L., Clary, D.O., and Wolstenholme, D.R. (1992). The mitochondrial genomes of two nematodes, Caenorhabditis elegans and Ascaris suum. Genetics 130, 471–498. Abstract Pasquinelli, A.E., Reinhart, B.J., Slack, F., Martindale, M.Q., Kuroda, M. I., Maller, B., Hayward, D.C., Ball, E.E., Degnan, B., Muller, P., et al. (2000). Conservation of the sequence and temporal expression of let-7 heterochronic regulatory RNA. Nature 408, 86–89. Abstract Article Reinhart, B.J., Slack, F.J., Basson, M., Pasquinelli, A.E., Bettinger, J.C., Rougvie, A.E., Horvitz, H.R., and Ruvkun, G. (2000). The 21-nucleotide let-7 RNA regulates developmental timing in Caenorhabditis elegans. Nature 403, 901–906. Abstract Article Sulston, J.E., and Brenner, S. (1974). The DNA of Caenorhabditis elegans. Genetics 77, 95–104. Abstract Thomas, J., Lea, K., Zucker-Aprison, E., and Blumenthal, T. (1990). The spliceosomal snRNAs of Caenorhabditis elegans. Nucleic Acids Res. 18, 2633–2642. Abstract Van Horn, D.J., Eisenberg, D., O'Brien, C.A., and Wolin, S.L. (1995). Caenorhabditis elegans embryos contain only one major species of Ro RNP. RNA 1, 293–303. Abstract Wolstenholme, D.R., Macfarlane, J.L., Okimoto, R., Clary, D.O., and Wahleithner, J.A. (1987). Bizarre tRNAs inferred from DNA sequences of mitochondrial genomes of nematode worms. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 84, 1324–1328. Abstract *Edited by Jonathan Hodgkin and Philip Anderson. Last revised June 16, 2005. Published June 25, 2005. This chapter should be cited as: Stricklin, S.L. et al. C. elegans noncoding RNA genes (June 25, 2005), WormBook, ed. The C. elegans Research Community, WormBook, doi/10.1895/wormbook.1.1.1, http://www.wormbook.org. Copyright: © 2005 Shawn L. Stricklin, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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The Concept of Cultural Relativism In a Multicultural World Creating Caring Communities The Concept of Cultural Relativism In a Multicultural World (Or Teaching the Concept of Cultural Relativism to Ethnocentric Students) We live in a rapidly changing world society, which is increasingly bringing people of various cultures in closer interaction with each other. This interaction can be positive or negative depending on the level of sensitivity and respect people have for other cultural groups. These two types of behaviors are related to the two important concepts examined in this presentationethnocentrism and cultural relativism. Negative attitudes towards other cultures and/or ethnic groups arise out of ethnocentrism, while positive attitudes are the result of a culturally relativist approach. If people are going to be successful in today's multicultural, information age, world society, they will need to develop a culturally sensitive frame of reference and mode of operation. It is the purpose of this presentation to help people move from an ethnocentric, exclusive mindset to a culturally sensitive modus operandi, by clarifying what is meant by ethnocentrism and cultural relativism, how each operates, and what are the steps that move a person from one perspective to the other. One of the most controversial challenges to the study of social ethics comes from a methodological approach of the social sciences called, cultural relativism. "Cultural relativism is in essence an approach to the question of the nature and role of values in culture" (Herskovits 1973, p. 14). If values are shared ideals which give rise to beliefs and norms of behavior around which a people or a group organizes its collective life and goals, cultural relativism declares that these values are relative to the cultural ambiance out of which they arise. Because of this many ethicists believe that the concept of cultural relativism threatens the discipline of ethics since, if values are relative to a given culture than this must mean that there are no universal moral absolutes by which the behavior of people can be judged. Therefore, "if there is no observable control transcending all cultures, no eternal book of rules, then right and wrong are a matter of opinion and it doesn't matter what we do: anything goes!" (Ruggiero 1973, p. 17). Thus, we can't go around passing judgment on what other people do. For, "if all morality is relative, then what moral objection could one make to the Nazi holocaust, to the economic deprivation of a Latin American underclass, or to a militaristic nation's unleashing nuclear devastation on others? And what would be wrong with conducting painful experiments on young children, using them for case studies on the long-term psychological effects of mutilation? In a world where no moral court of appeals exists, might makes right. The only appeal can be to power" (Holmes, 1984, pp. 17,18). But it is such a position that cultural relativism seeks to challenge. And the reason why cultural relativism has come under fire is "because it has been subject to divergent interpretation" (Ruggiero, p. 17). Anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn (1944, p. 43) declares: The concept of culture, like any other piece of knowledge, can be abused and misinterpreted. Some fear that the principle of cultural relativity will weaken morality. "If the Bugabuga do it why can't we? It's all relative anyway." But this is exactly what cultural relativity does not mean. The principle of cultural relativity does not mean that because the members of some savage tribe are allowed to behave in a certain way that this fact gives intellectual warrant for such behavior in all groups. Cultural relativity means, on the contrary, that the appropriateness of any positive or negative custom must be evaluated with regard to how this habit fits with other group habits. Having several wives makes economic sense among herders, not among hunters. While breeding a healthy skepticism as to the eternity of any value prized by a particular people, anthropology does not as a matter of theory deny the existence of moral absolutes. Rather, the use of the comparative method provides a scientific means of discovering such absolutes. If all surviving societies have found it necessary to impose some of the same restrictions upon the behavior of their members, this makes a strong argument that these aspects of the moral code are indispensable. Part of the problem has to do with ethnocentrism, the polar opposite of cultural relativism. Both concepts, ethnocentrism and cultural relativism, can be placed as polar ends of a continuum, each reflecting a different approach, either as exclusive or inclusive; a different mindset either closed or open to differences, and an attitude and behavior that is either insensitive or sensitive to another culture. What is ethnocentrism? There are three levels of ethnocentrism: a positive one, a negative one, and an extreme negative one. The positive definition defines ethnocentrism as "the point of view that one's own way of life is to be preferred to all others" (Herskovits, p. 21). There is nothing wrong with such feelings, for "it characterizes the way most individuals feel about their own cultures, whether or not they verbalize their feeling" (Herskovits, p. 21). It is ethnocentrism that which gives people their sense of peoplehood, group identity, and place in historyall of which are valuable traits to possess. Ethnocentrism becomes negative when "one's own group becomes the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it" (Sumner 1979, p. 13). It reaches its extreme negative form when "a more powerful group not only imposes its rule on another, but actively depreciates the things they hold to be of value" (Herskovits, p. 103). Apartheid, the holocaust, and the genocide of the American Indian are all examples of this third level of ethnocentrism. Audrey Smedley gives us the key to understanding ethnocentrismthe importance of cultural differenceswhen she declares: "The important point about ethnocentrism is that it is grounded in the empirical reality and perceptions of sociocultural differences and the separateness of interests and goals that this may entail. There [can] be no ethnocentrism without cultural differences, no matter how trivial or insignificant these may appear to an outsider" (Smedley, 1993:31). Vincent Ruggiero tells us that, "just as it is natural for us to read the behavior of others in terms of our own standards, so it is natural to view actions in other cultures from the codes of our culture. What seems fair to us we assume is fair to them; and when we see an action we regard as treacherous, we likewise assume that they have violated their code. Yet a deeper understanding of their code may reveal that they have not only not been violating it, but in fact observing it" (Ruggiero, p. 18). How can one eliminate ethnocentrism? Vincent Ruggiero (p. 18) suggests three important steps to take which will enable us "to penetrate deception of appearance." 1. "Study the cultural context in which the action occurs." 2. "Determine the circumstances of time, place, and condition surrounding it." 3. "Learn the reasoning that underlies it and the moral value it reflects." At the heart of these three steps lies the importance of learning to "take the role of the other," the ability to see things, especially that with which we are not familiar, from the perspective of the other before any consideration of judgment is considered. The Difference Between the Social Sciences and Ethics: What makes this difficult is that whereas anthropology and sociology are empirical sciences, fields of study based on observations and facts, ethics is a normative discipline, based on judgments and moral values. The social sciences are limited to what can be observed, measured and verified. The question of what is right and wrong lies outside of the discipline, in the field of ethics. A scientist can only predict a certain outcome, and not pass judgment on whether that outcome is morally right or wrong. When a scientist makes a moral declaration, she or he is no longer speaking as a scientist but as a concerned citizen, who has recognized the separation of roles and has bracketed off his or her role as scientists, so as to speak as a moral citizen. For example, a "physician is expected to treat patients he dislikes or whom she believes are a social menace with the same care with which she or he treats their other patients. A judge, in her role of citizen, vigorously condemns a defendant, but, in her role of judge, discharges the culprit. This is not regarded as inconsistent or schizoid behavior. An actor wins applause for the excellence of his enactment of the villain's role, not because of his personal approval or disapproval of the character portrayed. The latter question is recognized as a separate matter, of relevance in other contexts. Exactly the same is true of the scientist. He or she has performed their full function as scientist when they have clearly depicted the consequences of a proposed type of behaviorfor example, when they have accurately predicted an explosion. Their applause or abhorrence of the explosion is not part of their scientific conclusion or function" (Lundberg 1965, p. 18). On the negative side, ethnocentrism also implies the failure or refusal to view reality from the perspective of the other, thereby causing one to reject the other's contribution as valid, simply because it differs from one's own. This is one reason why ethicists, whose discipline arises out of philosophy (a metaphysical discipline), have difficulty with cultural relativism, which arises out of anthropology and sociology (both empirical disciplines). Each discipline approaches cultural relativism from a different paradigm or way of seeing the world. Thus ethicists approach cultural relativism from the perspective of philosophers and not from the perspective of social scientists. The result is a rejection of the concept, since it does not fit within the parameters of their discipline. But lest one is too quick to judge ethics, one needs to realize that sociology does the same with religion. Since God does not fit the parameters of an empirical approach, many social scientists have tended to reject the divine aspect of religion. Each using a different instrumentthe analogy of a telescope versus a microscopeis not able to include the perspective of the other (see graphic). COMPARING METHODOLOGIES: ETHICS AND SOCIOLOGY But this is because they have used the norms of one discipline to evaluate the findings of another, which is what cultural relativism is seeking to prevent in the first place. Each culture, each society, or, in this case, each discipline, must be evaluated in terms of its own structures, values and presuppositions, and not those of another. Only through such an approach will its contributions be understood. This principle of evaluating other perspectives on their own merits is important for all disciplines and not just for ethics versus the social sciences. The usual approach is the fallacy of trying to explain all of reality from the narrow perspective of one discipline, usually one's own. More on this later. Cultural Relativism Explained: Understanding this difference of approach can help us to grasp the importance of cultural relativism and where ethicists have misunderstood its positive contributions. What is cultural relativism? It is the idea that each culture or ethnic group is to be evaluated on the basis of its own values and norms of behavior and not on the basis of those of another culture or ethnic group. The basic principle out of which cultural relativism emerges is a simple one: "Judgments are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his or her own enculturation" (Herskovits, p. 15). It is simply the process by which a culture is learned. This is because much of human knowledge tends to be socially conditioned. In other words, "our thinking is determined by our social position" (Mannheim 1936, p. 125). And "thought is directed in accordance with what a particular social group expects. Thus, out of the possible data of experience, every concept combines within itself only that which, in the light of the investigators' interests, it is essential to grasp and to incorporate" (Mannheim, pp. 273-274). For this reason, "people in different social positions [and cultural settings] think differently" (Mannheim). Thus, where you stand determines what you see! We must therefore realize that, "the values by which [a people] live are relative to the particular kind of cultural learning they have experienced" (Herskovits, p. 93). Cultural relativism, of course, deals with more than just morals, ethics and values; it is also concerned with judgments of time and space and volume, differences in perception and cognition, as well as of conduct (Herskovits, p. 52). But it is in the area of ethics that controversy over its implications rages. What gives ethicists difficulty is a failure to recognize two important factors integral to cultural relativism. The first and perhaps the chief area where ethicists fail to understand cultural relativism is the failure to distinguish between intra-cultural and cross-cultural relativism. Cultural relativism does not imply that there is no system of moral values to guide human conduct. Rather, it suggests that every society has its own moral code to guide members of that society, but that these values are of worth to those who live by them, though they may differ from our own (Herskovits, p. 31). It is a failure to understand this difference that leads an ethicist like Abraham Edel to declare, "If cultural relativity is a sociological truth, then your morality is a function of your domicile. If moral assertions are simply expressive, it all depends on what you feel" (Edel 1955, pp. 27-28). But the problem here is the failure to realize that the principle of cultural relativism only has relevance across cultures and not within one culture. It is a cross-cultural principle and not an intra-cultural one. Failure to recognize that cultural relativism is a cross-cultural principle, leads ethicists to envisage an intra-cultural relativism, where the validity of any one society having any moral standards is denied, resulting in moral chaos and ethical anarchy (Herskovits, p. 64). Yet the culture of no society is marked by the kind of moral disintegration that intra-cultural relativism, if practiced, would bring on, for every culture has its own moral code of behavior for the members of its own society, without which no society would be possible. These values, however, only have worth and meaning to that society, and cannot be and should be used to measure the morality of another society. Our individual ethical behavior is shaped by our enculturative experience, by the manner in which we have been socialized to behave in a given social context. Every society has its own socialization process, which enculturates members as to how to behave morally. "Every society has its own rules of conduct, an ethical system, a moral code, that the individual members rarely question. Intraculturally, any act that falls outside the limits of accepted variation will be adjudged in terms of preexisting standards, and either rejected or reconciled with them. Those who make a society have no more difficulty in defining reality than they have in defining good conduct and bad. But this is within a society. Cultural relativism developed because the facts of differences in these concepts of reality or in moral systems, plus our knowledge of the mechanisms of cultural learning, forced the realization of the problem of finding valid cross-cultural norms. In every case where criteria to evaluate the ways of different peoples have been proposed, in no matter what aspect of culture, the question has at once posed itself: 'Whose standards?' The force of the enculturative experience channels all judgments. In fact, the need for a cultural relativistic point of view has become apparent because of the realization that there is no way to play this game of making judgments across cultures except with loaded dice" (Herskovits, p. 56). In other words, "each culture must be examined in terms of its own structure and values, instead of being rated by the standards of some other civilization exalted as absolutewhich in practice of course is always our own civilization" (Kroeber 1950, cited by Herskovits, p. 39). Cultural relativism is not the same as ethical relativism. "Cultural relativism has an exclusive cross-cultural reference; whereas ethical relativism is essentially intra-cultural in its focus. The first raises the question of the validity of applying the criteria that sanction the behavior and guide the thinking of the people of one society to the standards of another; the second raises the question of whether any standards can be drawn to direct individual conduct" (Herskovits, p. 88) within any one society. Cultural relativism does not advocate individual or ethical relativism. So far anthropological and sociological studies show that no society tolerates moral or ethical anarchy. Which leads us to the second problem, the failure of understanding the difference between absolutes and universals. Absolutes are fixed values which are not admitted to have variation, but which differ from culture to culture, and from epoch to epoch. While universals are those values that transcend cultures, which all cultures manifest (Herskovits, p. 32). Absolutes derive from universals. While universals transcend cultures, absolutes are the way specific cultures implement universals in their particular societies. Take modesty, for example. Every society has the universal principle of modesty. But what passes for modesty in one society, say for example in Arab societies in the Middle East is not what passes for modesty in Río de Janiero in Brazil or in Malibu Beach in California. Thus, "every society. . . has its moral code, which carries unquestioned sanctions for its members. But once we move into another society, we find a series of values differently conceptualized, differently phrased, but having sanctions of equal force. It is therefore apparent, by extending this observation to human society in general, that while the fact that every culture has an accepted code governing attitudes and conduct which has been empirically established, the absolute worth of any one of these codes" to other cultures, other than for the given society in terms of its own culture, has not been empirically validated (Herskovits, p. 89). Thus, "morality is a universal, and so is enjoyment of beauty, and some standard for truth. The many forms these concepts take, however, are but products of the particular historical experience of the societies that manifest them" (Herskovits). In other words, every society has its absolutes, but not all absolutes are universals. Thus, in order to avoid the problem of ethnocentrism, where our culture serves as the standard by which to evaluate other cultures, the behavior of other cultures and societies must be evaluated in terms of the total structure of its social and cultural forms and the sanctions that it prescribes. The importance of this lies in "that the values every human group assigns to its conventions arise out of its own historical background, and can be understood only in the light of that background" (Herskovits, pp. 41 and 47). This does not mean, however, that all cultural practices are equally valid. While each cultural practice may be understood against the backdrop of that culture, this does not mean that each cultural practice is appropriate, and therefore to be tolerated and respected. Some cultural practices are better than others. If you value cost-effective production, or the maximizing of profit with the minimum of effort, for example, than a steel ax and plow are better than stone and wooden ones, and Western medicine is more effective in eradicating disease than animal potions and witchs brews. This is not just an ethnocentric perspective on our part, but a pragmatic principle that "that which works is 'better' than that which doesn't work" (Bagish 1990, p. 34). But what does this mean? It means that "any belief or practice that enables human beings to predict and control events in their lives, with a higher degree of success than previous beliefs or practices did, can be said to 'work better.' Better prediction and better control of eventsthose are the two essential ingredients that enable human beings to adapt better to the world around them" (Bagish, p. 34). Thus, not all cultural practices and values are valid or of equal value and worth. While this position enables us to understand the absolute values of a given society, such as: the greed of Anglo-Americans in the genocidal efforts behind the doctrine and practice of Manifest Destiny which resulted in wiping out well over 75% of all American Indians; the mindset of Hitler and the Third Reich which eventually led to the annihilation of six million Jews; or the white supremacist ideology of South Africans that until recently denied Blacks many basic human rights, it does not justify these values. How then does ones solve this dilemma and apparent conflict between absolutes and universals? Let me propose an operational principle. Whenever absolute values violate universal values, normally regarded as "human rights," such as the sanctity of life or respect for the dignity and well-being of other humans, than a people from another culture and society have the right and responsibility to object to such dehumanization and to work toward bringing about an end to such practices. Such efforts, however, must not come across with a sense of triumphalism or a we-are-better-than-you attitude. But must be approached with a sense of humility, since no country or culture have a "clean record" when it comes to the practice of human rights, or environmental concerns, for that matter. Cultural Relativism, Religion, and Sources of Knowledge: Cultural relativism, however, raises a problem for itself in that, as it is true of any discipline, it tends to view reality exclusively from its own narrow perspective. This is what Abraham Kaplan calls, "the law of the instrument" (Kaplan 1964, p. 28). It is based on the old adage: "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Let me illustrate. When my son was five years old my wife bought him a small Fisher Price wooden hammer and small bench with pegs, which pegs he could hammer down and then turn the bench over and hammer the pegs down again. After a few minutes of playing with this toy, my son got bored with the bench and pegs, but not with the hammer. Soon we began to discover things broken throughout the houselight bulbs, light switches, dishes, cups, yelps from the dog, you name it. My son had become obsessed with the hammer, defining his small world in terms of it. For him, the problems in his "world" were that things needed hammering. Solution? Hammer them! Hence we have the Law of the Instrumentthe instrument determines the problem as well as the solution. Applied to any field of study, the law of the instrument exposes the fallacy of trying to explain reality exclusively from one disciplinary perspective. Thus as important as the cultural relativist perspective is, it is still only one perspective; it is only one way of looking at phenomena. The basic premise of anthropology and sociology is that "all experience is culturally mediated. There is no reality known to [humankind] beyond, or in addition to, cultural [or social] reality. All reality as known is culturally [and socially] determined. Once this basic assumption is granted then it follows a priori that all modes of perception and all value judgments are also culturally conditioned since culture constitutes a closed, self-intelligible system. This thesis implies that culture is an absolute reality in the sense that culture alone is autonomous and independent, and that all modes of human experience and thought are relative thereto because they are functions of culture and dependent on it for their form and content" (Bidney 1959, p. 66). But the social sciences provide only one perspective of looking at realitythe human perspective. The divine perspective, which lies outside of the realm of the social sciences, is lacking; and yet is most essential in order to comprehend human moral conduct. Therefore, "as against the uncritical assumption of cultural relativism that culture is the primary determinant of human experience and that all reality as known is cultural reality," it is important to realize "that culture is but one of the conditions of human experience" (Bidney). There is a "meta-cultural reality" which "exists independent of human experience and which is gradually discovered but never fully comprehended in the course of human experience" (Bidney). Thus, the way one experiences reality never truly exhausts the nature of that reality. This does not deny the contribution made by cultural relativism, for the truth of cultural conditioning and the importance of cultural relativism in understanding human experience is now an accepted principle of human interaction in a global, multicultural world society. "The criticism offered here concerns only the degree of this cultural determinism and cultural relativism. Culture is not the only or primary factor in human experience; it is but one essential condition of human experience"(Bidney, p. 67). Let me explain this further drawing from a typology on sources of knowledge which Jonathan H. Turner discusses in his book, The Structure of Sociological Theory (1986, p. 3). Turner declares: The typology asks two basic questions: (1) is the search for knowledge to be evaluative or neutral? and (2) is the knowledge developed to pertain to actual empirical events and processes or is to be about nonempirical realities? In other words, should knowledge tell us what should be or what is? and should it make reference to the observable world or to other, less observable realms? If knowledge is to tell us what should exist (and by implication, what should not occur) in the empirical world, then it is ideological knowledge. If it informs us about what should be but does not pertain to observable events, then the knowledge is religious or about forces and beings in another realm of existence., If knowledge is neither empirical nor evaluative, then it is a formal system of logic, such as mathematics. And if it is about empirical events and nonevaluative, then it is science. What Turner's statement can best be illustrated with the following graphic, a 4 by 4 table which visually explains the importance of Turner's typology. What Turner is suggesting with this typology is that: There are different ways to look at, interpret, and develop knowledge about the world. Science is only one way. It is based upon the presumption that knowledge can be value free, that it can explain the actual workings of the empirical world, and that it can be revised on the basis of careful observations of empirical events. And yet this view of science is itself faulty, for none of us sees the world objectively. Reality is not so much what is in front of us, but what is in our heads. Even the questions that we raise about our world are filtered through our experiences. However, the point of this topological discussion is to suggest that our knowledge of the world come to us from different sources, science being only one of them. For the religious, divine revelation is another source. The divine speaks to humankind in sacred writings, such as the Bible, the Torah, the Koran or Bhagavad-Gita, out of which emerge diverse cultural values. Even here, however, these sacred writings, like other realities, are understood by human beings through their own cultural experience. Nevertheless, these moral teachings, many of which transcend cultures, must be culturally perceived. The Christian, for example, when confronting social ethics, must recognize the importance of cultural relativism, as well as the fact that God speaks to humankind within their own specific cultural context. Thus the Word, both living and written, takes on fleshsocioculturally conditioned fleshin order to meet the needs of humankind. Thus, cultural relativism, as a new way of seeing, is a necessary optic to perceive the socio-cultural reality in todays multicultural, world society. It is "new" in the sense that most people tend to be socialized within an ethnocentric perspective. To move away from such a view and encompass a culturally relativistic one can be rather traumatic for most people. Yet such a perspective is necessary if a person is to become a "world citizen"a person who is able to transcend his/her own racial/ethnic, gender, cultural and socio-political reality and identify with humankind throughout the world, at all levels of human need. S/he is a transcending person who is not limited by the usual social boundaries, but whose operating life-principle is compassionthe ability to take the role of the other in order to help remove suffering. This is the goal to attain as a cultural relativist to become a world citizen. The needs of the 21st century demand nothing less. And a multicultural approach to education is the process that will make it possible. * * * * * * * * * * Bagish, Henry H. 1990. "Confessions of a Former Cultural Relativist." pp. 30-37 in Annual Editions Anthropology 90/91. Guilford, CT: The Dushkin Publishing Group, Inc. Bidney, David. 1959. "The Philosophical Presuppositions of Cultural Relativism and Cultural Absolutism." Pp. 51-76 in Ethics and the Social Sciences, edited by Leo R. Ward. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame. Edel, Abraham. 1955. Ethical Judgment, the Use of Science in Ethics. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Herskovits, Melville, J. 1973. Cultural Relativism: Perspectives in Cultural Pluralism. New York: Vintage Books. Holmes, Arthur F. 1984. Ethics. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Kaplan, Abraham. 1964. The Conduct of Inquiry. New York: Harper. Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1944. Mirror For Man. Greenwick, CT: Fawcett. Kroeber, A. L. 1950. "Anthropology," Scientific American 183:87-94. Lundberg, George A. 1965. "Can Science Validate Ethics?" Pp. 13-20 in Life in Society: Readings in Sociology, edited by Thomas E. Lasswell, John H. Burma and Sidney H. Aronson. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman. Lutzer, Erwin. 1981. The Necessity of Ethical Absolutes. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. Maduro, Otto. 1982. Religion and Social Conflicts. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt, Brace Ruggiero, Vincent Ryan. 1973. The Moral Imperative: Ethical Issues for Discussion and Writing. New York: Alfred. Smedley, Audrey. 1993. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sumner, William Graham. 1979. Folkways and Mores. New York: Schocken. Jonathan H. Turner. 1986. The Structure of Sociological Theory. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company. * * * * * * * * * * Revised, November 1994

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True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.- Edith Wharton, 1924 Outside the bathyscaphe, the environment was hostile, but inside, the craft hummed peacefully. When Swiss explorer Jacques Piccard had left the ocean’s surface a few hours earlier, he descended from an angry, rollicking January sea some two hundred miles off the coast of Guam. In the turbulence, the crew interpreted the launch of the Trieste, Piccard’s submersible, as ominous. But conditions had calmed underwater, as the seven-foot capsule—just big enough to hold Piccard and his cocaptain, an American naval officer named Don Walsh—descended through shafts of quiet blue light. Soon the men would be at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, 36,000 feet under the sea, pressed by eight tons of pressure per square inch. There, where it had once been supposed that life was unsustainable and the conditions unsuitable for human contact or survival, Piccard, Walsh, and the Trieste arrived. A flat, colorless, foot-long fish greeted them through one of their craft’s portholes. It was 1960, and the world was expanding in every direction. Just a few weeks before the descent, John F. Kennedy had announced his candidacy for president. In Geneva, the first CERN particle accelerator began propelling protons. That year the United States would launch a variety of satellites to study weather and navigation, and underwater the USS Triton would complete the first successful circumnavigation of the globe in a nuclear submarine. Human curiosity advanced toward the boundaries of scientific and geopolitical limits. Piccard, with his submersible, was at the bottommost front line. The trip was quick. After years of planning and trials, it took Walsh and Piccard only four hours to travel from the surface to the bottom of the trench, the deepest-known part of the ocean, called Challenger Deep. During the descent, they observed the sounds of the Trieste and the shifting light pouring through its portholes. At two thousand feet, the depth swallowed all sunlight, and Piccard reported that, visually, “it was completely night.” Since Piccard and Walsh, the only other man to visit the Mariana Trench has been film director James Cameron. “When I got to the bottom,” he wrote, “it was completely featureless and uniform. My feeling was one of complete isolation from all of humanity.” More than anything, one realizes “how tiny you are down in this big, vast, black unknown and unexplored place.” Piccard and Walsh stayed for only half an hour. Unmoored from everything, the pair took stock of the scene and then headed back up. They had brought nothing with them to measure or probe or sample or label, and they conducted no experiments. They went, they saw, they returned; you might conclude that they made the trip for the sake of seeing if they could get there, never knowing if they would even be able to make it all the way down, much less back up. Three decades earlier, in the winter of 1934, the American rear admiral Richard Byrd had traveled to a different extreme, attempting to man a weather station in the center of Antarctica by himself during the continent’s six-month winter night. He had told his funders that his goal was to observe polar light and to study weather, but in his 1938 memoir of the experience, Alone, he confessed to a different motivation: “We are caught up in the winds that blow every which way,” he wrote. “And in the hullabaloo, the thinking man is driven to ponder where he is being blown and to long desperately for some quiet place where he can reason undisturbed and take inventory.” During that solo winter, he observed that “it’s not getting to the pole that counts. It’s what you learn of scientific value on the way. Plus the fact that you get there and back without being killed.” Byrd’s logic, which foretold that trip by Piccard and Walsh, follows an old, hand-me-down adage. Even just writing it out makes me feel like a Girl Scout: The journey is its own reward. But what sounds at first cheesy and well-worn may reveal a kind of general truth about adapting to terra incognita. In the 1990s a Canadian psychologist named Peter Suedfeld, along with his colleagues Claude Bachelard and Jack Stuster, was commissioned by NASA, in research initiated by the French space agency, to study French officers working in an Antarctic research station. The goal was to understand how humans deal with confined, close-quarter spaces in order to find what profile might be required for long-duration space exploration. The researchers assigned the officers the task of keeping journals; when they studied the journals later, they found that particular themes emerged. One of these the researchers described as expressing “an appreciation for the special experience of living and working in a remote, hostile, and unspoiled environment.” Such entries include “feelings of awe concerning natural phenomena, such as violent storms and breathtaking views.” These struck the psychologists as important; appreciations like this implied a positive kind of personal adjustment to the situation. They labeled these entries “Beauty/special experience/wonderment.” Cameron described the “big, vast, black unknown” that Walsh and Piccard first encountered at the bottom of the trench; Byrd was enraptured in his polar home by the sky and stars, unimpeded by the lights of civilization, and he romanticized them extensively in his diary. “Numberless stars crowded the sky. I had never seen so many. You had only to reach up and fill your hands with the bright pebbles,” he wrote of his first stunning night alone. “And it was all mine: the stars, the constellations, even the earth as it turned on its axis. If a great inward peace and exhilaration can exist together, then this, I decided my first night alone, was what should possess the senses.” In 1982 cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev was awestruck from yet another angle when he spent a record-breaking 211 days in the space station Salyut 7. Reflecting from his capsule above Earth, he wrote, “I watched the aurora australis in the Southern Hemisphere above Antarctica. This really is the end of the world! Magnificent! Light-colored cloud wreaths spread on the horizon, fountains of white-green-burgundy streams reaching up to the stars surrounding the station as we flew in Earth’s shadow through the light jungles of silent space.” What marks the person who can gaze out a window in wonder rather than fall apart in confined space? It is a question there is a growing urgency to answer. Soon humankind will travel to Mars, undertaking a journey estimated to take a minimum of two and a half years. Whoever will be among the first to go must be capable of tolerating an extended hiatus from family and friends, from trees and running water, from holiday pastimes and the comforting banalities of a Sunday afternoon—from Earth—without growing despondent. Suedfeld wrote, “To appreciate the nature of life in a capsule, people have to open and perhaps to bend their mind a bit.” In other words, NASA is searching for the science of not losing your cool. The Trieste II, the successor to Jacques Piccard’s bathyscaphe, rests in Keyport, Washington, in the parking lot of the Naval Undersea Museum. A visitor is likely to ignore the spindly wire roping it off from touch. What, she might ask herself, could the pat of a hand do to the surface of a machine that’s been to the bottom of the ocean? Why not run her finger along the thick seam of the bathyscaphe’s massive tank, picturing what it’s like to peek out a muddy porthole into the pressured blackness of deepest sea? At first, the Trieste II appears big enough to accommodate a crew. But what initially presents as the ship’s cabin, a structure that rivals the size of a short school bus, is actually a buoyancy tank, which is what’s filled with incompressible gasoline to power the return journey up. The space for humans is a little sphere that calls to mind the head of R2-D2 and is the size of a love seat, nestled tightly below the bathyscaphe’s belly. When you adjust your perspective, you realize riding in the Trieste II would be like sinking to the bottom of the ocean in an airtight golf cart. It’s brilliant and terrifying. The design wasn’t originally Jacques Piccard’s; it was his father’s. And though the word bathyscaphe is inherently oceanic—derived from the Greek words bathus, “deep,” and skaphos, “ship”—the first design was meant for outer space. Auguste Piccard, a Swiss physicist, inventor, and explorer, was an avid balloonist who desired to travel where no man had gone before—the stratosphere—to observe cosmic rays. So he fashioned a giant pressurized sphere out of aluminum and, in 1931, took one of the first trips to outer space. Using a hot-air balloon to lift the little sphere carrying himself and one other man, Auguste floated nearly ten miles above the earth’s surface. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and His Wife (detail), by Jacques-Louis David, 1788. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman Gift, in honor of Everett Fahy, 1977. No man had yet ascended to this height, and the flight had some hair-raising foibles. When poking his head out of the sphere’s portal to do a final preflight check, Auguste’s assistant was shocked to find the balloon had already lifted the craft off the ground. Later, a lack of airflow in the vehicle almost asphyxiated them both. At last, though he had anticipated landing in the Adriatic Sea, Piccard crash-landed onto a glacier in the Austrian Alps. Grainy video footage shows a group of men rolling Piccard’s wrecked sphere down a mountain like a snowball. Auguste died in 1962, two years after Jacques’ pioneering journey to Challenger Deep. Though the two never undertook an expedition together, the father-son team were the progenitors of the capsule journey, one of the only known ways to explore frontiers where conditions are considered too hostile for humans to survive naturally. Capsules—pods, vessels, crafts—are pressurized and facilitate travel to these alien terrains. It’s not a coincidence that the family name may be familiar; Jean-Luc Picard, of the USS Enterprise, was so named by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry as a nod to the family who went where no men had gone before. The Piccards’ work was known to NASA early on. In 1966 Jacques was commissioned to build a craft that could drift underwater in ocean currents to help NASA study the mental health of future long-term space travelers. It was ready to launch in the summer of 1969. Just two days before the July 16 takeoff of Apollo 11, NASA towed the deep submarine off the Florida coast and released it into the Gulf Stream, where it drifted underwater 1,400 miles northward, resurfacing four weeks later near Maine. The immediate goal of the expedition was to study currents off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. But oceanic drafts were not the only dynamic being studied aboard the Ben Franklin. Among the submarine’s aquanauts was a NASA representative assigned the task of observing the psychological effects of isolation on the mission’s crew, which was sealed off and subsumed in the fifty-foot capsule. The observer had a number of boxes to check, including making a record of the crew’s sense of humor. It was not as odd a request as it might seem. How explorers dealt with confinement on a prolonged manned mission was a primary NASA concern, and for good reason. When Ernest Shackleton attempted to make the first land crossing of Antarctica, he drifted on a floe in Weddell Sea for two years after his ship was crushed by the ice that had locked it in place during the winter months. And yet no one on the mission died, a fact that is often attributed to Shackleton’s unorthodox approach to hiring and his propensity for jokes. His droll advertisement was thought to have read: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.” Those who responded seem likely to have been willing to take whatever fate that came. And the sensibility is not so far from that expressed in the opening statement of Andy Weir’s 2011 novel The Martian, in which capsule-dwelling protagonist Mark Watney frankly confesses, “I’m pretty much fucked.” (He survives.) The 1969 Gulf Stream dive broke underwater records, and NASA began its process of gathering information on how a mind behaves in prolonged confinement. The submarine making the mission possible was called a mesoscaphe—meso, “middle,” replacing bathus—designed by the younger Piccard, based on that first model, which took the elder Piccard to one end of our world and his son to the other. All of this history and none of it is apparent in the parking lot of the Naval Undersea Museum, where Trieste II makes very little sense when surrounded by cars. Their mundanity neuters the bathyscaphe’s wonder; they are, after all, just machines for getting around. I visited on one of those days close to Christmas, when people tend to wrap things up early and slip out quietly, and as cars filtered out of the lot, the machine began to dominate the empty blacktop. The low winter sun and scattered clouds shot light that illuminated the craft like a glowing white whale, luminescent. It could have been breathing. NASA’s research presents an attempt to gain scientific purchase on what past explorers have discovered in practice: whether confined with others or isolated in solitude, one can feel dangerously lonely at the ends of the world. After a few weeks of checking his meters and making lackluster meals in his Antarctic station, Byrd felt his bravado subtly fade. Though he continued to be amazed by his surroundings, monotony set in. He reflected on his strategy: “The brain-cracking loneliness of solitary confinement is the loneliness of a futile routine. I tried to keep my days crowded; and yet, at the same time, I, the most unsystematic of mortals, endeavored to be systematic.” Knowing that idleness was a threat to his sanity, Byrd intentionally did odd jobs and tasks at a slow pace so they would draw out over several days and keep him busy. But even this enterprising was not enough to ward off the inevitable. “This morning I had to admit to myself that I was lonely. Try as I may, I find I can’t take my loneliness casually; it is too big. But I must not dwell on it. Otherwise I am undone.” Autopsy of the First Crocodile, Onboard, Upper Egypt, by Ernest Benecke, 1852. Benecke’s amateur photographs, taken while on a grand tour of Egypt and the Mediterranean, arguably make him the world’s first ethnographic photographer. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Purchase, William Talbott Hillman Foundation Gift, 2005. Though he didn’t know it at the time, Byrd was being poisoned by carbon monoxide in his airtight hut. Hallucinations amplified his solitude, and though he fought against giving in to these specters, things deteriorated. “I seem to be groping in cold reaches of interstellar space, lost and bewildered. The room is a nondimensional darkness, without shadow or substance; even after all these days, I sometimes ask myself, Where am I? What am I doing here?” He was ultimately saved from his almost certain demise by his colleagues back at base camp. The admiral’s weekly Morse-code dispatches had become nonsensical and hard to decipher, so his crew broke protocol and headed into the Arctic winter to rescue him. A mind unraveling—this is a central concern of NASA’s in assembling a team that would go to Mars. In Suedfeld’s study, the researchers gave guidelines to the officers, dictating how to journal most effectively for the sake of the project. They reminded their subjects that it’s easy to exaggerate trivial issues in confinement, asked them not to focus on the negative in their entries, and requested a sense of humor to keep things in perspective. It’s tempting to imagine how such guidelines would have affected the chronicling efforts of Byrd or Lebedev, who were certainly not journaling with the explicit idea, as the French officers were, of providing “future generations of spacecraft designers with valuable insights regarding human performance that could not be obtained in any other way.” Byrd allowed himself to address the darkness of his situation in his journal. Lebedev grew depressed and existential toward the end of his trip, often even questioning the purpose of his journey. But NASA’s future concern is how to foretell and control a lonely traveler’s behavior—how to promote the most productive pioneers. One of its lines of inquiry extends back to an incident in the 1950s in which a member of an international Antarctic team developed symptoms of schizophrenia after being isolated too long on the desolate tundra. Another has examined the behaviors of isolated POWs in the Korean War. It’s been determined that, not unlike what prisoners suffer in solitary confinement, being subjected to long periods of deprivation leads to extreme mental deterioration. Researchers describe this as “winter-over syndrome,” wherein crew members become depressed, irritable, and cognitively impaired. It is nearly identical to a condition called “security housing unit syndrome,” which prisoners develop after long periods of time spent in solitary confinement. In tight, desperate spaces, even voluntary confinement can take the psyche hostage. So how can people, as Suedfeld put it, “bend their minds” to keep sane in a capsule? One way is to surround explorers with a sense of the natural world they left behind. Suedfeld’s report tells the story of a ship that in 1826 departed France loaded with boxes of olive and fig trees. The trees were being carried to Australia as a favor, but the ship’s captain found they provided a meaningful reminder of home, and he wrote in his log, “In the dreary monotony of the ocean, their greenness delights the eye, lifts the jaded spirit, and brings back happier thoughts.” Lebedev’s diary tells a similar tale. The cosmonaut fixated on a plant project in which he propagated pea shoots on the space station. His perky updates about the fledgling plants reveal their stabilizing force. “This is a little space garden,” he reported. “When I smell it, it seems I can smell the earth.” Another method is the one that might have saved Byrd, had the carbon monoxide not almost got him. Studies of Shackleton’s expedition concluded he kept his men alive by forcing them to do time-consuming work, no matter how arbitrary it was—housework, in this context, presenting as a form of salvation. On Mars, it seems, it will be smart to have a hobby. I recommend gardening. In the great Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, the title character, the king of Uruk, becomes consumed with worry about death after seeing his best friend perish from illness. Despite being two-thirds god, Gilgamesh is not immortal. So when he hears of a man named Utnapishtim who holds the secret of eternal life, he sets out into the hinterlands to find it. Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.- Susanne K. Langer, 1942 During his journey, he is warned that his quest is impractical, but such advice doesn’t stop him. When Gilgamesh finally reaches the man he’s been looking for, the story gets more complicated: Utnapishtim had been granted eternal life only as a reward for building a boat to save his family, animals, and plant seeds from a flood sent by the gods. Afterward, the gods swore never to destroy mankind again; men would remain mortal, though humanity would prevail. Gilgamesh is unable to share in Utnapishtim’s reward, but he is told of another option: there is a plant at the bottom of the ocean that when consumed can restore men to the strength of their youth. He goes after it, binding his feet to boulders, sinking to the ocean floor, and finally locating his treasure. But he doesn’t have it for long. A serpent steals it, and Gilgamesh humbly returns home. Even though both his mythical missions to find personal immortality failed, the world’s earliest deep-sea explorer probed those unknown murky depths and delivered a finding no one had even known to look for: he brought back the revelation that mankind had been spared. It takes a strange faith to approach a frontier isolated from others for the sake of possible new knowledge. A conservative view would have it that traveling outside known realms for the sake of research is too costly and dangerous for the slim chance of a useful result. In 1912 Robert Falcon Scott’s disastrous journey on the Terra Nova to the Antarctic—in which team members perished due to untested technology and lapses in judgment—called into question the decision to explore such remote spaces without the promise of concrete gains. Scott’s fellow explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard fought such criticism, writing in his 1922 memoir, The Worst Journey in the World, “It is really not desirable for [those] who do not believe that knowledge is of value for its own sake to take up this kind of life.” Cherry-Garrard was particularly upset about the tragic ending to the expedition—a failure by many metrics. But the mission’s ultimate effect may not entirely be quantified. Whatever the men of the Terra Nova were looking for outweighed, at the outset, the horror of trying to find it. Finding nothing at all was a risk they were willing to take. This sense of risk is not undersold back at the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport, where the walls are plastered with placards reminding visitors of the heroics that went into visiting the seafloor, hammering home the lives lost, dangers faced, and hardships endured just so you could be there to visit the Trieste II. In the gift shop, I bought a hat with the U.S. naval deep-sea-diver insignia on it, the image of two seahorses on either side of an old steel diving-suit helmet. The volunteer ringing me up eyed me and asked whether I was a diver myself. I confessed I wasn’t, which was true, but I knew you don’t always have to travel to hostile climates to know what being alone feels like, that loneliness as it confines and isolates is present on the seafloor as well as in the laboratory, the journal entry, or the artistic endeavor. Whatever removes you from comfort, forces you into the unknown, asks you to brave the small space of personhood to try to feel a sense of—as some would have it—beauty, special experience, or wonderment. Russian cosmonaut Yury Gagarin, the first person to travel into space, 1963. © Private Collection / Bridgeman Images. I thought of a friend of mine who worked as a cook in an Antarctic research station in 2007 and who recalled Robert Falcon Scott’s tent, perfectly preserved in ice just how he left it nearly one hundred years before, filled with frozen dead penguins and newspapers from the turn of the twentieth century. To stay active, my friend would often leave the station and walk out on the tundra, where he would feel overwhelmed by the idea that he could walk to his death in any direction. “It made me realize everything is so fragile,” he told me. An explorer’s reverence for fragility and awe—as important as strength or courage. “We are lucky people,” wrote Lebedev about being isolated with a Russian colleague in the space station, “because out of four billion people, just the two of us are flying in space, an event we still don’t understand completely. We still don’t comprehend its importance in our lives.” Byrd, too, struggled to define his experience, one of intense isolation along with undeniable revelation. “No doubt it was partly animal: the sheer expanding discovery of being alive, of growing, of no longer being afraid. But there was more to it than just that,” he wrote. “There was the sense of identification with vast movements: the premonition of destiny that is implicit in every man; and the sense of waiting for the momentary revelation.” During such moments, one has to be ready, patient, and alone.

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Библиотека сайта или "Мой Linux Documentation Project" |Purchase||Copyright © 2002 Paul Sheer. Click here for copying permissions.||Home| Next: 37. crond and atd Up: rute Previous: 35. The LINUX File   Contents - 36.1 Web Server Basics - 36.2 Installing and Configuring Apache - 36.2.1 Sample - 36.2.2 Common directives - 36.2.3 User HTML directories - 36.2.4 Aliasing - 36.2.5 Fancy indexes - 36.2.6 Encoding and language negotiation - 36.2.7 Server-side includes -- SSI - 36.2.8 CGI -- Common Gateway Interface - 36.2.9 Forms and CGI - 36.2.10 Setuid CGIs - 36.2.11 Apache modules and PHP - 36.2.12 Virtual hosts - 36.2.1 Sample In this chapter, we will show how to set up a web server running virtual domains and dynamic CGI web pages. HTML is not covered, and you are expected to have some understanding of what HTML is, or at least where to find documentation about it. In Section 26.2 we showed a simple HTTP session A web server is really nothing more than a program that reads a file from the hard disk whenever a GET /<filename>.html HTTP/1.0 request comes in on port 80. Here, we will show a simple web server written in shell script. [Not by me. The author did not put his name in the source, so if you are out there, please drop me an email.] You will need to add the line /etc/inetd.conf file. If you are running xinetd, then you will need to add a file containing directory. Then, you must stop any already running web servers and restart You will also have to create a log file /usr/local/var/log/sh-httpd.log) and at least one web page ( for your server to serve. It can contain, say: Note that the server runs as nobody, so the log file must be writable nobody user, and the index.html file must be readable. Also note the use of the getpeername command, which can be changed to if you do not have the netpipes package installed. [I am not completely sure if other commands used here are unavailable on other UNIX telnet localhost 80, as in Section 26.2. If that works and your log files are being properly appended (use tail -f ...), you can try to connect to http://localhost/ with a web browser like Netscape. Notice also that the command tells you which of your own IP addresses the remote client connected to) could allow the script to serve pages from a different directory for each IP address. This is virtual domains in a nutshell. [Groovy, baby, I'm in a giant nutshell.... how do I get out?] Because all distributions package Apache in a different way, here I assume Apache to have been installed from its source tree, rather than from a You can refer to Section 24.1 on how to install Apache from its source .tar.gz file like any other GNU package. (You can even install it under Windows, Windows NT, or OS/2.) The source tree is, of course, available from The Apache Home Page < Here I assume you have installed it in In the process, Apache will have dumped a huge reference manual Apache has several legacy configuration files: srm.conf are two of them. These files are now deprecated and should be left empty. A single configuration file may contain at minimum: With the config file ready, you can move the index.html file above to You will notice the complete Apache manual and a demo page already installed there; you can move them to another directory for the time being. Now run and then point your web browser to Here is a description of the options. Each option is called a directive in Apache terminology. A complete list of basic directives is in the file - As discussed in Section 29.2, some services can run standalone or from xinetd). This directive can be exactly inetd. If you choose inetd, you will need to add an appropriate line into your inetdconfiguration, although a web server should almost certainly choose standalone mode. - This is the directory superstructure [See page .] under which Apache is installed. It will always be the same as the value passed to - Many system services store the process ID in a file for shutdown and monitoring purposes. On most distributions, the - This option is used for communication between Apache parent and child processes on some non-UNIX systems. - This is the TCP port for standalone servers to listen on. - This option is important for security. It forces nobodyprivileges. If the web server is ever hacked, the attack will not be able to gain more than the privileges of the force a reverse DNS lookup on every connecting host, set this directive to on. To force a forward lookup on every reverse lookup, set this to double. This option is for logging purposes since access control does a reverse and forward reverse lookup anyway if required. It should certainly be offif you want to reduce latency. - Error messages include this email address. - If Apache has to return a URL for any reason, it will normally return the full name of the server. Setting to offuses the very host name sent by the client. - Add the server name to HTML error messages. - All files returned to the client have a type field specifying how the file should be displayed. If Apache cannot deduce the type, it assumes the MIME Type to be text/plain. See Section 12.6.2 for a discussion of MIME types. - Where errors get logged, usually - How much info to log. - Define a new log format. Here we defined a log format and call common. Multiple lines are allowed. Lots of interesting information can actually be logged: See /opt/apache/htdocs/manual/mod/mod_log_config.htmlfor a full description. - The log file name and its (previously defined) format. - This directive specifies the top-level directory that client connections will see. The string /opt/apache/htdocs/is prepended to any file lookup, and hence a URL http://localhost/manual/index.html.enwill return the file - This directive gives the default file to try serve for URLs that contain only a directory name. If a file index.htmldoes not exist under that directory, an index of the directory is sent to the client. Other common configurations use - Before serving a file to a client, Apache reads additional directives from a file .htaccessin the same directory as the requested file. If a parent directory contains a .htaccessinstead, this one will take priority. The .htaccessfile contains directives that limit access to the directory, as discussed below. The above is merely the general configuration of Apache. To actually serve pages, you need to define directories, each with a particular purpose, containing particular HTML or graphic files. The Apache configuration file is very much like an HTML document. Sections are started with and ended with >. The most common directive of this sort is which does such directory definition. Before defining any directories, we need to limit access to the root directory. This control is critical for security. This configuration tells Apache about the root directory, giving clients very restrictive access to it. The directives are [Some of these are extracted from the Apache manual.]: Optionsdirective controls which server features are available in a particular directory. There is also the syntax -option to include the options of the parent directory, for example, Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes. - The server will follow any symbolic links beneath the directory. Be careful about what symbolic links you have beneath directories with FollowSymLinks. You can, for example, give everyone access to the root directory by having a link htdocs--not what you want. - Execution of CGI scripts is permitted. - Server-side includes are permitted (more on this later). - Server-side includes are permitted, but the #includeof CGI scripts are disabled. - If a client asks for a directory by name and no index.htmlfile (or whatever DirectoryIndexfile you specified) is present, then a pretty listing of the contents of that directory is created and returned. For security you may want to turn this option off. - Content-negotiated MultiViews are allowed (more on this later). - The server will only follow symbolic links for which the target file or directory is owned by the same user ID as the link (more on this later). - All options except for MultiViews. This is the default setting. - Hosts that are not allowed to connect. You can specify a host name or IP address, for example, as: - which will deny access 10.1.2.3, all hosts beginning with 192.168.5., and all hosts ending in .cranzgot.co.za, including the host - Hosts that are allowed to connect. This directive uses the same - If order is Deny,Allow, then the Denydirectives are checked first and any client that does not match a Denydirective or does match an Allowdirective will be allowed access to the server. If order is Allow,Deny, then the Allowdirectives are checked first and any client that does not match an Allowdirective or does match a Denydirective will be denied access to the server. - In addition to the directives specified here, additional directives will be read from the file specified by AccessFileName, usually called .htaccess. This file would usually exist alongside your .htmlfiles or otherwise in a parent directory. If the file exists, its contents are read into the current AllowOverridesays what directives the .htaccessfile is allowed to squash. The complete list can be found in You can see that we give very restrictive to the root directory, as well as very restrictive access. The only server feature we allow is FollowSymLinks, then we any access, and then we remove the possibility that a file could override our restrictions. > directive sets restrictions on all files matching a particular regular expression. As a security measure, we use it to prevent access to all .htaccess files as follows: We are now finally ready to add actual web page directories. These take a less restrictive set of access controls: Our users may require that Apache know about their private web page directories ~/www/. This is easy to support with the special For this feature to work, you must symlink and create a directory www/ under each user's home directory. Hitting the URL http://localhost/~jack/index.html will then retrieve You will find that Apache gives a Forbidden error message when you try to do this. This is probably because home directory's permissions are too restrictive. Your choices vary between now making jack's home directory less restricted or increasing the privileges of Apache. Running Apache under the group by using Group www, and then running is a reasonable compromise. Sometimes, HTML documents will want to refer to a file or graphic by using a simple prefix, rather than a long directory name. Other times, you want two different references to source the same file. Alias directive creates virtual links between directories. For example, adding the following line, means that a URL will serve the file We do, of course, need to tell Apache about this directory: You will find the directory lists generated by the preceding configuration rather bland. The directive causes nice descriptive icons to be printed to the left of the file name. What icons match what file types is a trick issue. You can start with: This requires the Alias directive above to be present. The default Apache configuration contains a far more extensive map of file types. You can get Apache to serve Now if a client requests a file index.html, but only a file index.html.gz exists, Apache decompresses it on-the-fly. Note that you must have the MultiViews options enabled. The next options cause Apache to serve index.html is requested, filling in the preferred language code sent by the web browser. Adding these directives causes your Apache manual to display correctly and will properly show documents that have non-English translations. Here also, the MultiViews must be present. LanguagePriority directive indicates the preferred language if the browser did not specify any. Some files might contain a indicating a Russian character set encoding for this file. Many languages have such custom character sets. Russian files are named .html.ru.koi8-r. Apache must tell the web browser about the encoding type, based on the extension. Here are directives for Japanese, Russian, and UTF-8 [UTF-8 is a Unicode character set encoding useful for any language.], as follows: Once again, the default Apache configuration contains a far more extensive map of languages and character sets. Apache actually has a built-in programming language that interprets files as scripts. The output of such a script is returned to the client. Most of a typical .shtml file will be ordinary HTML, which will be served unmodified. However, lines like will be interpreted, and their output included into the HTML--hence the name server-side includes. Server-side includes are ideal for HTML pages that contain mostly static HTML with small bits of dynamic content. To demonstrate, add the following to your Create a directory /opt/apache/htdocs/ssi with the index and then a file footer.html containing anything you like. It is obvious how useful this procedure is for creating many documents with the same banner by means of a #include statement. If you are wondering what other variables you can print besides DATE_LOCAL, try the You can also goto to see some other examples. (I have actually never managed to figure out why CGI is called CGI.) CGI is where a URL points to a script. What comes up in your browser is the output of the script (were it to be executed) instead of the contents of the script itself. To try this, create a file Make this script executable with chmod a+x test.cgi and test the output by running it on the command-line. Add the line httpd.conf file. Next, modify your for the directory /opt/apache/htdocs to include After restarting Apache you should be able to visit the URL http://localhost/test.cgi. If you run into problems, don't forget tail /opt/apache/logs/error_log to get a full report. To get a full list of environment variables available to your CGI program, try the following script: The script will show ordinary bash environment variables as well as more interesting variables like QUERY_STRING: Change your script to and then go to the URL It is easy to see how variables can be passed to the shell script. The preceding example is not very interesting. However, it gets useful when scripts have complex logic or can access information that Apache can't access on its own. In Chapter 38 we see how to deploy an SQL database. When you have covered SQL, you can come back here and replace your CGI script with, This script will dump the table list of the database if it exists. Apache will have to run as a user that can access this database, which means changing User nobody to User postgres. [Note that for security you should really limit who can connect to the postgres database. See To create a functional form, use the HTTP <FORM> tag as follows. /opt/apache/htdocs/test/form.html could contain: which looks like: Note how this form calls our existing Here is a script that adds the entered data to a postgres SQL table: Note how the first lines of script remove all unwanted QUERY_STRING. Such processing is imperative for security because shell scripts can easily execute commands should ` be present in a string. To use the alternative ``POST'' method, change your The POST method sends the query text through stdin of the CGI script. Hence, you need to also change your opts= line to Running Apache as a privileged user has security implications. Another way to get this script to execute as user postgres is to create a setuid binary. To do this, create a file test.cgi by compiling the following C program similar to that in Section 33.2. chown postgres:www test.cgi and chmod a-w,o-rx,u+s test.cgi (or chmod 4550 test.cgi). Recreate your shell script as test.sh and go to the URL again. test.cgi, which becomes user postgres, and then executes the script as the postgres user. Even with Apache as User nobody your script will still work. Note how your setuid program is insecure: it takes no arguments and performs only a single function, but it takes environment variables (or input from stdin) that could influence its functionality. If a login user could execute the script, that user could send data via these variables that could cause the script to behave in an unforeseen way. An alternative is: This script nullifies the environment before starting the CGI, thus forcing you to use the POST method only. Because the only information that can be passed to the script is a single line of text (through the -e q option to sed) and because that line of text is carefully stripped of unwanted characters, we can be much more certain CGI execution is extremely slow if Apache has to invoke a shell script for each hit. Apache has a number of facilities for built-in interpreters that will parse script files with high efficiency. A well-known programming language developed specifically for the Web is PHP. PHP can be downloaded as source from The PHP Home Page < http://www.php.net> and contains the usual GNU installation instructions. Apache has the facility for adding functionality at runtime using what it calls DSO (Dynamic Shared Object) files. This feature is for distribution vendors who want to ship split installs of Apache that enable users to install only the parts of Apache they like. This is conceptually the same as what we saw in Section 23.1: To give your program some extra feature provided by some library, you can either statically link the library to your program or compile the library as a shared .so file to be linked at run time. The difference here is that the library files are (usually) called mod_name and are stored in They are also only loaded if a _module appears in httpd.conf. To enable DSO support, rebuild and reinstall Apache Any source package that creates an Apache module can now use the Apache utility /opt/apache/bin/apxs to tell it about the current Apache installation, so you should make sure this executable is in your You can now follow the instructions for installing PHP, possibly beginning with ./configure --prefix=/opt/php --with-apxs=/opt/apache/bin/apxs --with-pgsql=/usr. (This assumes that you want to enable support for the postgres SQL database and have postgres previously installed as a package under Finally, check that a file libphp4.so eventually ends up in httpd.conf then needs to know about PHP scripts. Add the and then create a file and test by visiting the URL Programming in the PHP language is beyond the scope of this book. Virtual hosting is the use of a single web server to serve the web pages of multiple domains. Although the web browser seems to be connecting to a web site that is an isolated entity, that web site may in fact be hosted alongside many others on the same machine. Virtual hosting is rather trivial to configure. Let us say that we have www.domain3.com. We want domains www.domain2.com to share IP address www.domain3.com has its own IP address of The sharing of a single IP address is called name-based virtual hosting, the use of a different IP address for each domain is called IP-based virtual hosting. If our machine has one IP address, we may need to configure a separate IP address on the same network card as follows (see Section 25.9): For each domain we now create a top-level directory. We need to tell Apache that we intend to use the IP 220.127.116.11 for several hosts. We do that Then for each host, we must specify a top-level directory as follows: All that remains is to configure a correct DNS zone for each domain so that lookups of 18.104.22.168 while lookups of You can then add index.html files to Next: 37. crond and atd Up: rute Previous: 35. The LINUX File   Contents Только зарегистрированные пользователи могут оценивать и комментировать статьи.

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Scutellaria — skullcap Scutellaria is a genus of about three hundred species, including mostly annuals and herbaceous perennials, and a few subshrubs. They are distributed widely across the temperate regions of the planet, and also occur in tropical regions at high altitude. They are classified in the huge mint family (lamiaceae), but unlike many of their cousins, they're not known for their fragrance. The genus name derives from the Latin word scutella, which means a little shield, dish or saucer - describing the little dish-like fruiting bodies left behind when the flowers fade. The common name refers to the flower itself, whose bottom calyx resembles a tiny medieval helmet. the little dishes I doubt scutellaria will ever be the object of massive gardening passion, like roses, hostas, daylilies, or even cranesbills. But I've developed a low-level collecting habit towards the genus - I'm intrigued enough to attempt any new variety that comes my way through seed exchanges. Through the years, I've tried my hand at many - not all successfully, mind you. Expect to see updates to this page as new ones enter our garden and strut their stuff! I'll be describing the skullcaps growing in our garden in the rest of this page. Nearly all of them came from seed that I received in trades and exchanges; it is quite possible that my identification is off for a few species. If you see any evidence of mis-identification, please let me know using the email link at the bottom of the page! Habit and cultivation The statures of scutellarias growing in our garden range from little ground-hugging things to medium-height upright plants - none much taller than about two feet. Some of them have been downright easy to keep alive and happy, while others seem to fade quickly. I've not yet figured out if that's because of natural differences in life span, or because I failed to provide the proper conditions for the species in the latter group to thrive. The skullcap that's graced our garden longest is S. incana, which we picked up a the Bowman's Hill wildflower sale many years ago. It still happily occupies the same space in our garden; every year I'm afraid it finally gave up (it's late to return in spring), but so far so good. Another one with staying power is S. altissima - although I'm not sure if it's the original plants that keep returning, or whether their place is taken by their generous offspring. In any case, our patch remains strong year after year. The smaller varieties have been shorter-lived, in my experience. S. baicalensis was among the first we tried. It's gorgeous, but only lasted two or three years. Several attempts to re-establish it were unsuccessful (I think it insists on good drainage, which I cannot always provide), but finally this year we have flowering plants again. Even smaller is S. pontica, which defied its billing as a perennial, behaving instead as a biennial for us. So I'll be experimenting with placement in years to come. One skullcap, the little woody-stemmed S. alpina, has already made its way into our rock garden, which provides the best-drained conditions our garden can offer. This may also be the best location for S. baicalensis, S. orientalis, and S. scoridifolia. On the other hand, some like it wet - most notably, S. galericulata (marsh skullcap) grows along the waterside; we have ours planted in a pot set right in our big pond's filtration bog, where its soil is consistently wet. It seems quite happy there. All of my skullcap multiplication efforts proceed via seed. I wish I could give you a single method for germinating scutellarias, but it's not that simple. Some species germinate easily and in great numbers; others only grudgingly yield a seedling or two from multiple attempts, even after lengthy I've had reasonable success germinating S. altissima and S. pontica without any cold treatment. S. baicalensis I've given about two weeks cold before germinating at room temperature. All others have been more recalcitrant; I have come to accept that S. incana needs about three months cold - given that treatment, it germinates nicely when returned to room temperature. The same probably holds for several other species that have been reluctant to sprout I share all of the detailed information on my germination attempts on the portrait pages for the individual species (linked in the captions of the tables below). Eventually, I hope I'll be able to provide good directions for a larger number of species. Oh, the seeds themselves? Little dark balls. The fall out of their scutellas easily, so be sure to harvest them not too long after they ripen - which is when the dishlets turn crispy - tan or brown. I don't have enough of an experience base to know how long the seeds remain viable - but in at least one case (for S. baicalensis), year-old seed germinated fine, while the same lot a year later failed to germinate at all. Fresher is almost certainly better. Skullcaps are not known for their brilliant foliage. But even though they are mostly grown for their blooms, there's enough variety in leaf appearance to take a closer look. On all members of the genus, leaves are arranged oppositely (in pairs along the stems). All the ones we grow are leafless in winter. The photos below illustrate some of the variety: |Downy skullcap (S. incana) has crinkly, elongated, gently serrated leaves in a muted shade of dark green. Attractive without drawing attention to itself. ||Tall skullcap (S. altissima) is apple-green, with slightly sharper serrations on triangular to ovate leaves. A stand of these creates a bright green swarm in the garden, looking good even when not in bloom. ||Chinese skullcap (S. baicalensis) features smooth, entire-margined, mid-green leaves. Some of our plants (particularly youngsters) have narrower leaves than shown here. |S. orientalis makes a marvellous mat of small glossy leaves, attractively serrated. ||Alpine skullcap (S. alpina)'s woody stems sprout small gray-green leaves - similar in shape but not size to those of S. altissima. ||S. pontica, another low-growing type, has small leaves with more gently scalloped margins. |Marsh skullcap (S. galericulata)'s leaves are triangular and just a bit smaller than those of S. altissima - but slightly ||S. tournefortii) likewise has serrated, roughly triangular leaves. ||Prairie skullcap (S. resinosa) has small, slightly felted, smooth-margined gray-green leaves. Even though most of the diversity in appearance derives from the plants' habits and foliage, the flowers are the primary reason most of us grow scutellarias. Many of them, viewed up close, have a bit of a funny-face look to them. It's the muppet show! The mini-gallery below shows some of the blooms: |S. incana sports bicolor flowers with a nice contrast between clear blue and crisp white. ||Another bicolor, S. alpina is quite a bit different - not only in the rose color, but also the pattern and the way the flowers are clustered at the stem tips. ||S. baicalensis takes the bicolor thing to a much subtler level - from a distance, they just look like a royal blue. ||S. altissima continues the blue theme in a slightly more muted tone, with flowers that are conspicuously arranged in pairs along one side of the flowering stem. |Temporarily breaking up the blues, here's S. orientalis with its soft-yellow flowers held just barely above the leafy mat. ||Returning to icy blue, S. galericulata also sports the one-sided pairs look. ||The magenta flowers of S. pontica are held along one side of the stem, and show just a touch of white on their lower lips and along their tubes. ||S. resinosa's flowers are pretty close to a clear true blue, with subtle white highlights. |Another cool blue, S. tournefortii pairs its two-tone flowers along one side of upright stems. Roughly divided into two categories: those that I've tried to grow (but failed), and those I've yet to try. In the first category we have S. diffusa, a lavender-flowered annual, S. lateriflora (which has thwarted many of my seed attempts), and S. ovata. I thought I had S. wononowii, but it turned out to be S. altissima (or so I believe). In the not-tried category, S. suffrutescens carries marvellous magenta flowers over a small-leaved low-growing mound - but it is hardy only to zone 7. 'Violet Cloud' is one of the few hybrid skullcaps I know of, with deep-violet flowers. It should be hardy to zone 6 at least. S. integrifolia is a US wildflower with narrow leaves and blue blooms. There are many more - these are just some of the more garden-worthy species I'm aware of. If you have others to recommend, please use the comment form Wikipedia entry with some basic information about the genus. The Open Directory Project's collection of links features mostly references to photographs of various species. A paper describing possible medicinal uses, also including general, cultivation, and propagation Alpicola: A Japanese page showing photographs of two dozen species. Visitors to this page have left the following comments |Mike Baker||Oct 22, 2008||I grow Scutellaria parvula, a native prairie species. I only gets about 6 inches tall. The flowers are unfortunately small. It does form a nice ground cover. I am currently letting mine go to see if a large mass of these plants will produce a better display. | Looks like a neat little plant that I wouldn't mind trying sometime. Adding it to my seed want list! |Annette Wright||Jan 01, 2009||I love skullcaps and what you can bring to flower namely pontica and orientalis I cannot, they are evergreen here, certainly can recommend indica,formosona,ventenatii and tournefortii, these are all great, one of the best grape coloured ones is scutellaria javanica. |Nirmal Joshee||Feb 28, 2010||I have many Scutellaria species and would like to exchange. I conduct research on their conservation and medicinal properties. And yes, you have a wonderful site. Thanks Nirmal - I have replied by email. |Scott||Apr 09, 2010||where can I get scutellaria galericulata and indica seeds? Can't find people selling these seeds on google.| |Tom Bayer||Jun 13, 2010||I simply goggled Scutellaria baicalensis and got your fantastic site. The information you have is invaluable. Just got the seeds from Hudson in California and needed that information on two weeks cold treatment. Only interested in medicinal properties at this point, but it appears to be a gorgeous plant as well. I live in Hillsdale, Michigan, which straddles Ohio and Indiana. Will take my time with your site. Beautiful! I also grow six species of bamboo. Gardening is a hobby as I'm retired. | |ROBERTA||Jul 16, 2010||Thank you for your very concise descriptions and photos, for now I am finally convinced I have a huge patch of Scutellaria altissima growing happily in my South Florida rose garden for the last 2 years. I don't know why my yard is ever changing, and I would miss this one if it does not return. It is a fantastic ground cover. Just one thing though- no one ever mentions the scent of the leaves...like lemon or grapefruit to me. Have you noted this as well?| I just tried, and I didn't notice a strong scent - maybe a slight minty or anisey fragrance. So maybe what you have is slightly different from ours. |ROBERTA||Jul 18, 2010||Well thank you for responding so promptly. Since there are so many species of Scutellaria, it is certainly possible this is somewhat different, though I am convinced from your photos that must be altissima. I will just for fun send you a couple of photos. I believe you are the man when it come to a Scutellaria ID. I will like looking over the rest of your site as well. Thanks again!| |Tony V.||Apr 26, 2011||I appreciate your graphics and descriptions - all very good. I was searching for photographs of the seedlings and embryos of Scutellaria baicalensis Georgi when I found your site. I am interested to take the challenge to grow some of them from seed... in zone 8/9. If you could include pictures of the young plants and seeds that would be tremendous. I'll drop in from time to time to see what you have here. |hermes||Mar 09, 2012||Thank you for your informative website with such beautiful photos. It will be interesting to see if my mother with dementia can manage to grow S.lateriflora (she kills houseplants by the over-kindess of water). Guess I'll have to plant it outside a container, right in the earth. I was about to order seeds but based on your miserable results I will wait for seedlings from a mail order house and pay the price. I am insomniac and I find a decoction or infusion useful. Tastes good too. I am growing scullcap to add a third, and fresh rather than dried, level of potency to my tinctures of the same plant. I will grow S. Baicalensis for the colour as well.| |Bryan||May 18, 2012||Hi, Nice job with all the photo's - the one (and perhaps most important) photo your missing is Sculleteria Lateriflora which is used medicinally in America. Apparently not all species of "scullcap" are related nor are they used the same medicinally....| I've tried to grow S. lateriflora once or twice (see my feeble portrait stub, but wasn't successful at growing them to maturity. |Catharine Gunderson||Feb 13, 2013||I volunteer at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum, and I have been wanting to find Skullcap in the wild for years. I heard it grows around here, but I may have found it as an ignored plant at The Arboretum yesterday. Too shady for it to produce flowers most likely, but it appears to be S. altissima or S.ggericulata. The leaves are very serrated, and from the specimen I collected, seem to grow opposite from each other. Under a Spruce tree's shade. i would love to know more about it, and will probably have to key it out (with help), as I don't want to take chances with a possible toxic species of Scutellaria as I lead herb walks, etc. The leaves have no scent, and they taste somewhat bitter. From the top leaves I picked, the stem doesn't seem to be square like the mint family. Do you have any ideas with what else I can try to i.d. it? I don't know if I will get help in keying it out, but I will try. Thanks. Love the pictures and the site. Cat (Catharine)| |Louise||Mar 12, 2013||I visited battery park NYC , just 2 weeks before the terrible floods, last october. I found lots of S.incana flowering and took photographs and a few seeds. I gave them 3 months of cold and sowed them in a cup filled with perlite and left in a warm, light spot. just 4 days on, I notice the first green bits appearing. am so excited. I live in the netherlands and assume our climate to be much like that in NYC, so can hardly wait for our spring to arrive and my young plants can grow on under natural circumstances. they will remind me of a wonderful holiday and I will probably never know whether the parent plants survived this terrible disaster. | Good luck with the babies. I bet their parents are doing just fine, too. |Jennifer Tomlinson||Mar 26, 2013||Hello, I'm interested in growing scutellaria galericulata but the only place I can find that sells the seeds is in the U.K. and they won't sell outside of country. Well, it grows in the wild on state land in certain areas of our county but I can't exactly go take cuttings. Does anyone know how to get ahold of the plants or seeds? Please email me if you do. firstname.lastname@example.org. Thanks.| |Randy Collins||May 30, 2015||Thank you for your informative website devoted to Scutellaria....my first intro to this wonderful genus was because of it's parentage in the Lamiaceae family. We have the white-tailed deer so abundantly in our area and they seem to not like many of the genera in the Lamiaceae group. My first attempt with Scutellaria was with S. integrifolia. This plant grows very nicely in our South Carolina garden. I am now trying S. baicalensis and want to try other species as well. Thanks again for your insightful material on these plants. | |Mia||Aug 03, 2015||I have a S. baicalensis plant that I just grew from seed earlier this year. It has flowered and I see the little disks you were talking about. When do I actually harvest them from the plant? Should they be green, brown or does it matter? Also, I assume the actual seeds are inside the disc? Is there anything I should know about opening it to get the seeds out? I appreciate the insights!| Wait till they are tan/brown. At that stage, you can easily strip them from the stems into a container. A little further crushing will release the small round seeds from the disk pouches. Don't wait too long, or they will self-release. I typically wait till most of the disks on a stalk have turned brown (with the top ones still green). |Kalie||Sep 21, 2015||I have found that we have a very abundant supply of skullcap growing wild. Not sure what we should or could do with it. | I'm not aware of anything you should do with it besides enjoy its appearance. It's in the mint family, but I'm not aware of any culinary or medicinal use. I welcome comments about my web pages; feel free to use the form below to leave feedback about this particular page. For the benefit of other visitors to these pages, I will list any relevant comments you leave, and if appropriate, I will update my page to correct mis-information. Faced with an ever-increasing onslaught of spam, I'm forced to discard any comments including html markups. Please submit your comment as plain text. If you have a comment about the website as a whole, please leave it in my guestbook. If you have a question that needs a personal response, please June 18, 2015

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Energy, Department of ENERGY, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY, DEPARTMENT OF. The Department of Energy (DOE) became the twelfth U.S. cabinet-level agency on 1 October 1977 under the Department of Energy Organization Act. Its responsibilities fall into three broad categories: energy, research, and national security. The agency collects data on energy production and consumption, operates the petroleum reserve, and oversees numerous research programs including energy projects and a wide array of mathematics, science, and engineering projects at the national laboratories. The DOE also over-sees nuclear weapons research, production, and ultimately disposal. The energy secretary advises the president on international energy issues and nuclear nonproliferation. The DOE sprung primarily from the Atomic Energy Commission, the Federal Energy Administration, and the Energy Research and Development Administration. The Atomic Energy Commission was created under the Atomic Energy Act of 1946; it replaced the wartime Manhattan Engineer District, which had developed the world's first atomic weapon. The new commission primarily oversaw nuclear weapons development and testing. However research and development extended to nuclear power reactors as part of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program in 1953. The oil crisis of 1973 and the increasing need for research on new forms of energy inspired passage of the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974. This act established the Energy Research and Development Administration, which assumed the Commission's research and development programs. Before the act was passed, President Richard Nixon had established the Federal Energy Office within the Executive Office of the President to oversee fuel allocation, rationing, and prices. He wanted a cabinet-level agency to assume these roles and work on the commercial development of new energy technologies so that the United States could become energy self-sufficient by 1980. Nixon signed into law the act creating the Federal Energy Administration (FEA) to replace the Federal Energy Office. The new agency was also made up of several offices formerly of the Department of the Interior: the offices of petroleum allocation, energy conservation, energy data and analysis, and oil and gas. For three years the FEA administered oil allocation and regulated prices. The FEA also had the task of promoting energy conservation. The enabling legislation for the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) was signed by President Gerald Ford. It came with a wave of legislation encouraging research on renewable energy. The Solar Heating and Cooling Act of 1974, the Geothermal Energy Research, Development, and Demonstration Act of 1974, and the Solar Energy Research, Development, and Demonstration Act of 1974 charged the ERDA with ambitious research goals. The ERDA established the Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colorado. It also oversaw the creation of the (then) world's largest operational solar power generator, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In Idaho, the ERDA created pilot projects that used hydrothermal convection to generate power. It also developed a prototype wind-power system in Sandusky, Ohio, and oversaw research on conventional nuclear reactors, breeder reactors, and fusion. All of these activities were added to the responsibilities for nuclear weapons production and waste disposal that the ERDA assumed from the defunct Atomic Energy Commission. Creation of the DOE President Jimmy Carter requested the creation of the DOE as his first attempt at reorganizing the Federal agencies. Congress created the new agency with one major change from Carter's request. Carter wanted the authority to set wholesale interstate electricity rates and crude oil prices to rest with the DOE secretary. Congress vested this authority in an independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The enabling legislation reflected the energy and environmental concerns of the late 1970s. The DOE was to "promote maximum possible energy conservation measures" and to give the commercial use of solar, geothermal, recycling, and other renewable energy resources "the highest priority in the national energy program." The Carter era. President Carter's National Energy Plan had two broad objectives: first, to reduce dependence on foreign oil; and, second, to develop renewable and inexhaustible sources of energy. The DOE proposed energy efficiency standards for new buildings, created the Solar Training Institute, and worked with General Motors to develop prototype electric cars and trucks. The new agency inherited ongoing investigations into allegations that several oil companies had conspired to overcharge consumers during the 1973 oil embargo crisis. These investigations were ongoing when another oil crisis in the spring of 1979 brought new allegations of price gouging against fifteen oil companies and further DOE investigations. By the end of Carter's term in office, the DOE had collected $1.7 billion in settlements with oil companies. During the Carter era, the DOE's weapons laboratories developed nuclear warheads for air-and land-launched cruise missiles. The agency invested heavily in nuclear weapons safety research and cleanup procedures. Underground tests of nuclear weapons continued at the Nevada Test Site. The newly formed agency generated a substantial amount of controversy across the full range of its activities. Some lawmakers immediately attacked the renewable-energy programs because of their high costs and slow production. In the summer of 1979 the DOE revealed that it had miscalculated key oil supply figures, resulting in $9 billion overcharge in favor of the oil companies, at the expense of the consumers. A DOE official admitted that petroleum industry lobbyists had obtained access to DOE documents in advance of public release. In the first two years of the agency's existence the DOE was subjected to over two hundred investigations. The DOE also had to deal with mismanagement problems resulting from its predecessor agencies. The DOE announced that in 1975 secret documents pertaining to the hydrogen bomb had been erroneously declassified. A DOE official also testified before Congress on the exposure of at least nine hundred people to significant doses of radiation during atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in Nevada and the South Pacific between 1951 and 1962. The DOE identified fifty sites in more than twenty states that were once used for nuclear research and still posed contamination problems for area residents. The Reagan and Bush era. Early in his first term, Ronald Reagan sought to abolish the DOE. He cut hundreds of positions from enforcement divisions of the agency. Reagan's abolition attempt failed in Congress when a General Accounting Office study revealed that abolition of the DOE would not save any money. Reagan was still able to change the function significantly. The Reagan-era DOE placed a much stronger focus on nuclear weapons production, nuclear energy, and fossil fuels. The Reagan administration cut DOE funding for renewable energy and conservation programs by as much as 80 percent, while it pledged to speed the licensing process of new nuclear power plants. The Reagan-era DOE deregulated the gasoline market. Between 1981 and 1989 the DOE dramatically expanded its weapons production and testing activities. During the previous decade nuclear weapons had been tested once every two years. In the 1980s three nuclear tests were conducted each year. The DOE also began preparations to store high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. During Reagan's tenure a DOE official was convicted of accepting bribes to pass on internal documents to oil industry officials. The DOE illegally provided a $550,000 grant to a contractor to aid in a lobbying effort against Congressional attempts to constrain nuclear testing. Independent investigations by the GAO and other agencies found the DOE lacking in both security and safety measures. President George H. Bush vowed to improve the safety and environmental record of the DOE. His agency initiated research projects on acid rain and global warming. The weapons labs oversaw the development of nuclear testing methods that did not require atmospheric or underground detonations. Nuclear weapons production fell significantly as the Cold War concluded. The Clinton era. The new post–Cold War world enabled the Clinton administration to make significant changes in the function of the DOE. The Clinton DOE spent less on nuclear weapons production and halted all underground tests. The DOE created partnerships between the national laboratories and private industry. Where the laboratories were previously focused on weapons production, they now developed research programs on environmental modeling, supercomputing, and the human genome. The Clinton DOE also resumed the development of energy efficiency standards for appliances, which had been dropped during the Reagan administration, and started a public awareness campaign on alternative fuels for automobiles. In 1995 the DOE published a report documenting radiation experiments conducted by its predecessor agencies from the 1930s to the 1970s that exposed 16,000 men, women, and children to significant levels of radiation. The agency also had to handle the loss of significant nuclear-weapons secrets to China. The chief suspect in this espionage case was the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was set free after a botched investigation. This serious security lapse led to an agency reorganization in 2000 that created the Agency for Nuclear Stewardship, which now answers to an independent chief rather than to the secretary of energy. Fehner, Terrence R., and Jack M. Holl. Department of Energy, 1977–1994: A Summary History. Washington, D.C.: Department of Energy, 1994. Fehner, Terrence R., and F. G. Gosling. "Coming in From the Cold: Regulating U.S. Department of Energy Nuclear Facilities, 1942–1996." Environmental History 1, no. 2 (April 1996): 5–33. Gosling, F. G., and Terrence R. Fehner. Closing the Circle: The Department of Energy and Environmental Management, 1942–1994. Washington, D.C.: Department of Energy, 1994. Hewlett, Richard G., and Oscar E. Anderson Jr. The New World, 1939–1946. Vol.1of A History of the Atomic Energy Commission. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. "Energy, Department of." Dictionary of American History. . Encyclopedia.com. (April 25, 2017). http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/energy-department "Energy, Department of." Dictionary of American History. . Retrieved April 25, 2017 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/energy-department Department of Energy Organization Act (1977) Department of Energy Organization Act (1977) Joseph P. Tomain Prior to the 1970s, the responsibility for energy regulation was spread among a variety of federal agencies, including such cabinet-level departments as the Department of Interior and the Department of Agriculture. Energy issues also were administered by independent regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Power Commission and the Atomic Energy Commission, which were renamed, respectively, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Complicating energy regulation even further is the fact that individual states regulate the natural resources used for the production of energy through their own statutes, regulations, and case law. The major impetus for efforts at energy planning and coordination was the "energy crisis" of the mid-1970s stimulated by the OPEC Oil Embargo of October 1973. Congressional concern focused on matters of energy reliability, environmental protection, reasonable prices, economic stability, and national security. Presidents Nixon and Ford responded to the energy crisis with several initiatives centered predominantly on controlling oil supplies and prices. President Carter introduced his National Energy Act, consisting of five pieces of major legislation supported by the declaration that the energy crisis was the "moral equivalent of war." The National Energy Act addressed a wide range of energy regulation from traditional fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas to conservation and rate design. In an attempt to coordinate all of these activities, Congress passed the Department of Energy Organization Act in 1977 (P.L. 95-91, 91 Stat. 565). In 1980 Congress passed the Energy Security Act, which addressed alternative energy sources from solar power and geothermal to oil shale and tar sands. The Department of Energy Organization Act was based upon Congressional findings that the United States faced an increasing shortage of nonrenewable energy resources, thus increasing its dependence on foreign energy supplies, particularly oil, and presenting a threat to national security; that a strong national energy program was needed; that energy policy was fragmented in the federal government; and that a national energy program needed to be integrated and coordinated. ESTABLISHING THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY The Department of Energy (DOE) was established as a cabinet-level agency with responsibility for information collection, policy planning, coordination, and program administration. To further those goals, the Economic Research and Development Administration and the Federal Energy Administration were abolished, and their powers were transferred to DOE. Also, the Federal Power Commission was renamed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and came under the umbrella of DOE, while retaining its status as an independent regulatory agency. DOE also had the responsibility for various energy regulations formerly administered by the Department of the Interior, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Interstate Commerce Commission, and Department of the Navy, and the Department of Commerce, among others. Established within the Department of Energy were an Energy Information Administration and an Economic Regulatory Administration along with an Office of Energy Research. The DOE was charged with assisting in the development of a coordinated national energy policy. To that end, DOE is required to submit to Congress a biannual National Policy Plan containing energy production, utilization, and conservation objectives, as well as identifying strategies and recommendations for action. ENERGY POLICY IN THE UNITED STATES Historically, the United States has had neither a comprehensive nor a coordinated national energy policy. Several factors contribute to a lack of a national energy plan, including the fact that energy matters are spread throughout the federal government; that the preference for social ordering is the market; and that federalism inhibits coordination. In oil and gas matters, for example, state, statutory, and common law affect exploration and production; and for natural gas and electricity, state public utility commissions affect retail rates and sales. Moreover, the Department of the Interior retains responsibility for the management of federal lands and resources. Its agencies include the Bureau of Mines which administers surface mining and reclamation regulations; the Bureau of Reclamation, which administers hydroelectric projects; the Bureau of Land Management, which is responsible for federal lands: and Minerals Management Service, which regulates the intercontinental shelf. The Department of Labor through its Mine Health and Safety Administration regulates health and safety standards for miners. To these federal agencies can be added the Environmental Protection Agency, the Council on Environmental Quality, and the Department of Transportation. Thus, even after the passage of the Department of Energy Organization Act, energy regulation and administration remains fragmented at the federal level. It is still the case that FERC's administration of the Federal Power Act and the Natural Gas Act involves primary federal energy regulation. FERC has been very active in deregulating the natural gas and electric industries as well as revamping the hydroelectric licensing process. At a general policy level, the United States has had a dominant model of energy policy throughout the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first. That dominant model largely relies on large, capital-intensive, fossil fuel industries such as coal, oil, and natural gas, and it centers on the production and distribution of those resources as well as electricity. Over recent years, energy policies and proposed energy legislation have recognized the importance of alternative energy sources, conservation, and sustainability. Nevertheless, the mainstay of national energy policy and planning remains fossil fuels. Perhaps the most important function played by the Department of Energy has been to gather information, particularly through the Energy Information Administration. The energy information is thorough, extensive, and updated on a regular—in some instances daily—basis. Information on production, consumption, and pricing is readily available at the DOE Web site through its biannual National Energy Policy Plan, which provides baseline information on energy industries and provides solid data for understanding the history and direction of energy policy and planning. See also: Federal Power Acts; National Energy Conservation Policy Act; Natural Gas Act. Aman, Alfred C. "Institutionalizing the Energy Prices: Some Structural and Procedural Lessons." Cornell Law Review 65 (1979–1980): 491–598. Byse, Clark. "The Department of Energy Organization Act: Structure and Procedure." Administrative Law Review (1978): 93–36. Clark, John. Energy and the Federal Government: Fossil Fuel Policies, 1900–1946. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Tomain, Joseph P. "Institutionalized Conflicts between Law and Policy." Houston Law Review 22 (1985): 661–723. Vietor, Richard H. K. Energy Policy in America since 1945: A Study of Business-Government Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. U.S. Department of Energy. <http://www.energy.gov/engine/content.do>. Energy Reorganization Act In 1974 Congress passed the Energy Reorganization Act, which estab lished the Nuclear Regulatory Com mission. Previously, all functions related to the production and regula tion of nuclear power and nuclear weapons were managed by the Atom ic Energy Commission. The Energy Reorganization Act separated these functions, assigning responsibility for developing nuclear power and nuclear weapons to the Department of Energy and responsibility for regu lation of nuclear power plants to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "Department of Energy Organization Act (1977)." Major Acts of Congress. . Encyclopedia.com. (April 25, 2017). http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/department-energy-organization-act-1977 "Department of Energy Organization Act (1977)." Major Acts of Congress. . Retrieved April 25, 2017 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/department-energy-organization-act-1977 Energy Research and Development Administration ENERGY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT ADMINISTRATION ENERGY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT ADMINISTRATION. The Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) was created by Congress on 11 October 1974 as part of the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974. The act created two new agencies: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which would regulate the nuclear power industry, and the ERDA, designed to manage the nuclear weapon, naval reactor, and energy development programs. Activated on 19 January 1975, the agency attempted to carry out President Richard M. Nixon's goal of achieving energy independence by developing plans, technologies, and conservation programs and by managing national-security activities associated with nuclear energy. Spurred on by the Arab oil embargo of 1973, the agency provided a bridge between the Atomic Energy Commission (1947–1975) and the Department of Energy (created in 1977), which absorbed the ERDA. Despite the brevity of its brief existence, ERDA represented an important step by the administration of President Gerald R. Ford in bringing together diverse energy activities across the federal government. ERDA's focus was reflected in six program areas: fossil and nuclear energy; environment and safety; solar; geothermal and advanced energy systems; conservation; and national security. Led by Robert C. Seamans, Jr., and Robert W. Fri, the agency produced a series of national energy plans that advocated experimentation and energy leadership to stimulate private-sector commercialization. These plans stressed expanding existing resources and conservation; establishment of a synthetic-fuels industry; and long-range development of inexhaustible energy sources from breeder reactors, fusion, solar, wind, thermal, ocean thermal power, and photovoltaics. While Americans expressed some support for conservation, they responded much more enthusiastically to research into alternative energy resources. Although the agency was unsuccessful in early commercialization of synthetic fuels, it made progress in planning, mobilizing talent, and developing ties with industry and international partners. It created the Solar Energy Research Institute (which became the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 1994). Solar power so dominated the national energy discussion in the mid-1970s that, in 1974, three of the five major bills passed by Congress involved solar and geothermal energy. The ERDA also promoted fusion and prototype wind-power demonstrations while executing its continuing responsibility for nuclear weapons production and nuclear waste disposal. Kash, Don E., and Robert W. Rycroft. U.S. Energy Policy: Crisis and Complacency. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984. Vietor, Richard H. K. Energy Policy in America Since 1945: A Study of Business Government Relations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Walsh, Roberta W., and John G. Heilman, eds. Energizing the Energy Policy Process: The Impact of Evaluation. Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 1994. B. FranklinCooling/s. c. "Energy Research and Development Administration." Dictionary of American History. . Encyclopedia.com. (April 25, 2017). http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/energy-research-and-development-administration "Energy Research and Development Administration." Dictionary of American History. . Retrieved April 25, 2017 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/energy-research-and-development-administration

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Most viruses move intracellularly to and from their sites of replication using microtubule-based mechanisms. In this study, we show that nucleocapsids of the baculovirus Autographa californica multiple nucleopolyhedrovirus undergo intracellular motility driven by actin polymerization. Motility requires the viral P78/83 capsid protein and the host Arp2/3 complex. Surprisingly, the virus directs two sequential and coordinated phases of actin-based motility. Immediately after cell entry, motility enables exploration of the cytoplasm and collision with the nuclear periphery, speeding nuclear entry and the initiation of viral gene expression. Nuclear entry itself requires transit through nuclear pore complexes. Later, after the onset of early gene expression, motility is required for accumulation of a subpopulation of nucleocapsids in the tips of actin-rich surface spikes. Temporal coordination of actin-based nuclear and surface translocation likely enables rapid transmission to neighboring cells during infection in insects and represents a distinctive evolutionary strategy for overcoming host defenses. Intracellular pathogens have evolved mechanisms for rapidly navigating the cell interior to replicate and spread in a timely fashion while evading host defenses. Viruses generally use microtubule-based mechanisms to mediate transport to and from sites of replication (Greber and Way, 2006), whereas bacteria use actin-based motility for transit and cell to cell spread (Gouin et al., 2005). Even vaccinia virus, which undergoes actin-based motility after replication and release in its extracellular form, uses microtubules for intracellular movement and egress (Hollinshead et al., 2001; Rietdorf et al., 2001; Ward and Moss, 2001). We propose that baculoviruses are an exception to this convention. These nuclear replicating DNA viruses release their nucleocapsids into the cytoplasm after endocytosis and must immediately transit from the periphery into the nucleus (Rohrmann, 2008). Moreover, during baculovirus infection of epithelial cells within the insect midgut, a subpopulation of nucleocapsids has been proposed to bypass the nucleus and transit directly to the basolateral surface without replicating to enable rapid spread (Granados and Lawler, 1981; Washburn et al., 1999). Unlike many viruses, baculoviruses do not require microtubules for the production of progeny budded virus (Volkman and Zaal, 1990), although microtubules may play a role in this process (Fang et al., 2009). In contrast, the actin cytoskeleton is essential for budded virus production (Ohkawa and Volkman, 1999). Nucleocapsids from the baculovirus type species Autographa californica multiple nucleopolyhedrovirus (AcMNPV) were seen to associate with cable-like actin structures immediately after release into the cytoplasm (Charlton and Volkman, 1993), hinting at a possible actin-based means of transport. Moreover, the AcMNPV capsid protein P78/83 was shown to be a nucleation-promoting factor that activates actin polymerization by the host Arp2/3 complex (Goley et al., 2006), and P78/83 and the Arp2/3 complex were required for actin assembly within the nucleus late in infection. However, it has remained unclear whether, how, or why baculoviruses might use actin for intracellular transport early in infection. In this study, we demonstrate that AcMNPV nucleocapsids undergo motility driven by actin polymerization during the early stage of infection. Movement requires the ability of P78/83 to stimulate actin nucleation with the host Arp2/3 complex. In the first phase of infection, nucleocapsid actin-based motility is critical for efficient transit to the nucleus, enabling translocation through nuclear pore complexes. In the next phase of infection, after the onset of viral gene expression, motility is required for accumulation of a distinct set of nucleocapsids at the cell periphery. Coordination of these two phases of motility may provide a mechanistic basis for accelerated passage through infected insect tissues, which is vital to evasion of host defenses. Results and discussion AcMNPV undergoes actin-based motility To visualize AcMNPV movements in cells, we generated a virus encoding an inserted copy of the major viral capsid protein VP39, fused at its C terminus to three copies of the monomeric red fluorescent protein mCherry (Fig. S1). This virus (named 3mC) produced budded progeny at rates similar to wild type (WT; Fig. S2) and had sufficient incorporation of VP39–triple mCherry for nucleocapsids to be visualized by fluorescence microscopy. The 3mC virus was used to infect High Five cells that were transfected with a plasmid expressing EGFP-actin so that the virus and actin could be observed simultaneously. Remarkably, in infected cells at very early times (5–30 min) after infection, nucleocapsids moved rapidly within the cytoplasm and were trailed by actin comet tails (Fig. 1 A, bottom; and Video 1). The mean velocity of movement was 14 ± 3 µm/min (mean ± SD; n = 61) with a range of 7–22 µm/min and was not affected by expression of EGFP-actin (13 ± 3 µm/min in untransfected cells; n = 38). Movement depended on actin assembly, as it was inhibited by the actin-depolymerizing agent latrunculin A (latA; Fig. 1 B). Baculovirus actin-based motility was similar to that of the bacterial pathogens Listeria monocytogenes and Shigella flexneri and vaccinia virus with respect to its velocity (10–26 µm/min depending on pathogen and cell type; Gouin et al., 1999; Rietdorf et al., 2001) and the association of moving viruses with actin tails. However, in contrast to vaccinia virus, which undergoes actin-based motility after replication and release in its extracellular form (Hollinshead et al., 2001; Rietdorf et al., 2001; Ward and Moss, 2001), baculovirus motility occurred immediately after entry and release into the cytoplasm and before replication. Actin-based motility of L. monocytogenes is mediated by the bacterial surface–associated nucleation-promoting factor ActA, which activates the host Arp2/3 complex to promote actin polymerization (Gouin et al., 2005). Because baculovirus nucleocapsids contain the nucleation-promoting factor P78/83, we sought to determine whether P78/83 and Arp2/3 complexes play a role in viral actin-based motility. We first generated a mutant 3mC virus bearing a substitution of a conserved residue in the predicted Arp2/3-binding region of P78/83 (Ile358 → Ala358 [I358A]) that results in a partial defect in actin polymerization by the purified P78/83 protein in vitro (Goley et al., 2006). Interestingly, the 3mC I358A mutant moved at a reduced velocity (8 ± 3 vs. 14 ± 3 µm/min for WT; P < 0.0001; Fig. 1 B and Video 2) with a distribution of rates skewed toward that observed in the presence of latA (Fig. 1 C). Moreover, the actin comet tails formed by 3mC I358A were shorter and more difficult to visualize (Video 3), and the movement paths were more erratic with more frequent changes in direction (Fig. 1 D and Video 4). To quantitatively measure the quality of motion, we calculated the straightness of the path by dividing the net displacement by the total distance traveled. By this measure, the mean straightness of I358A paths was only 63% of WT (P < 0.0001). We further confirmed involvement of the Arp2/3 complex by treating infected cells with the Arp2/3 chemical inhibitors CK-548 and CK-636 (Nolen et al., 2009), which decreased the velocity of viral movement to the values observed for I358A or in latA-treated cells (Fig. 1 B). Thus, the ability of P78/83 to activate the Arp2/3 complex drives actin assembly and AcMNPV motility, and reducing P78/83 activity impairs the ability of the virus to move rapidly and progressively in a single direction. Early AcMNPV actin-based motility is critical for translocation to the nucleus As nuclear-replicating viruses, baculoviruses rapidly travel to the nucleus within 1 h after inoculation (Granados and Lawler, 1981). Because the immediate onset of actin-based motility corresponded with the time of nuclear translocation, we wondered whether motility might promote nucleocapsid interactions with the nucleus. While visualizing movements in the vicinity of the nucleus, we noticed that nucleocapsids frequently collided with and stuck to the nuclear periphery. Strikingly, these viruses continued to polymerize actin, which radiated from the nucleus and underwent corkscrew-like motions (Fig. 2 A and Videos 5 and 6). In many instances, the nuclear membrane indented at the point of impact, suggesting that significant force was exerted (Fig. 2 B and Video 7). Nucleocapsids remained docked at the nuclear periphery for 3 ± 1 min (n = 5) after collisions with the nuclear envelope and then separated from their actin corkscrews and entered the nucleus (Fig. 2 C and Video 8). This resulted in a termination of actin assembly and depolymerization of actin on the nuclear periphery. After separation, virus particles moved a short distance within the nucleus, presumably to sites of capsid uncoating and gene expression. These results suggested that actin-based motility plays a role in transit of baculoviruses to the nucleus. To test the importance of actin-based motility for translocation to nuclei, we constructed a virus that expresses EGFP behind the immediate-early baculovirus promoter ie-1 and evaluated the kinetics of EGFP expression. When cells were infected with this ie-1 GFP virus and observed by time-lapse microscopy, GFP expression was initially observed at 5 h postinfection (hpi), with the percentage of cells initiating GFP expression increasing steadily over the first 15 hpi (Fig. 2 D). Treating cells with the microtubule depolymerizing drug colchicine did not affect the kinetics of GFP expression (Fig. 2 D), confirming that microtubules are not important for nuclear translocation of baculovirus. In contrast, disrupting actin dynamics by treating cells with either latA or the actin-stabilizing drug jasplakinolide slowed the kinetics dramatically (Fig. 2 D), indicating that actin-based motility is crucial for efficient viral transit to the nucleus. We obtained similar results after allowing endocytosis to occur for 5 min before drug addition, ruling out the possibility that latA treatment interfered with endocytosis rather than actin-based motility. To test the role of rapid and directionally persistent motility in transit to the nucleus, we also introduced the P78/83 I358A mutation into the ie-1 GFP virus to generate an ie-1 GFP I358A variant. This mutant virus exhibited delayed GFP expression in the early stage of infection (6–10 hpi) but ultimately reached WT levels by 12 h (Fig. 2 D). In keeping with an ability of the P78/83 mutant to reach the nucleus, 3mC I358A made actin corkscrews when associated with the nuclear periphery (Video 9). These results demonstrate that actin-based motility is crucial for cytoplasmic translocation to the nucleus but that even the more erratic movement of the I358A mutant is sufficient for the virus to reach the nucleus. Although our results implicated actin-based motility in virus transit to the nuclear periphery, the mechanism of translocation across the nuclear envelope remained unclear. We sought to distinguish whether the virus crossed the envelope through nuclear pores, as was hypothesized based on electron micrographs of the virus docked on pores (Granados and Lawler, 1981), or whether it entered the nucleus by a different means. To evaluate the role of nuclear pores, we first determined whether nucleocapsids at the nuclear periphery colocalized with pores. Deconvolution microscopy revealed that 3mC nucleocapsids were either colocalized with (Fig. 3 A, top; and Fig. S3 A), adjacent to (Fig. 3 A, middle; and Fig. S3 B), or between pores (Fig. 3 A, bottom; and Fig. S3 C). The variable associations of nucleocapsids with pores may represent temporal stages in the translocation pathway, with an initial collision occurring between pores followed by pore engagement and translocation. This notion is consistent with the observed 3 ± 1 min delay between collision and entry into the nucleus as well as the tight fit for the 30–60-nm diameter nucleocapsid (Cunningham, 1968; Hughes, 1977) to squeeze through the 50-nm diameter pore (Elad et al., 2009). To further determine whether nuclear pores function as the main route of entry, we examined the effect of expressing a dominant-negative human importin-β truncation derivative, importin-β71–876 (amino acid residues 71–876), that blocks transport through nuclear pores (Chi et al., 1997; Kutay et al., 1997). Cells were transfected with a plasmid that expresses importin-β71–876–mCherry or mCherry alone as a control and infected with AcMNPV. The number of capsids per nucleus was quantified at 2 h after infection (Fig. 3 B). Cells expressing importin-β71–876–mCherry showed a 78% decrease in the number of detectable capsids per nucleus compared with cells expressing mCherry (Fig. 3 C). To confirm this result, we microinjected cells with WGA, a well-established inhibitor of nuclear transport (Finlay et al., 1987), or with dextran as a control. Microinjection of WGA caused a 70% decrease in the number of capsids per nucleus compared with controls (Fig. 3 C). These results demonstrate that the main route of nuclear entry of nucleopolyhedroviruses is through nuclear pores. Later actin-based motility results in prereplication accumulation of nucleocapsids at the cell surface The use of actin-based motility by AcMNPV for transit to the nucleus is unprecedented, as other pathogens use cytoplasmic actin-based motility to propel themselves to the cell surface to facilitate cell to cell spread (Gouin et al., 2005). Therefore, we wondered whether actin-based motility might also play a role in viral transit to the cell surface. In High Five cells infected with 3mC at 0–2 hpi, we observed nucleocapsids moving to the cell periphery and entering into preexisting actin-rich cell surface spikes (Fig. 4 A and Video 10). However, these associations with the surface were transient, and in fixed cells, nucleocapsids were observed primarily in the cytoplasm associated with comet tails (Fig. 1 A). In contrast, after the onset of early viral gene expression (2–4 hpi), nucleocapsids accumulated at the tips of cell surface spikes (Fig. 4 B, left). These nucleocapsids were from the inoculum and were not newly synthesized progeny, as the timing was too early for virus production, and nucleocapsids accumulated at the cell surface in the presence of aphidicolin, which blocks DNA synthesis (Fig. S3 D). To determine whether nucleocapsid accumulation in surface spikes required actin-based motility, we examined the localization of the 3mC I358A virus in fixed cells at 4 hpi. Although WT virus was localized to both the cell body and the tips of surface spikes, 3mC I358A primarily localized in the cell body (Fig. 4 B, right) and exhibited a 58% reduction in the percentage localized to cell surface spikes compared with WT (Fig. 4 C). This dramatic impairment in cell surface localization of 3mC I358A indicates that accumulation in surface spikes requires rapid movement in straight paths in contrast to nuclear translocation, which occurred even with the mutant’s slower and more erratic movements. Conclusions and models Our results demonstrate that AcMNPV utilizes actin-based motility in two key transport processes for which other viruses require microtubules. In the initial phase of infection, motility enables the virus to efficiently probe the cytoplasm, promoting frequent collision with and translocation into the nucleus. After early gene expression, motility enables nucleocapsids to accumulate at the tips of actin-rich cell surface spikes. We propose a model in which these two motility processes are coordinated to enable rapid transmission to neighboring cells during infection in insects (Fig. 4 D). The multiple nucleopolyhedroviruses, including AcMNPV, are defined by the presence of multiple nucleocapsids packaged within a single envelope in the occlusion-derived virus form. During oral infection of caterpillars by occlusion-derived virus, midgut epithelial cells receive a dose of several nucleocapsids, which is similar to the high MOI conditions of our experiments. It was previously hypothesized (Granados and Lawler, 1981; Washburn et al., 1999) that some nucleocapsids transit to the nucleus and initiate early gene expression, whereas others move to the basal cell surface. Upon early gene expression by the nuclear population, the budding protein GP64 is expressed, and the surface-associated nucleocapsids bud, enabling them to pass through epithelial cells and infect secondary targets. Our discovery that actin-based motility enables successive transport to the nucleus and the cell surface, coordinated by patterns of early gene expression, supports this hypothesis and provides a mechanistic explanation for how these transport events are performed and coordinated. The selective pressure driving the evolution of this pass-through behavior is likely to be the need to overcome the caterpillar’s defense response of frequent apoptosis and sloughing of midgut epithelial cells by rapidly spreading to secondary targets to establish a productive systemic infection (Engelhard and Volkman, 1995; Washburn et al., 1998, 1999, 2003). Interestingly, baculoviruses exploit a common molecular mechanism of actin assembly to enable cytoplasmic actin-based motility (this study) and nuclear actin assembly (Goley et al., 2006), both involving the viral P78/83 protein and the host Arp2/3 complex, indicating that this pathway can be adapted to enable diverse behaviors during infection. Thus, AcMNPV is a fascinating pathogen that has appropriated the actin cytoskeleton for multiple functional roles and represents a model for understanding the diverse functions of the cytoskeleton in pathogenesis. Materials and methods Cells and viruses Sf9 cells were maintained in Grace’s insect media (Gemini Bio-Products) with 10% FBS (and 1% Pluronic F-68 [Invitrogen] for shaker cultures) or ESF 921 media (Expression Systems) at 28°C. High Five cells were maintained in Hink’s insect media (SAFC Biosciences) with 10% FBS (and 1% Pluronic F-68 for shaker cultures) at 28°C. AcMNPV WOBpos (Goley et al., 2006) was the parental bacmid strain used for this study. Plasmid DNA constructions To generate the vp39 gene fusion to three copies of the gene encoding mCherry (3mC; Fig. S1 A), the mCherry gene was PCR amplified from pIZ-mCherry (Goley et al., 2006) and the vp39 gene from the AcMNPV E2 HinDIII C fragment. The native vp39 gene promoter was derived from 1.34 kb of the HinDIII C fragment covering the vp39 promoter and part of the vp39 ORF, which was ligated to vp39-mCherry. The native promoter vp39–triple mCherry was cloned into pWOBCAT and pWOBGent6 to generate 3mC transfer vectors for selection with either chloramphenicol or gentamycin (Fig. S1, A and B). These plasmids target insertion of gene constructs just upstream of the polyhedrin gene in the viral genome. The ie-1 GFP transfer vector was constructed by removal of the actin gene from ie-1 GFP-actin/pWOBGent3 (Fig. S1 C). pWOBGent3 targets insertion of gene constructs upstream of both the kanamycin resistance cassette and the polyhedrin gene (Fig. S1 D). For the importin-β71–876–mCherry construct, the importin-β71–876 gene (Chi et al., 1997; Kutay et al., 1997) was PCR amplified out of pET 71–876 (provided by K. Weis, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA) and ligated to mCherry. This importin-β71–876–mCherry fusion gene was subcloned into pACT (Ohkawa et al., 2002). For the negative control that expresses mCherry alone, mCherry was subcloned into pACT. All sequences were confirmed by DNA sequencing. Recombinant bacmid generation and virus verification To generate the 3mC and ie-1 GFP viruses, linearized 3mC/pWOBCAT or ie-1 GFP/pWOBGent3 DNA was coelectroporated with WOBpos viral DNA into BW25113pKD46 Escherichia coli as described previously (Goley et al., 2006). Selection was performed on plates containing kanamycin and chloramphenicol (3mC) or kanamycin and gentamycin (ie-1 GFP). To generate the 3mC I358A and ie-1 GFP I358A viruses, WOBpos containing the p78/83 I358A mutation (Goley et al., 2006) was used in place of WOBpos. Insertion of 3mC and ie-1 GFP into the correct location in the viral genome was verified by restriction digestion and/or PCR, and the presence of the I358A mutation was verified by DNA sequencing. Bacmid DNAs were transfected into Sf9 cells using Cellfectin (Invitrogen), and the resulting virus was amplified and titered (Volkman and Goldsmith, 1982). One-step growth curves comparing WOBpos (WT) with 3mC and ie-1 GFP viruses were performed in triplicate as described previously (Ohkawa and Volkman, 1999). Imaging of fixed cells High Five cells were seeded onto coverslips 1 d before infection with AcMNPV WOBpos at an MOI of ∼200. Cells were chilled for 15 min, and chilled virus was added and allowed to adsorb at 4°C for 1 h. After the inoculum was removed, the cells were washed, and fresh media at 28°C were added (this point was defined as time 0). In the experiment with aphidicolin (Sigma-Aldrich), drug was included at a concentration of 5 µg/ml. Coverslips were processed at 30 min or 2 hpi by either (a) fixing in 4% formaldehyde in PHEM (60 mM Pipes, 25 mM Hepes, 10 mM EGTA, and 2 mM MgCl2, pH 6.9), permeabilizing in 0.15% Triton X-100/PHEM, and staining with 0.1 µg/ml DAPI and 100 nM TRITC-phalloidin (Invitrogen), or (b) preextracting in 0.15% Triton X-100/PHEM containing 0.3 µM TRITC-phalloidin and 0.1 µg/ml DAPI. Cells were blocked with 3.3% normal goat serum in PHEM and stained with mouse monoclonal anti-VP39 antibody P10C6 (1:250; Whitt and Manning, 1988) and 4 µg/ml FITC anti–mouse secondary antibody (Invitrogen). To visualize nuclear pores, cells were stained with 100 nM FITC-phalloidin, 2 µg/ml primary antibody Mab414 (Covance; Aris and Blobel, 1989), and 4 µg/ml Alexa Fluor 350 anti–mouse secondary antibody (Invitrogen). For deconvolution microscopy, cells were seeded onto coverslips 1 d in advance of transfection (Cellfectin) with importin-β71–876/pACT or mCherry/pACT DNA, or in the case of nuclear pore imaging, were seeded 1 d in advance of infection with 3mC at an MOI of 60 for 30 min before processing. Transfected cells were infected 1 or 2 d after transfection with AcMNPV WOBpos at an MOI of 60, and after 2 h, they were fixed, stained, and mounted using Prolong Gold Antifade (Invitrogen). Images were captured at 25°C using a microscope (IX71; Olympus) with a 60× 1.40 NA or 100× 1.35 NA Plan Apo oil objective, a camera (CoolSNAP HQ; Photometrics), and MetaMorph software (MDS Analytical Technologies). Image files were in 8-bit tagged image file format. Deconvolution microscopy was performed at 25°C on a DeltaVision 4 system (Applied Precision) with a 100× 1.35 NA Plan Apo oil objective and SoftWoRx software (version 3.3.6; Applied Precision). Deconvolution was performed using Huygens Professional software (version 3.1.0p0; Scientific Volume Imaging), and images were exported as 32-bit tagged image file format files. Images files were converted to 8-bit and processed with ImageJ (National Institutes of Health) and Photoshop (Adobe), with brightness/contrast levels adjusted without altering γ settings. High Five cells were seeded onto coverslip dishes (MatTek), and 1 d later, were transfected using Cellfectin with a plasmid expressing EGFP–B mori A4 actin (GA/pACT; Ohkawa et al., 2002). 2 d after transfection, dishes were chilled for 15 min at 4°C, and freshly harvested, chilled 3mC or 3mC I358A virus was added. After 1 h of adsorption at 4°C, the inoculum was removed, cells were washed with Grace’s media, and fresh 28°C media with antibiotics (penicillin/streptomycin and fungizone) were added (this point was defined as time 0). For drug treatments, 0.5 ml media containing each drug (latA; Enzo Life Sciences, Inc.), CK-548 and CK-636 (Cytokinetics) or DMSO control (Sigma-Aldrich), was added to cells in 0.5 ml drug-free media to bring the final drug concentrations to 8 µM latA, 100 µM CK-548 or CK-636, or 1% DMSO. Images were captured at 5-s intervals using a microscope (IX71; Olympus) as described in the previous paragraph. Velocities of virus particles were calculated after measuring the distance traveled over at least six 5-s intervals. Velocities were measured seconds after latA addition or 30 min after addition of Arp2/3 inhibitors. Displacement was defined as the distance between the initial and final location in a 50-s interval. Total distance traveled was the total path length in the same 50-s interval. Straightness was defined as displacement/total distance traveled. Speed/distance measurements were made using the manual tracking plug-in of ImageJ. To analyze the relative efficiency of viral nuclear entry, High Five cells were inoculated with ie-1 GFP or ie-1 GFP I358A virus at 4°C as described in the previous paragraph. 28°C Hink’s media with 10% FBS and antibiotics with or without 8 µM latA, 1 µM jasplakinolide (EMD), or 10 µM colchicine (Sigma-Aldrich) was added (defined as time 0). Time-lapse imaging was performed at 25°C using a microscope (IX71; Olympus) equipped with a 20× objective over 15 h with images taken at 15-min intervals as described for the imaging of fixed cells. Fields containing 65–122 cells were analyzed for the time of onset of detectable GFP expression in individual cells. High Five cells were seeded 1 d in advance of injection. Cells were microinjected using Femtotips with a FemtoJet microinjector controlled with an InjectMan micromanipulator (Eppendorf) using a pressure of 80 hPa, a time of 0.4 s, and a compensation pressure of 30 hPa. WGA Alexa Fluor 488 (Invitrogen) or dextran tetramethylrhodamine (70,000 molecular mass; lysine fixable; Invitrogen) was diluted to 0.5 mg/ml in PBS, centrifuged for 15 min, and filtered through a 0.2-µm filter (Millipore). After injection, cells were inoculated with AcMNPV WOBpos at an MOI of 60 as described for time-lapse imaging. Cells were stained with DAPI and P10C6 and processed for deconvolution microscopy as described for imaging of fixed cells. All statistical analyses were conducted using Prism (GraphPad Software, Inc.). Nucleocapsid velocities (Fig. 1 B) were analyzed by a one-way analysis of variance test. Displacement, total distance traveled, and straightness data (Fig. 1 E) were analyzed by unpaired t tests. Mean nucleocapsids/nucleus data from deconvolution stacks (Fig. 3 C) were analyzed using an unpaired t test. The percentage of nucleocapsids localized to cell surface spikes at each time point (Fig. 4 C) was analyzed by an unpaired t test. Online supplemental material Fig. S1 shows the fluorescent protein gene constructs used for generation of the recombinant viruses used in this study. Fig. S2 shows viral growth curves comparing the WT virus with 3mC and ie-1 GFP. Fig. S3 shows lower magnification versions of the images shown in Fig. 3 (deconvolved images of virus associations with nuclear pore complexes in infected High Five cells) and the accumulation of nucleocapsids in surface spikes in the presence of aphidicolin. Video 1 shows AcMNPV actin-based motility in High Five cells, Video 2 shows a comparison of the motility of AcMNPV and the I358A mutant, Video 3 shows the motility of the I358A mutant, Video 4 shows a comparison of the movement tracks of AcMNPV and the I358A mutant, and Videos 5, 6, and 7 show AcMNPV collision with the nuclear periphery. Video 8 shows viral entry into the nucleus, Video 9 shows I358A virus association with the nuclear periphery, and Video 10 shows AcMNPV moving into cell surface spikes. Online supplemental material is available at http://www.jcb.org/cgi/content/full/jcb.201001162/DC1. We thank S.G. Kamita for Sf9 and High Five cells, R. Tsien for the mCherry gene, J. Hartman and Cytokinetics for the Arp2/3 inhibitors, R. Kern and P. Kalab for advice on microinjection, K. Weis for the importin-β71–876 construct and helpful discussion, K. Campellone and K. Weis for comments on the manuscript, and the Welch laboratory for discussion. This study was supported by the United States Department of Agriculture Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (grant 2004-35607-14906) and the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of General Medical Sciences (grant R01 GM059609 to M.D. Welch). - Abbreviations used in this paper: - Autographa californica multiple nucleopolyhedrovirus - h post-infection - latrunculin A - wild type - Submitted: 29 January 2010 - Accepted: 23 June 2010 This article is distributed under the terms of an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike–No Mirror Sites license for the first six months after the publication date (see http://www.rupress.org/terms). After six months it is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

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In the winter of 1963, as the Civil Rights Act worked its way through Congress, Justice William Brennan decided to play for time. The Supreme Court had recently heard arguments in the appeal of 12 African American protesters arrested at a segregated Baltimore restaurant. The justices had caucused, and a conservative majority had voted to decide Bell v. Maryland by reiterating that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause did not apply to private businesses like restaurants and lunch counters—only to “state actors.” The Court had used this doctrine to limit the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment since 1883. Brennan—the Warren Court’s liberal deal maker and master strategist—knew that such a decision could destroy the civil-rights bill’s chances in Congress. After all, the bill’s key provision outlawed segregation in public accommodations. Taxing his opponents’ patience, he sought a delay in order to request the government’s views on the case. He all but winked and told the solicitor general not to hurry. And then the conservatives on the Court lost their fifth vote. Justice Tom Clark changed his mind and circulated a draft opinion granting the appeal. In a revolutionary constitutional change, lunch counters and restaurants would suddenly be liable if they violated the equal-protection clause. But Brennan foresaw a new difficulty. By now it was June 1964, and a coalition of northern Democratic and Republican senators looked set to break a southern filibuster and pass a strong civil-rights bill. Would a favorable Supreme Court ruling actually give wavering senators an excuse to vote no? They might say there was no need for legislation because the Court had already solved the problem. So Brennan, ever nimble, engineered a tactical retreat by assembling a majority that avoided the merits of the case altogether. It was an alley-oop to the political branches. They grabbed the ball and dunked it. Ten days after the Court’s decision, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the president signed it into law. In the popular imagination, the Supreme Court is the governmental hero of the civil-rights era. The period conjures images of strong white pillars, Earl Warren’s horn-rims, and the almost holy words Brown v. Board of Education. But in Bell, the Court vindicated civil rights by stepping aside. As Bruce Ackerman observes in The Civil Rights Revolution, Brennan realized that a law passed by democratically elected officials would bear greater legitimacy in the South than a Supreme Court decision. He also doubtless anticipated that the act would be challenged in court, and that he would eventually have his say. The moment demonstrated not merely cooperation among the three branches of government, but a confluence of personalities: Brennan slowing down the Court, President Johnson leaning on Congress to hurry up, and the grandstanders and speechmakers of the Senate making their deals, Everett Dirksen and Hubert Humphrey foremost among them. In this age of obstruction and delay, it is heartening to recall that when the government decides to act, it can be a mighty force. But three equal branches rarely means three equal burdens, and the civil-rights era was no exception. Although the Court-centered narrative undervalues the two political branches, of those two branches it was the executive that provided decisive leadership in the 1960s. Just as the intragovernmental cooperation of 1964 is striking in light of today’s partisan gridlock, the presidential initiative displayed during the mid-’60s is worth considering in light of Barack Obama’s perceived hands-off approach to lawmaking. Of course, no discussion of civil-rights leadership is complete without including Martin Luther King Jr., who provided moral and spiritual focus, infusing the movement with resolution and dignity. But the times also called for a leader who could subdue the vast political and administrative forces arrayed against change—for someone with the strategic and tactical instincts to overcome the most-entrenched opponents, and the courage to decide instantly, in a moment of great uncertainty and doubt, to throw his full weight behind progress. The civil-rights movement had the extraordinary figure of Lyndon Johnson. The Civil Rights Act turns 50 this year, and a wave of fine books accompanies the semicentennial. Ackerman’s is the most ambitious; it is the third volume in an ongoing series on American constitutional history called We the People. A professor of law and political science at Yale, Ackerman likens the act to a constitutional amendment in its significance to the country’s legal development. He acknowledges the Supreme Court’s leadership during the 1950s, when President Eisenhower showed little enthusiasm for civil rights, and when Congress passed the largely toothless Civil Rights Act of 1957. During those same years, the Court spoke with a loud, clear voice, unanimously deciding Brown, which ordered the desegregation of schools, and Cooper v. Aaron, which held that state segregation laws conflicting with the Constitution could not stand. But the Supreme Court does not command the National Guard or control the budget. Someone needed to enforce those decisions in the defiant South. That is why, Ackerman writes, “the mantle of leadership passed to the president and Congress,” beginning with the 1964 law. But the political branches ventured into the fray only in the last weeks of 1963. President Kennedy had introduced the bill in June of that year with much ambivalence. As Todd S. Purdum, a senior writer at Politico, recounts in An Idea Whose Time Has Come, Kennedy had led a sheltered life in matters of race. While generally sympathetic to civil-rights ideals, he “believed that strong civil rights legislation would be difficult if not impossible to pass, and that it could well jeopardize the rest of his legislative program.” He had tried to attack literacy tests and other barriers to voting with legislation but had twice been defeated in the Senate, where the old bulls of the South wielded the filibuster with practiced skill. (Roy Wilkins of the NAACP observed, “Kennedy was not naïve, but as a legislator he was very green.”) He regarded Martin Luther King Jr. warily, and with each new southern crisis saw his agenda slipping away. But events finally forced Kennedy to act. The Freedom Riders in Montgomery, the dogs and water cannons in Birmingham, and the sit-in in Jackson all made further equivocation on civil rights impossible by the spring of 1963. Four hours after Kennedy’s speech calling for legislation, an assassin murdered the NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in his own driveway. Five months after that, the bill was stuck in the House Rules Committee—“the turnstile at the entry to the House of Representatives,” in Purdum’s phrase—and the country had a new president. Purdum, whose book is an astute, well-paced, and highly readable play-by-play of the bill’s journey to become a law, describes the immense challenges facing Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination. “When it came to civil rights, much of America was paralyzed in 1963,” he writes. That certainly included Congress. The civil-rights bill, which had been languishing in the House since June, had no hope of coming to a full vote in the near future, and faced even bleaker prospects in the Senate. In fact, Kennedy’s entire legislative program was at a standstill, with a stalled tax-cut bill, eight stranded appropriations measures, and motionless education proposals. And Congress was not Johnson’s only problem. He also had to ensure the continuity of government, reassure the United States’ allies, and investigate Kennedy’s assassination. Purdum’s version of this story is excellent, but he cannot surpass the masterful Robert A. Caro, who offers a peerless and truly mesmerizing account of Johnson’s assumption of the presidency in The Passage of Power. Days after Kennedy’s murder, Johnson displayed the type of leadership on civil rights that his predecessor lacked and that the other branches could not possibly match. He made the bold and exceedingly risky decision to champion the stalled civil-rights bill. It was a pivotal moment: without Johnson, a strong bill would not have passed. Caro writes that during a searching late-night conversation that lasted into the morning of November 27, when somebody tried to persuade Johnson not to waste his time or capital on the lost cause of civil rights, the president replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” He grasped the unique possibilities of the moment and saw how to leverage the nation’s grief by tying Kennedy’s legacy to the fight against inequality. Addressing Congress later that day, Johnson showed that he would replace his predecessor’s eloquence with concrete action. He resolutely announced: “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for 100 years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.” The New York Times journalist Clay Risen contends in The Bill of the Century that Johnson’s contribution to the Civil Rights Act’s success was “largely symbolic.” One might say the same thing about Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. Sometimes symbolism is substance—especially where the presidency is concerned. The head of the executive branch firmly seized the initiative, taking up a moribund bill addressing the nation’s most agonizing problem. Here was Johnson, president for only five days, working out of the Executive Office Building because the White House was still occupied by Kennedy’s family and staff, with an election already looming less than a year away. Instead of proceeding tentatively, as most anyone in those circumstances would have done, he radiated decisiveness, betting everything he had right after he got it. As Caro shows so persuasively, from that moment, Johnson’s urgency and purpose infused every stage of the bill’s progress. And in the days and weeks that followed, the stagnant cloud that had settled over Kennedy’s agenda began to lift. Symbolism was the least of it. Johnson took off his jacket and tore into the legislative process intimately and tirelessly. As the former Senate majority leader, he knew his way around Capitol Hill like few other presidents before him—and none since. The best hope of moving the civil-rights bill from the House Rules Committee—whose segregationist chairman, Howard Smith of Virginia, had no intention of relinquishing it—was a procedure called a “discharge petition.” If a majority of House members sign a discharge petition, a bill is taken from the committee, to the chagrin of its chairman. Johnson made the petition his own personal crusade. Even Risen credits his zeal, noting that after receiving a list of 22 House members vulnerable to pressure on the petition, the president immediately ordered the White House switchboard to get them on the phone, wherever they could be found. Johnson engaged an army of lieutenants—businessmen, civil-rights leaders, labor officials, journalists, and allies on the Hill—to go out and find votes for the discharge petition. He cut a deal that secured half a dozen votes from the Texas delegation. He showed Martin Luther King Jr. a list of uncommitted Republicans and, as Caro writes, “told King to work on them.” He directed one labor leader to “talk to every human you could,” saying, “if we fail on this, then we fail in everything.” The pressure worked. On December 4—not two weeks into Johnson’s presidency—the implacable Chairman Smith began to give way. Rather than have the bill taken from his committee, he privately agreed to begin hearings that would conclude before the end of January, and then release the bill. Smith looked set to renege on his agreement in the new year, but reluctantly kept his word, allowing the bill to be sent to the full House on January 30, 1964. Risen credits others with this development, suggesting that it was Representative Clarence Brown of Ohio, a Republican member of the Rules Committee, among others, who got Smith to move. Risen is particularly sharp on the evolution of the Republicans during these tumultuous years, but here he accords them too much clout. Brown had to answer to House Republican Leader Charles Halleck of Indiana, whose support Johnson likely bought by proposing, and then personally securing, a NASAresearch facility at Purdue University, in Halleck’s district. And the entire Republican caucus in the House was wilting under Johnson’s relentless and very public campaign to portray “the party of Lincoln” as obstructing civil rights by opposing the discharge petition. Johnson kept the bill moving in the Senate by dislodging President Kennedy’s tax-cut bill from the Finance Committee. As vice president, Johnson had advised Kennedy not to introduce civil-rights legislation until the tax cut had cleared Congress. Kennedy didn’t listen, and now both bills were stuck. (Like House Rules, Senate Finance had a wily segregationist for a chairman: Harry Byrd of Virginia.) Risen minimizes the significance of this problem, writing that the tax bill “presented no procedural obstacle to the civil rights bill, only a political one.” (And when does politics ever derail legislation?!) As Caro explains, the tax bill was a hostage. By holding it in committee, the South pressured the administration to give up on civil-rights legislation, with the implication that the withdrawal of the latter might produce movement on the former. But Johnson and Byrd were old friends, and during an elaborate White House lunch they came to an understanding: if Johnson submitted a budget below $100 billion, Byrd would release the tax bill. Johnson then personally bullied department heads to reduce their appropriations requests, and delivered a budget of $97.9 billion. The Finance Committee passed the tax bill on January 23, 1964, with Byrd casting the deciding vote to allow a vote, then weighing in against the measure itself. The Senate passed the tax bill on February 7, mere days before the civil-rights bill cleared the House. Finally, Johnson helped usher the bill to passage in the Senate by working to break the southern filibuster, which was led by his political patron, the formidable Richard Russell of Georgia. In light of the Senate’s fiercely guarded independence, the president could not operate in the open; he had to use proxies like Humphrey, who was his protégé and future vice president, as well as the bill’s floor manager. Johnson impressed upon Humphrey that the vain and flamboyant Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois was the key to delivering the Republican votes needed for cloture: “You and I are going to get Ev. It’s going to take time. We’re going to get him. You make up your mind now that you’ve got to spend time with Ev Dirksen. You’ve got to let him have a piece of the action. He’s got to look good all the time. Don’t let those [liberal] bomb throwers, now, talk you out of seeing Dirksen. You get in there to see Dirksen. You drink with Dirksen! You talk with Dirksen! You listen to Dirksen!” Johnson demanded constant updates from Humphrey and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, and always urged more-aggressive tactics. (“The president grabbed me by my shoulder and damn near broke my arm,” said Humphrey.) Even though Senate Democrats did not deploy all those tactics, Johnson’s intensity nevertheless set the tone and supplied its own momentum. He kept up a steady stream of speeches and public appearances demanding Senate passage of the strong House bill, undiluted by horse-trading. And he personally lobbied senators to vote for cloture and end the filibuster. Risen contends that Johnson “persuaded exactly one senator” to change his vote on cloture. Given that it is of course impossible to know what motivated each senator’s final decision, this lowball figure is expressed with too much certitude. Evidence presented by Purdum and Caro suggests that Johnson’s importuning, bribing, and threatening may have made an impact on closer to a dozen. The Senate invoked cloture on June 10, breaking the longest filibuster in the institution’s history. The full Senate soon passed the bill. Johnson signed it into law on July 2, 1964, and immediately turned his energies to what would become another landmark statute: the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Risen’s attempt to minimize Johnson’s significance in the passage of the Civil Rights Act—“he was at most a supporting actor”; “he was just one of a cast of dozens”; “the Civil Rights Act was not his bill by any stretch”—is perplexing. In an otherwise strong book, his revisionist view is less a question of facts than of emphasis: after all, Purdum too notes that Johnson “strategically limit[ed] his own role” at key moments (careful, for example, not to upstage Dirksen). But Risen seems bent on denying Johnson his due, drawing nearly every inference against him and repeatedly overstating the anti-Johnson case. On the one hand, Risen is right to take a fresh look at the evidence and tell the story from a new perspective, focusing on unsung heroes such as Dirksen, Humphrey, Representative William McCulloch, and Nicholas Katzenbach of the Justice Department. He makes a fair point in questioning the way history awards presidents the credit for measures that by necessity cross many desks. On the other hand, Risen is simply wrong to portray Johnson as some hapless operator for trying multiple tactics and targets, some of them unsuccessfully. Johnson’s very comprehensiveness is what jarred the sluggish and paralyzed Capitol into action and ultimately moved the bill. If the president led and Congress followed, where did that leave the Supreme Court? Three months after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, the Court heard arguments in a pair of cases challenging the constitutionality of its most contentious provision—Title II, which outlawed segregation in public accommodations. In December 1964 the Court decided Katzenbach v. McClungand Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, upholding Title II as a valid exercise of Congress’s commerce power. In the years since, the act has been a remarkable success. Its acceptance in the South was surprisingly quick and widespread. In a stroke, the act demolished the rickety but persistent foundation for segregation and Jim Crow. Title II reached far into the daily lives of southerners, creating an unprecedented level of personal mingling between the races and making integration a fact of daily life. Title VII, meanwhile, has vastly reduced workplace discrimination, through the efforts of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Although years of toil, struggle, and bloodshed still lay ahead, the 1964 law dealt a major blow to the system of segregation. The past 50 years of American history are almost unimaginable without it. And yet the anniversary prompts an ominous reconsideration of the Supreme Court’s role in civil rights. In 1954, the Court launched the federal government’s assault on segregation, with Brown. In 1964, it got out of the way of the political branches, then quickly ratified their work. Today when it comes to racial civil rights, the Roberts Court is an aggressively hostile force. Recall Ackerman’s contention that the 1964 act has taken on the weight of a constitutional amendment. At a literal level, this is of course untrue: the act was not ratified by three-quarters of the states and is not part of the written Constitution. This means that a constitutional amendment is not needed to overturn the Civil Rights Act, which is vulnerable to a subsequent act of Congress or, more to the point, a decision by the Supreme Court. Ten years ago, even mentioning this possibility would have seemed outrageous. But last June, the Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, striking down Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as unconstitutional. Section 4(b) listed the states with a history of voting discrimination that were required to seek preclearance from the Justice Department or the courts before amending their voting laws. The 5–4 decision by Chief Justice John Roberts is nothing short of appalling: as unpersuasive as it is misguided, it is, in Ackerman’s words, “a shattering judicial betrayal” of the civil-rights era. It is also the Roberts Court’s most brazenly activist decision: Congress has reauthorized the Voting Rights Act four times, most recently in 2006, with votes of 390–33 in the House and 98–0 in the Senate. In her brilliant dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg summed up the decision’s obtuseness: “Throwing out pre-clearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Shelby County may be so unique that it portends no harm for the Civil Rights Act. After all, the preclearance regime was extraordinarily invasive. Ackerman calls it the biggest federal intrusion into the prerogatives of the southern states since Reconstruction. But Title II of the Civil Rights Act is also strong medicine, reaching beyond state actors to tell private businesses whom they must serve. It was by far the act’s most controversial provision—and it remains controversial among some conservatives. In 2010, Senator Rand Paul caused a sensation by arguing that the provision in the Civil Rights Act dealing with “private business owners” (ostensibly Title II) is unconstitutional. He quickly walked back his comments, but his father, Ron Paul, proudly continues to make the same argument, and the Tea Party is listening. The Heritage Foundation’s Web site files the McClung decision upholding Title II on its “Judicial Activism” page, tagged to the terms Abusing Precedent and Contorting Text. The Voting Rights Act decision can only embolden Title II’s opponents. And they just might get a hearing. Three trends in the Roberts Court’s jurisprudence suggest that the justices would be more receptive to a challenge to Title II than any prior Court. First is its disregard for precedent. The Roberts Court has repeatedly ignored prior decisions when doing so enabled a conservative victory—most notoriously in the areas of gun regulation (District of Columbia v. Heller) and campaign finance (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission). Hence it is little comfort that the Court upheld Title II in 1964. It had also previously upheld the Voting Rights Act and its reauthorizations. Second is the Roberts Court’s impatience with open-ended civil-rights measures, which some justices believe are no longer necessary. “The tests and devices that blocked access to the ballot have been forbidden nationwide for over 40 years,” the Court wrote in Shelby County, dismissing the need for ongoing vigilance against voting discrimination. And third is the Court’s continued disdain for the commerce clause. Remember when Roberts’s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act made the point that the act was not a valid exercise of Congress’s commerce power? He was singling out the section of the Constitution that supports the Civil Rights Act. The 1964 law is not in imminent danger from the Supreme Court. But it is worth considering how a hostile Court changes the equation from 1964, when the judiciary acted in concert with the political branches. The new paradigm places a premium on presidential leadership, at the very least in nominating judges and justices who are in sympathy with the great statutes of the 1960s. But the battle over the Civil Rights Act shows that presidents who are serious about concrete social progress must do even more. Lyndon Johnsons, of course, do not come along every four or every 40 years. Even if they did, Johnson brought plenty of darkness (election stealing, a credibility gap, Vietnam) along with the light (Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Great Society). Moreover, not every president needs to be a legislative genius in order to pass laws. Obama, after all, gambled big on the Affordable Care Act, investing the same type of capital in health care that Johnson invested in civil rights. It is now the law of the land. But the energy and purpose that Johnson brought to the Civil Rights Act struggle remains inspiring, and is a model for all presidents. As Richard Russell, the South’s leader in the Senate during the 1960s, put it to a friend a few days after Kennedy’s assassination: “You know, we could have beaten John Kennedy on civil rights, but not Lyndon Johnson.”

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This week we hear back from Kath Castillo, our Orchid Observers Project Officer, about what orchids you can search for in the field this month. August is nearly here and with it the start of the holiday season, so if you are planning a walking holiday or a bit of wildlife photography in the UK, there are some stunning species on our list to look out for and photograph for Orchid Observers. Flowering now and into late August, the Marsh Helleborine (Epipactis palustris) is a fairly large orchid with loose clusters of pink and white flowers with a white frilly lower petal. The species, which grows in wetland areas such as fens and damp dune slacks, can flower on a grand scale, with tens of thousands of plants creating a carpet of flowers. Although it may occur in profusion in some areas, the Marsh Helleborine is declining in England and Wales due to habitat loss. A flower of the Marsh Helleborine. Photo credit: Fred Rumsey. Marsh Helleborine photographed flowering in large numbers last summer at Berrow Dunes, north Somerset. Photo credit: Fred Rumsey. If you are up in northern England and in north-east parts of Scotland and likely to be visiting and walking in woodland, particularly pine woods, then look out under the pine trees on the forest floor for small spikes of creamy white flowers which are very hairy! Take a look at the leaves; if the veins are distinctively net-shaped (rather than parallel as in most UK orchids) then you may well have found Creeping lady’s-tresses (Goodyera repens). Please take a photograph and record the location and date and upload your data to the Orchid Observers website. Creeping lady’s-tresses at Eden Valley, Cumbria. Photo credit: Mike Waller. A similar looking species, but in another genus altogether, is Autumn lady’s-tresses (Spiranthes spiralis) which is found in southern England, most commonly by the coast This small orchid has tiny white flowers arranged in a single spiral around the stem resembling braided hair, hence the common name. An interesting fact is the leaves develop in autumn and photosynthesise throughout the winter but wither before flowering – this is an adaptation to hot dry climates. Germination to flowering takes 14 years. This is a Mediterranean species that only grows on calcareous grassland with very short turf. Look out for it in late August and into September on chalk downs, fixed dunes, cliff tops and even lawns and old grass tennis courts! Autumn lady’s-tresses at Eggardon Hill in Dorset. Photo credit: Chris Raper. The Orchid Observers team would once again like to thank all our participants who have been out photographing orchids and collecting records from all over the country; nearly 1600 records have been submitted so far! Kath is a biologist and botanist working as the Orchid Observers project officer and along with the Zooniverse web team developed the Orchid Observers website. She now tries to get out into the field whenever she can to find and photograph wild orchids! Today one of our Microverse citizen science project participants, Robert Milne, presents his own interpretation of the results of the microbial samples collected from Mid Kent College in Gillingham where he is a student: Despite our best efforts, the samples we obtained for the Microverse project were taken in different weather conditions, at slightly different times, in slightly different areas of the building, and all three samples were taken from walls facing different directions. The materials of the surfaces we sampled were brick, glass and metal. Mid Kent College building, swabbed by The Microverse participants. From the results below, it can be seen that all three surfaces have about the same number of OTUs, (Operational Taxonomic Units, a phrase to indicate taxonomic groupings in microorganisms), but this does not mean that each surface has the same number of individual microorganisms. The number of genetic sequences varies greatly. Sample Area A Sample Area B Sample Area C |Number of genetic sequences generated||88,264||120,498||27,894| |Number of OTUs||2,198||2,107||1,960| |% of sequences that were from Archaea||0.02%||0.00%||0.00%| |% of sequences that were from Bacteria||75.62%||88.76%||87.75%| |% of sequences that were from Eukaryotes||24.36%||11.24%||12.19%| Table 1: Results from samples of microorganisms swabbed from brick, glass and metal, at Mid Kent College, Gillingham, (% rounded to 2 decimal places). The glass surface has generated the most genetic sequences while metal has generated the least. This could mean that the bacteria on the surface of the glass are more successful than the ones on the metal, for instance. Sample Area A - Brick. The image above shows the brick wall from which the first sample was taken. This wall had the most eukaryotic cells present, in which the majority of them contained chloroplasts (these are the organelles of plants that convert light energy into sugar). This wall faces southwest and a wall facing south of any kind will always receive the most sunlight on it during the day, which could explain the increased chloroplast numbers compared to the other two surface areas we sampled. The fact that this wall was also close to a lot of grass could also play a part in these numbers. Sample Area B - Glass. The image above shows the second surface sampled, which was glass. This had the most genetic sequences found out of all three of the surfaces we swabbed. There were, however, less eukaryotic cells on the glass and metal surfaces than on the wall. This could be because the smooth surface of the metal and the glass meant that less eukaryote cells could remain on the surfaces for prolonged periods. The eukaryotic cells (represented by the mitochondria and chloroplast sequences in the sample) could have originated from natural wildlife around the area, such as a snail's trail or some spider webbing. Sample Area C - Metal. Most of the eukaryote sequences found in all samples were chloroplasts, rather than mitochondria. This probably means the surfaces always have some form of sunlight on them, which is somewhat true since all the surfaces faced either west or east to some extent. Figure 1: The relative abundance of bacterial phyla, archaea, mitochondria and chloroplasts in the three samples. One of the prime examples for undertaking this feat of exploring more of the microbiological world is the need to find better antibiotics; resistance to antibiotics is an increasing threat in the world of medicine. Antibiotic discovery can occur via the identification of bacteria that produce chemical substances that kill or inhibit the growth of other bacteria. Once identified the chemical substance can potentially be cultured and used as a treatment to kill off bacterial infections. Exploring the countless surfaces outside in the world is a treasure trove of information that could lead to the discoveries of new bacteria that can be used effectively as a source for an antibiotic. However, it can also be considered that a new resilient bacteria could be discovered that can survive without much water for a long time, which may, just maybe, hold a specific DNA sequence to help relieve the effects of hunger and thirst in patients that must undergo a fast before an operation (such as colon screening). It can open up a number of new doors to the world of medicine, and with a huge percent of areas still not investigated, it could only be a matter of time before huge changes are discovered. Thank you Robert! Robert Milne is a student of Mid Kent College, who has just finished his second year of an Applied Science Level 3 course. He has a keen interest in biochemistry and genetics and hopes to enrol this Autumn on an Undergraduate degree in Chemistry at the University of Greenwich. To find out more about the Museum's citizen science projects, see our website. Our trainees on the Identification Trainers for the Future project have been extremely busy since our last blog post, here's Mike Waller with an update on what they have been getting up to! The trainees puzzle over their latest capture (L-R: Sally, Anthony, Mike and Katy) Our timetables, until now a collage of various colours, have become a very busy reality over the last two months. We got our teeth into another batch of long-anticipated ID workshops - Flowering Plants, Beetles, Flies and Earthworms. I think I speak for everyone when I say the skills and knowledge we've been passed by some of the leading scientific experts in the Museum have been rich, extensive and unique. Developing techniques to hoard as much of this golden information as possible have become paramount. I've already gathered a thick stack of mixed ID keys, notes, powerpoint handouts and even the odd specimen - usually midway through the processing to go into my personal collection. Sally has taken her learning consolidation to a new level and is producing an incredible assemblage of annotated line drawings and intricate watercolours in her note book. She'll be blogging about that separately, but we're all a little jealous! An extract from Sallys notebook The first of these workshops was a one-day instalment of flowering plants out in the wilds of East London with Mark Spencer. We met promptly for 9.00 at Mile End tube station before heading out in the company of other trainees from a similar scheme called Wild Talent being run by the London Wildlife Trust (also funded by the HLF's Skills for the Future programme), and people who narrowly missed out on getting the traineeship during the first round. Indeed, several places have been made available on all workshops for the other 20 trainee applicants as an opportunity to maximise the skills-base across the board. It was great to see them again! Mark Spencer highlighting some of the finer points of plant identification After a scorching day keying out Fabacae and crucifers, dodging cyclists and discussing the horror of path-side 'tidying', we finished in Mark's local pub for a well-earned pint. As always, Mark's casual ability to blend good science, humour and memorable anecdotes always makes for a superb time. We all very much look forward to our next sessions with him in July. Next up was our very first invertebrate workshop, and what better to start with than beetles - the group within which both Katy and Anthony find their true passion. This workshop was a solid four-day stretch that began with Roger Booth taking us through the depths of beetle anatomy followed by some family keying. Max Barclay provided a two-part lecture on world beetle families that, for me, gave a fascinating insight into the truly spectacular speciation and morphological diversity of the group acoss the planet. As our confidence grew, we began to use specific familiy keys to make accurate species identifications of some of the more challenging groups such as Elateridae or the 'click' beetles. Michael Geiser and Roger offered invaluable help during this process as their oceans of knowledge were repeatedly called upon. A small selection of beetles for identification Just as we thought we were getting to understand insects, BOOM, in swept the seemingly impenetrable order of flies - a group with unfathomable diversity! Luckily we were in very good hands as we were led through the array of sub-orders by Erica McAlister, Duncan Sivell, Zoe Adams, Daniel Whitemore and the AMC's very own Chris Raper. In similar style to the beetles, we used familiy keys to start with then slowly graduated to species identifications where possible. This workshop however came with a difference and on the second day, we all met at Wimbledon Common for a day out collecting. With nets, pooters and pots at the ready, we were unleased on the varied mix of heathland, pastures and oak woodlands to capture what we could. The weather couldn't have been better and gave us a golden opportunity to use collecting techniques in the field. Once back in the Museum we were then able to pin and mount our specimens for our personal collections. Left: Out on Wimbledon Common with the Diptera team. Right: Chloe back in the lab working on her diptera slide preparation Our most recent workshop went subterranean with Emma Sherlock as we dug up seemingly half of the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trusts London Wetland Centre in the pursuit of earthworms. Using our trusty spades, and encouraged with the possibility of encountering a rare species, we sampled different habitats around the reserve to gain a good range of species which we then took back to the lab for identification the following day. Emma's unbridled passion for earthworms is infections and we all developed a new-found interest to take forward. If that wasn't enough, we all packed our walking boots and set out for our placements with the Field Studies Council where we were based at various FSC Centres scattered up and down the country. During May, I made my way north to Malham Tarn, whilst Chloe took heading north to the extreme with a week at Kindrogan and Milport on the edge of the Cairngorms National Park. Meanwhile, Anthony settled at Flatford Mill in Suffolk. Sally followed the South Wales coast to Dale Fort and Katy battled her way through the winding roads of North Wales to Rhyd-y-Creau in the mists of Snowdonia. The focus of each of our placements was 2-fold: to observe the identification courses each centre was running and to assist with the outdoor teaching for which the FSC is renowned. I got to observe a beginners course called 'Spring Wildflowers of the Dales' which, as you'd expect, concentrated on the botanical. It was led by local botanist Judith Allinson who taught a mixture of plant structure and lineage with a good dose of field visits to observe some of the specialist plants of the stunning limestone pastures, pavements and hay meadows. Having not been to the Dales proper before, I was continually stunned by this landscape of dramatic limestone cliffs and thick green meadows chequered by moss-drenched dry stone walls where the only sounds were the melancholy warbles of distant curlews. Highlights for me were the rafts of early purple orchids, adder's-tongue ferns and a hungry peregrine attempting to snatch Lapwing chicks on the tarn shore Malham Tarn FSC Centre The second part of my stay saw a sudden shift from pupil to teacher as various school groups, ranging from 8-14 year olds, visited for day trips and longer stays. This meant hanging out with the tireless field teachers who work extremely long hours to meet the educational needs of over-excited children! It was a real privilege to see the field teacher's skills in action, but equally how challenging their roles can be. Trying to deliver a range of syllabus-based content that is relevant and exciting to different age groups, whilst trying to avoid the hazards of controlling a large group of children in an unpredicatable environment is very hard indeed. These observations were echoed by the other trainees who also gained immesurably from their experiences. To round off our teaching and learning, Sally, Anthony and I also got stuck into some more people engagement at Big Nature Day here at the Museum. This is a coming together of over 50 different specialist wildlife organisations from across the UK. These included the more familiar groups such as the BSBI and iSpot, but it also provided an opportunity for some of the lesser-known societies such as the Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland and the British Pteridological Society to get their name out there. Like Lyme Regis, this was a wonderful opportunity to showcase the work of the Angela Marmont Centre while also browsing and networking with some fascinating wildlife groups. As trainees, we ran our own table providing microscopes to observe lichens and several drawers filled with UK insects and bee mimics. I also spent some of my time at the Orchid Observers stand where I helped answer questions about the project alongside Kath Castillo, Fred Rumsey and Mark Spencer. Mike, Sally and Anthony at Big Nature Day All in all, an inspiring day, and an inspiring, and hectic couple of months! As the traineeship progresses, we're all looking forward to our next few workshops, which include Freshwater Invertebrates, Lepidoptera and Hymenoptera, as well as our short field trip down to the Isle of Purbeck before we all set sail in September for our three month curation placements at various departments around the Museum. Make sure you stay tuned for the next instalment of the Identification Trainees saga! Your blog author, Mike Waller Thanks Mike! Don't forget you can find out more about the Identification Trainers for the Future project at www.nhm.ac.uk/idtrainers, including how and when to apply for next years traineeship positions. Posted on behalf of Ranee Prakash, Curator of Flowering Plants in the Plants Division, Department of Life Sciences. We are happy to share our recent journey to the Nilgiris in Tamilnadu, southern India in March - April 2015. Our team from the Plants Division, Department of Life Sciences includes: > The aim of the visit was to consult the herbaria of Botanical Survey of India (BSI) at Coimbatore, and Pune and also to visit Blatter Herbarium, St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. We looked at the Solanaceae collections. Apart from visiting BSI’s regional offices, we also visited Madras Christian College (MCC), Presidency College, National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), The Eco Park and the Theosophical Society in Chennai. Xavier also made a brief visit to the French Institute in Pondicherry. The aim of this visit was to investigate the botanical collections of the herbarium of the French Institute, as well as to liaise with the French and Indian researchers working on the Indian flora. They are known to be particularly well curated and informative for the region of Mumbai and Pondicherry, from where Solanum trilobatum L. is native. The Botanical Survey of India (BSI) The BSI was established in 1890, with the main aim of surveying the plant resources and identifying plant species of economic value within the countr. With headquarters in Kolkata, it has ten regional offices in various states of India. It comes under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Government of India. We visited regional offices in Coimbatore and Pune. Coimbatore office has important collections of R.Wight (b. 6 July 1796 – d. 26 May 1872) and other collectors of the Honorable East India Company (EIC). We databased around 400 specimens from both the regional offices. This data will be repatriated back to India. During the visit, Xavier identified Solanum species and recurated the species. For example Solanum xanthocarpum Schrad. & H. Wendl. is now Solanum virginianum L. A detailed list of synonyms, correct taxonomy and pictures of Solanceae species is available on the Solanaceae Source website. Madras Christian College (MCC) Madras Christian College has a beautiful campus spread over 360 acres area with a rich flora and fauna (see Fig. 1). Originally founded by Rev. John Anderson, a Missionary from the Church of Scotland, on April 3, 1837, the college recently celebrated its 178th anniversary. Anderson is known for introducing English medium education in Southern India. MCC is an autonomous college and is renowned for academic excellence and for social commitment. Fig 1. Madras Christian College, Chennai. We met the faculty staff members: Dr M. Baluswami (Head-Department of Botany), Dr D Narasimhan (Associate Professor), Leslie Lawrence (Assistant Professor) and Sheeba Irwin (Research Assistant). We also had a brief chat with undergraduates and post graduate students and listened to their views on career aspirations. Established in 1840, Presidency College is one of the oldest Arts College in Chennai, India. Located opposite the Marina beach in Karmalai area in Chennai, the building has very beautiful architecture (see Fig. 2). The college has various streams viz. Arts, Science, Commerce and has facilities for research leading to Ph.D. degree. Fig 2. Presidency College, Chennai Ravichandar84. We looked at P.F. Fyson’s (1877–1947) botanical collections stored in the College’s herbarium (see Fig.3). Fyson was a noted botanist and educator who worked in Southern India. During the period of 1920-1925, he served as Inspector of Schools for Vishakapatnam and Ganjam districts (Andhra Pradesh). He later returned to the Presidency College and served as Principal from 1925-1932. Fig 3. PF Fyson. Fyson is famous for many books and illustrated volumes that he wrote from 1912-1932.In 1912, he wrote a textbook of Botany for college students. He is renowned for the first illustrated volumes of the South Indian Hills, 'The Flora of the Nilgiri and Pulney Hill-tops' which was published in 1915. This book has 286 illustrated pages and 483 species. This book was followed with a book on plant species from the lower elevations and notes on the Shevaory Hills in 1921. In 1932, he published 'The Flora of the South Indian Hill Stations', which covered 877 species. Besides these, he also wrote a book on Madras flowers - illustrated 100 plates, a monograph on the genus Eriocaulon and a Flora of the South Indian Hills. In his honour, the Presidency College, Chennai has instituted 'The Fyson Prize' for work in the area of Natural Sciences. Founded in 1875 in New York, the International Headquarters moved to Adyar, Chennai in 1882. The main aim of this body is universal brotherhood and the members are united to learn the purpose of existence through, self-responsibility, study, reflection and loving service. Located between the Adyar River and the coast, the society is spread in 100-hectare grounds and provide a green, peaceful, vehicle-free retreat from the city. One can wander through the native and introduced flora, including a 400 year old banyan tree. Some of the plants that we saw in the garden and will not forget include the Sandbox tree, also known as Dynamite tree (see Fig. 4). Fig 4. Hura crepitans, commonly known as sandbox tree. Botanically, this plant is known as Hura crepitans belonging to the Euphorbiaceae family and the Cannon Ball tree - botanically known as Couroupita guianensis belonging to Lecthidaceae family (see Fig. 5a, b). Fig 5a. Fruits of Couroupita guianensis, commonly known as cannon ball tree. Fig 5b. Flower of Couroupita guianensis commonly known as cannon ball tree. The French Institute at Pondicherry Inaugurated after the cessation of French Territories to India in 1955 (i.e. the 5 cities of Pondicherry, Karikal, Yanaon, Mahé and Chandannagar), the French Institute of Pondicherry is very active in the study of South Indian civilisation and culture. Since the 60s, it has also developed an important ecology department, specialised in collecting information on the evolution of the environment in South India. From this time, the researchers of the Institute have constituted a herbarium which counts today more than 24,000 specimens. Xavier visited the herbarium, annotated and databased all the Solanacae specimens present in the collections (more than a 100). This trip to Pondicherry has been also an ideal occasion to exchange contacts with the French and Indian researchers working there on various aspect of the Indian flora (mostly forest ecology), and Xavier has presented his research project during a conference. During a short tour at the Pondicherry Botanical Garden with Soupramanien Aravajy, the most knowledgeable botanist of the IFP, we were happy to find, hidden in the bushes, the small (and terribly spiny!) Solanum trilobatum L. (see Fig. 10). After three days of work in this quiet and beautiful “Petite France”, it was difficult to come back to busy Chennai… Besides visiting the Institutes, we also visited some historic temples in Chennai, Coimbatore, Mahabalipuram (also known as Mamallapuram) and Madurai belonging to the Chola and Pallava dynasty (around 3rd to 6th century C.E.). We were amazed with the absolute beauty of architectural designs. It was sweltering hot in India with temperatures around 38-40 degrees centigrade but the food was delicious with so many varieties of Kathrik kai (brinjal) (see Figs. 6a & 6b), Valai palam (banana) and the lovely chutneys made from Takali (tomatoes) and puli (tamarind). We had rice Arisi (rice) for lunch and dinner, lots of keerai (leafy vegetables) and tanni (water) to keep us hydrated! Fig. 6a. Solanum torvum( sundaikkai) sold in the market. Fig 6b. Brinjal varieties sold in the market. As our journey came to an end, we would like to reflect on the memorable wander to the Nilgiris, the picturesque memories for years to linger including the highest Peak Point 'Doddabetta' in the Nilgiri Mountains at 2367 metres (8650 feet). This is where the Eastern and Western Ghats meet (see Fig. 7). The endless vibrant greenery of the tea estates (see Fig. 8) (wonder what it must be like when there were undisturbed forests) and the beautiful architectural buildings of the various temples and palaces. Fig. 7. Doddabetta Peak (highest point 2637m, where the Eastern and Western Ghats meet). Fig. 8. Tea plantation in the Nilgiris. We would like to convey our warm Nandri (Thank you- in Tamil) and gratitude to all the staff at various Institutes. A special Nandri to Dr D.Narasimhan at MCC, Dr V Sampath Kumar, Dr G V S Murthy, Dr Beniamim, G. Gyanansekaharan and Kannamani at BSI for all the hospitality and help (see Fig. 9). Fig. 9. Staff at BSI Coimbatore office. Great way to collaborate and open the boundaries! Come on India. Fig. 10. Solanum trilobatum L., growing along the path, Pondicherry Botanical Garden. For July, the Orchid Observers team are simultaneously excited and fretting. We're excited because we're planning field trips to see the next orchids on our hit list, but we're also concerned about the flower spikes scorching in the sun and wilting. It might be a race against the sun this month to catch July's finest orchids. Not only that but this month's highlight species are some of the trickiest to spot and identify. Please don't let this deter you, take up the challenge and see if you can locate and photograph these beauties. The bog orchid (Hammarbya paludosa) is the tiniest of the UK orchid species. © Mike Waller. Being the tiniest of the UK orchids, the bog orchid can be rather inconspicuous. It's just 4-8cm tall and green and there are only 25 flowers on the flower spike, which are said to smell sweet and cucumber-like. As its name implies this species lives on bogs, growing among clumps of sphagnum moss. It needs to live in areas that don't dry out, even in a hot summer. When the summer is hot it flowers earlier than when the summer is cool and wet. Being a bog plant it's our Scottish contributors that are going to have most opportunity to find this one. But there are a few colonies dotted around England, in Cumbria, northwest Yorkshire, Northumberland, one-site in Norfolk, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire and some in the west of Wales. The bog orchid (Hammarbya paludosa) has very distinct flowers, that small sweet and cucumber-like. © Mike Waller. Keep an eye out for the frog orchid (Coeloglossum viride) which is found across the UK. © Fred Rumsey. The frog orchid can be found across the UK, but only in small localised patches. It is more easily found in the north and west of the UK, having declined in the south due to changes in land management. It is quite a hard plant to spot as it is only 5-15cm tall and mostly green in colour. But you can find it on short chalk or limestone grasslands in the south, and in all sorts of places in the north, from railway embankments and road verges, to grasslands and dune slacks. The flowers of the frog orchid have a very enclosed green hood and a long red lower lip, which is lobed at the end. It's classified as vulnerable, so please take extra care when you find this orchid. The frog orchid (Coeloglossum viride) can be found on chalk and limestone grasslands in the south of England. © Fred Rumsey. Now for a last chance to see: Its a last chance to see the greater butterfly-orchid (Platanthera chlorantha). © Mike Waller. Distributed across the UK the lesser butterfly-orchid and greater butterfly-orchid are really quite difficult to tell apart. But here are some top features to help you distinguish between the two. Compared to the greater butterfly-orchid, the lesser butterfly-orchid is shorter, it carries less flowers and it usually flowers a little bit later. It can be found on damp heathlands and moorlands, or in deciduous woodland, whilst the greater butterfly-orchid is found on deciduous woodland and chalk grassland. But the most reliable way of telling the two apart is in the positioning of the pollinia (the pollen bearing structures of the flower). In the lesser butterfly-orchid the pollinia are closer together and parallel to each other, while in the greater butterfly-orchid the pollinia are further apart and slant inwards at the top. The lesser butterfly-orchid (Platanthera bifolia) can be identified by its parrallel pollinia. © Mike Waller. The greater butterfly-orchid (Platanthera chlorantha) has pollinia that are further apart and slant inwards. Of the two, the lesser butterfly-orchid is classified as vulnerable, due to large declines, particularly in south-eastern regions, so again please be extra vigilant when locating this species. If you manage to find any of the 29 species of orchid we are conducting our research about, then don't forget to take a photo and upload it to the Orchid Observers project here. And if it just gets too hot to go outside then get online and help us transcribe data from our orchid herbarium sheets. Jade Lauren Cawthray is Citizen Science Project Officer in the Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity, where she develops and runs citizen science research projects. Having studied an undergraduate degree in Ecology and Conservation and then a master's degree in Science Communication, Jade is combining her two passions, nature and public engagement, by pursuing a career in citizen science. From the field From our archive At the Museum

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Youth creativity, ideals and courage lead to achieve sustainable development, according to the: - Rio Declaration - Paris Agreement - Kyoto Protoco The answer is... Rio Declaration! According to the Declaration, "the creativity, ideals and courage of the youth of the world should bemobilized to forge a global partnership in order to achieve sustainabledevelopment and ensure a better future for all". It also affirms the rights of members of civil society to participate in international intergovernmental decision-making processes on environmental matters, and states that “involvement of today’s youth in environment and development decision-making and in the implementation of programmes is critical to the long-term success". More information available on Youth Participation in the UNFCCC Negotiation Process: The United Nations, Young People, and Climate Change. Q. In 2012, how many premature deaths were linked to climate change? - 200,000 deaths - 400,000 deaths - 800,000 deaths - 1,000,000+ deaths The answer is... 400,000 deaths! Globally, 400,000 premature deaths have been linked to climate change and approximately 250,000 additional deaths due to effects of climate change are expected per year between 2030 and 2050. The impacts of climate change pose a threat to the full and effective enjoyment of the human right to health. Inclusion of this language in the Paris Agreement reflects growing recognition of the connections between climate change and human rights, including specifically the human right to health. Climate change impacts health in a number of ways: directly, through extreme weather or changes in temperature; and indirectly through changes to natural systems that result in inter alia crop failures, expanding disease vectors, and displacement of persons. These mechanisms contribute to human vulnerability to disease and injury, diminished occupational and mental health, and risks posed by resource scarcity and migration. More information available on the impacts of climate change on enjoyment of the right to health, here. Q. In Cambodia, about how much of the national budget is spent in climate change related programmes? The answer is… 15%! Countries in Asia and the Pacific are spending significant amounts of their national budgetary resources on climate change related matters. Climate change is increasingly affecting national spending: roads and bridges are being severely damaged, agricultural crops are failing because of drought, storms affect people’s personal safety. Important financial and economic implications raise from climate change as it affects various aspects of public policy, from agricultural projects and water management, to infrastructure investments, energy supply and public health systems, among others. Check out the Climate Policy and Public Finance e-tutorial to learn more about national planning and budget systems for better management of climate finance. Q. In 2011 floods in Asia caused an estimated damage of: - US$211 million - US$711 million - US$11 billion - US$61 billion The answer is... US$61 billion! Natural disasters, 90% of which are water related, are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change. Improving the resilience of physical wastewater infrastructure, including drains and pipes, and of the drainage systems that can capture runoff during floods and storm events is key. During floods, which caused an estimated total damage of US$61 billion in Asia, in 2011, the sewage effluent often mixes with already contaminated storm water, creating a sanitation crisis and increasing the risk of waterborne diseases. Where urban runoff is a major source of flooding and pollution, as is the case in most cities across the region, there is a great need for new and innovative city planning, including climate-resilient water infrastructure, which can rely on appropriately decentralized water harvesting and collection systems. More information available in the United Nations World Water Development Report 2017 on Wastewater: The Untapped Resource. Q. Strategically placed trees in urban areas can cool the air by: - 2 - 8 ºC - 10 - 16 ºC The answer is... 2 - 8 ºC! Strategically placed trees in urban areas can cool the air by between 2 – 8 degrees C, as wood and trees can be used to optimize urban living and lower energy bills. In this way forests can be an essential component for countries when designing well-balanced adaptation and mitigation strategies against climate change in their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). Forests are more than trees and are fundamental for food security and improved livelihoods. When managed sustainably, forests can increase the resilience of communities by providing fundamental economic, social and environmental services such as food, wood energy, shelter, fodder and fibre, as well as income and employment, and the conservation of biodiversity. More information available in FAO's Forests and Climate Change document. Q. Approximately, what percentage of participants to COP20 of UNFCCC were women? The answer is... 36%! UNFCCC COP20 has an average of 36% of women’s participation rate. Government Delegates, Bureau Members, and NGO Representatives to the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) of the conventions have the opportunity to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment through actions against climate change. While there is no one solution to ensuring that gender considerations are addressed comprehensively, achieving equal gender representation at the COPs would elevate the potential impact women can have on inclusive, sustainable environmental policy. Through their experiences and traditional knowledge as stewards of many natural resources, women can offer valuable insights into better managing the climate and its risks. They also have a right to all capacities needed to protect themselves, and to participate in decisions with profound implications for people and the planet. Q. Each year, about how many hectares of forest are lost or converted to other land uses? - 30 thousand hectares - 300 thousand hectares - 3 million hectares - 13 million hectares The answer is... 13 million hectares! Deforestation and forest degradation are among the main causes of climate change. The degradation of the world’s forests is proceeding at an alarming rate. Each year about 13 million hectares of forest are lost or converted to other land uses. Deforestation and forest degradation has a considerable impact on the climate, accounting for 10-11% of global GHG emissions. Deforestation also has a significant effect on poor populations who earn income from forestry activity. For example, Central Africa is home to the second largest tropical rainforest area in the world with over 240 million hectares. In this region, an annual loss of about 3.1 million hectares of natural forest in the last five years, has been reported. More at FAO publication on Climate is Changing, Food and Agriculture Must Too. Q. Which of the following is not a climate change related impact on wildlife? - Ecosystem changes - Human–wildlife conflicts - Natural disasters - Health and diseases The answer is... natural disasters! Natural disasters are not among the climate change related impacts on wildlife. Biodiversity extinction is likely to be made worse by climate change. The impacts of climate change will include permanent changes in physical conditions, such as snow cover, permafrost and sea level along with increases in both the irregularity and severity of extreme weather events like droughts, floods and storms, which will lead to changes in ecosystems and ecosystem functioning. Degraded ecosystems are expected to be less resistant to climate change than intact ones. The main consequences for wildlife, including: - Ecosystem changes: These include geographical shifts, changes in seasonality, changes in species composition and a rapid increase in invasive species. - Species interactions: species distribution and abundance. - Human–wildlife conflicts: These are likely to increase as humans and wild species compete for the same dwindling resources. - Wildland fires: Increased drought and the drying out of previously wet forests lead to more frequent and disastrous fires. - Health and diseases: Wildlife, humans and livestock will be affected by the emergence and increased spread of pathogens. More information available on FAO Wildlife in a Changing Climate Report. Radio based technologies monitored the collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf (2000km2, almost as big Mauritius) in Antarctica. It melted in: - 2 days - 2 weeks - 2 months - 2 years The answer is... 2 months! The breakups of major ice sheets in the Antarctic , if not attributed to global warming, have been accelerated by it. These breakups have been observed from space, as ice sheets can be easily monitored by space-borne instrumentation. The collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in Antarctica in 2002 – captured only because of frequent coverage by satellite imagery – dramatically illustrated the dynamics of ice sheets on astonishingly short time-scales. These revelations carry weighty implications: the rapid transfer of ice from the continental ice sheets to the sea could result in a significant rise of sea level. This is one example of how radio based technologies and systems can monitor the various manifestations of climate change and their impact. At the same time, the application of ICTs and radiocommunications can provide solutions to contribute to a global reduction in energy consumption. Q. What percentage of diseases is attributed to the environment? The answer is… 21.8%! It has been estimated that 21.8% of diseases (23% in men and 20.6% in women) are attributable to the environment. Environmental factors have a significant influence on the global burden of disease. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the 2030 Agenda address human rights and well-being through a common understanding that a healthy environment is integral to the full enjoyment of basic human rights, including the rights to life, health, food, water and sanitation, and quality of life. Interwoven into this is the concept that by directly addressing the interlinkages between gender and the environment, new opportunities will open up to help achieve the SDGs in a more effective, sustainable and beneficial manner. The interconnections among drivers, pressures and impacts on gender equality and environmental sustainability are complex. Population and economic development are two major drivers of environmental changes and impacts, while a range of economic activities and natural resource exploitation are considered to put pressures on the environment. Besides demographic changes and economic development, this includes the social, political-structure and gender norms of a society. Gender norms and environmental changes affect each other, and their roles as drivers/pressures and effects/impacts could be interchanged. More information available in the Global Gender and Environment Outlook. Q. Compared to a CO2 molecule, what is the global warming potential of hydrofluorocarbons over a 100-year lifespan? - Up to 12-fold - Up to 170-fold - Up to 650-fold - Up to 14,800-fold The answer is... up to 14,800-fold! Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) were widely adopted as an alternative to products that were damaging the ozone layer, particularly those used in refrigeration and air conditioning. However, science has revealed that, while HFCs have greatly reduced the threat to the ozone layer, they are an extremely potent greenhouse gas and trap thousands of times more heat in the Earth's atmosphere than carbon dioxide. HFCs are a powerful greenhouse gas that contribute to climate change. As HFCs are also the fastest-growing of all greenhouse gases, their emissions increasing by up to 10 per cent each year. On October 2016, delegates from around the world gathered in Kigali, Rwanda, to amend the Montreal Protocol to cut the production and usage of HCFs. Curbing HFCs use will help limit near-term warming of the planet, providing a major boost for the Paris Agreement, and it could also significantly improve the energy efficiency of some alternative refrigerants and technologies. Q. If the Paris Agreement were implemented and global warming halted below 2ºC, the Arctic would have: - warmed by 2ºC - cooled by 1.5ºC - warmed by 5ºC - remain the same The answer is... warmed by 5ºC! If the Paris Climate Agreement reached during the Conference of the Parties session 21 (COP21) in December 2015 were implemented and average global warming were halted at a level well below 2˚C, preferably at 1.5˚C, the Arctic would have warmed by 3.75˚C to nearly 5˚C. It is because of this amplification of global climate change that the Arctic is under a higher degree of pressure. Major system change is already under way, and we have only years to take action to turn the trajectory around. To learn more about the Arctic, check the #TrueValueArctic initiative. Q. Which of the following statements on pulses (dry beans/dry peas/chickpeas/lentils) is true? Pulses: - Adapt to climate change - Damage the soil - Increase fertilizer use - Increase GHG emissions The answer is... adapt to climate change! Food production, food security and climate change are closely linked. Pulses are particularly climate-smart as they simultaneously adapt to climate change and contribute towards mitigating its effects. Pulses (such as lentils, beans, peas and chickpeas) can fix atmospheric nitrogen and provide it to the soil. This reduces the need for synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and contributes in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. For example, 85 million hectares of pulses have contributed globally to fixating 3 - 6 million tonnes of nitrogen in soils. Pulses can also increase resilience against climate change in different ways: - Pulse-based cropping systems: including pulses in crop rotations exploits symbiotic microbes to fix nitrogen, partly transferring it to next crops, increasing their yields. - Pulses and agroforestry systems: growing pulses such as pigeon peas together with other crops improves farmers’ food security, by helping them to diversify their nutrition and sources of income. - Pulses in animal nutrition: when included in livestock feed, pulse by-products contribute to improve feed conversion ratio while, reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the same time. For more information on pulses and climate change, visit: http://www.fao.org/resources/infographics/infographics-details/en/c/454530/ Q. What is the approximate share of tourism sector to global CO2 emissions? - Less than 1% - Between 1 to 6% - Between 6 to 10% - More than 10% The answer is... between 1 to 6%! Tourism, including transport, accommodation and activities (such as museums, theme parks, events or shopping) is responsible of about 5% of global CO2 emissions. Climate is a key resource for tourism and the sector is highly sensitive to the impacts of climate change and global warming, many elements of which are already being felt.; - given tourism’s importance in the global challenges of climate change and poverty reduction, there is a need to urgently adopt a range of policies which encourages truly sustainable tourism that reflects a ‘quadruple bottom line’ of environmental, social, economic and climate responsiveness; - the tourism sector must rapidly respond to climate change, within the evolving UN framework and progressively reduce its Greenhouse Gas (GHG) contribution if it is to grow in a sustainable manner; this will require action to: – mitigate its GHG emissions, derived especially from transport and accommodation activities; – adapt tourism businesses and destinations to changing climate conditions; – apply existing and new technology to improve energy efficiency; and – secure financial resources to help poor regions and countries. You can find detailed information in the Climate Change and Tourism analytical document. Q. Buying a real #Christmas tree, rather than a plastic #tree, has a bigger impact on #climatechange: The answer is... false! Real fir trees take in carbon dioxide, release oxygen, provide habitat, and can be recycled. Farmers grow trees especially for the holidays, which may take 8 to 12 years to grow. During that time, the tree is taking in carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen, and providing habitat for birds and animals; it is cleaning the air and helping slow climate change. Real trees can be recycled, there are many programs that pick up holiday trees and grind them up into mulch, which is then it is spread back onto the land to help grow something else—or more trees. An artificial tree would have to be reused for more than 20 years to be greener than buying a fresh-cut tree annually. These calculations include greenhouse gas emissions, use of resources and human health impacts. The annual carbon emissions associated with using a real tree every year are just one-third of those created by an artificial tree over a typical six-year lifespan. Most fake trees also contain polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, which produces carcinogens during manufacturing and disposal. For more information, visit: NASA Climate Kids: http://climatekids.nasa.gov/christmas-tree/ Q. In 2008, how many people were displaced by extreme weather compared to 4.6 million people by conflict? - 1 million persons - 10 million persons - 20 million persons - 30 million persons The answer is... 20 million persons! In 2008, 20 million persons have been displaced by extreme weather events, compared to 4.6 million internally displaced by conflict and violence over the same period. Gradual and sudden environmental changes are resulting in substantial population movements. The number of storms, droughts and floods has increased threefold over the last 30 years with devastating effects on communities. Over the last thirty years, twice as many people have been affected by droughts as by storms (1.6 billion compared with approx 718m). Future forecasts vary from 25 million to 1 billion environmental migrants by 2050, moving either within their countries or across borders, on a permanent or temporary basis, with 200 million being the most widely cited estimate. This figure equals the current estimate of international migrants worldwide. Refer to Migration, Climate Change and the Environment for further information. Which percentage of plant/animal species will face extinction if global temperature increase exceeds 1.5 - 2.5°C? - 1 - 10% - 20 - 30% - 40 - 50% - 60 - 70% The answer is... 20 - 30%! Climate change is a huge driver of biodiversity loss. Species have been disappearing at up to 1,000 times the natural rate, and this is predicted to rise dramatically. Current trends suggest that an estimated 34,000 plant and 5,200 animal species - including one in eight of the world's bird species - face extinction. Combinations of drivers could push some systems beyond tipping points at regional scales. On of the best understood examples is the loss of summer Arctic sea ice due to climate change. This relatively rapid and large shift in ecosystem structure and function at regional scale is projected to have large negative impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being if it is not averted. Ultimately all societies and economies would be affected. Direct and indirect drivers of biodiversity loss are often embedded deep within our systems of policymaking, financial accounting and patterns of production and consumption. More information here: Q. Health is affected by climate change through different ways. Which are examples of direct or primary exposure pathways? - flood, storms - allergens, diseases - water/air pollution - food production, stress The answer is… flood, storms! Human health is affected by the weather, climate variability and climate change. There are three exposure pathways by which climate change affects health: - Directly through extreme weather and climate events, such as heat, flood, and storms. These are primary pathways; - Indirectly through changes in natural systems that then affect disease vectors and disease transmission pathways, such as allergens and increased water/air pollution. These are secondary pathways; and - Pathways heavily mediated through human systems such as under-nutrition, food production, and mental stress. These are tertiary pathways. To learn more about Climate Change and Human Health, take the free online course here. Q. Transport sector aims to reach “0 net emission” between 2060-2080. By 2050 the goal is to move from 7.7Gt emissions/year to: - 7 or 6Gt/year - 5 or 4Gt/year - 3 or 2Gt/year The answer is... 3 or 2Gt/year! During COP22, in Marakech, countries accelerated global climate action as they fast-tracked the political and practical aims of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. For the Transport sector, the goal is to move from 7.7Gt emissions/year down to 3 or 2Gt by 2050, and aim to “zero net emission” between 2060 (most advanced areas) and 2080 (other parts of the world). All modes of transport (road, railway, aircraft, maritime, rivers, transport for people and goods) will need to be part of a global systemic transformation involving consumption pattern and behavioral changes, major technological innovations, the emergence of new mobility ecosystems, and the creation of new business models. The facilitators of the Global Climate Action transport activities will bring together all relevant stakeholders (public and private sector, think tanks) around a Global Macro-Road Map on Decarbonizing Transport, a reference or compass to set the course towards the long-term direction set in Paris. For more information, please read the COP22 Transport Report. Q. Which stage of the life-cycle of a pair of jeans has the most impact on the environment? - Growing the cotton - Manufacturing of jeans - Use, wash, and dry jeans - Disposal of jeans The answer is... use, wash, and dry jeans! Consumer care is responsible for the most significant energy use and climate impact, representing 37% of the 33.4 kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted during the lifecycle of a jean. This stage, in which consumers wash and dry jeans, is driven by high use of non-renewable energy. Consumer jeans-washing habits vary by region; by washing every 10 times instead of every 2 times after use, consumers can reduce energy/climate change and water consumption impacts by up to 80%. To know more about Sustainable Consumption and Production (SDG 12), please click here. For more information on the life cycle assessment study, please click here. Q. Which of the following climate change related events took place this past November 4 - 6, in connection to COP22? The answer is... Conference of Youth 12 (COY12)! This Conference is an international event where youth around the world gather on the theme of climate change in connection with the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC. The COY12 was held in Marrakesh for three days from November 4th to November 6th, right before the COP22. This year it focused on the role of education and capacity building in empowering young people to take action on climate change and to bring about positive change in society. More information here. The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) took place in Johannesburg, South Africa, from August 26th to September 4th, 2002. The WSSD discussed direct actions toward meeting difficult challenges, including improving people's lives and conserving our natural resources in a world that is growing in population, with ever-increasing demands for food, water, shelter, sanitation, energy, health services and economic security. The Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement 2 (CMA2) will take place during COP23, which is expected to be held from November 6th to 17th, 2017. The CMA oversees the implementation of the Paris Agreement and takes decisions to promote its effective implementation. The Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol 11 (CMP11) took place in Paris le Bourget, France, from November 30th to December 11th, 2015. The CMP oversees the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and takes decisions to promote its effective implementation. Q. Which of the following group of parties first ratified the Paris Agreement? - Fiji, Palau - Canada, European Union - Bahamas, Costa Rica - Paraguay, Uruguay The answer is... Fiji and Palau! Fiji and Palau were among the 15 overall parties that submitted their ratification during the special Paris Agreement signing ceremony at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, on April 22nd, 2016. The other parties included: Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Nauru, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Samoa, Somalia, State of Palestine, and Tuvalu. For more information, please refer to the Paris Agreement Status of Ratification. Q. Which percent of global GHG emissions are deforestation and forest degradation accountable for? The answer is... 17%! The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that the forest sector and other sectors that impact land use – through deforestation, forest degradation and other changes in forests – contributes approximately 17 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, or approximately 5.8 Gt of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-e), per year. These emissions are mainly taking place in tropical developing countries. Therefore, abatement of forest-based emissions is critical to limiting global warming. For more information, please refer to The UN-REDD Programme Strategy 2011-2015. Graph source: IPCC Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report. Q. In the absence of economic growth, how many people could be driven into extreme poverty by climate change by 2030? - Up to 42 million - Up to 82 million - Up to 122 million - Up to 162 million The answer is... up to 122 million! While climate change is but one driver shaping poverty and food insecurity, its impacts are expected to be substantial. Those two trends, and the severity of climate change impacts on them, will be determined largely by future socio-economic development. In the absence of climate change, and with continuing economic progress, most regions are projected to see a decline in the number of people at risk of hunger by 2050. With climate change, however, the population living in poverty could increase, largely due to its negative impacts on incomes in the agricultural sector. A recent World Bank study estimated that, a scenario with high impact climate change, rapid population growth and a stagnant economy indicated that an additional 122 million people would be living in extreme poverty by 2030. Reduced income in the agricultural sector explains the largest share of increased poverty as a result of climate change. This is because the most severe reductions in food production and increases in food prices occur in Africa and India, which account for a large share of the world’s poor. For more information, please refer to FAO's report on The State of Food and Agriculture-Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security. Q. Which of the following are examples of initiatives initiated by cities to address climate change? - Cities’ Compact - Green Climate Fund - Kyoto Protocol The answer is ...C40! C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, a network of the world’s megacities, is committed to addressing climate change. Bus rapid transit, municipal building efficiency, green growth and climate risk assessment are examples of some of their networks that connect cities on specific topics. C40 is a founding partner of the Compact of Mayors, partner to the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories and to the carbonn® Climate Registry. Learn more at http://www.c40.org/cities and check if your city forms part of this network. Another example of initiatives is the Compact of Mayors, which was launched in September 2014 at the Climate Summit by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the UN Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change, Michael R. Bloomberg. The Compact is the world’s largest coalition of city leaders. Cities will take action by registering their mitigation and adaptation commitments, taking inventories, setting reduction targets and creating action plans. The data on commitments and actions will be available to the public. Learn more about the Compact of Mayors at http://www.compactofmayors.org/. Q. Test your #ClimateIQ! Which of the following animals produces the most CH4 (methane)? The answer is... buffaloes! They produce 11% of CH4 emissions! Greenhouse gas emissions from enteric fermentation consist of methane, CH4, produced in digestive systems of ruminants and to a lesser extent of non-ruminants. In 2011, world total annual GHG emissions from enteric fermentation were 2,071 Mt CO2 eq, about 40% of total emissions! With respect to average 2000’s levels, global emissions from enteric fermentation are projected to increase by 19% and 32% in 2030 and 2050, respectively, reaching more than 2,500 Mt CO2 eq in 2050. To know more about this topic, please read the report by FAO: http://www.uncclearn.org/sites/default/files/inventory/fao198.pdf

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Patent foramen ovale as a cause of fatigue A patent foramen ovale - A cause of poor oxygen delivery in CFS The idea here is that if mitochondria go really slow, the heart does not beat strongly. This can result in an opening of the foramen ovale, a hole between the left and right atria (which normally closes as a flap at birth), so blood bypasses the lungs and does not pick up oxygen as it should. This means arterial oxygen levels will drop precipitously and CFSs suddenly dive into a much worse state. Please see Wikipedia:Foramen ovale (heart) A Patent Foramen Ovale (PFO) (Mayo Clinic Discussion of PFO) therefore is a disease amplifying problem - it explains why some CFS sufferers get a lot worse with a relatively minor exertion, i.e. the degree of worsening is not commensurate with the effort. The mechanism by which a PFO causes problems Dr Paul Chaney explains one possible cause of poor oxygen delivery. For mitochondria to work they need a regular supply of oxygen. If oxygen levels fall, the mitochondria will go slow and acute fatigue (or even loss of consciousness) will result. One possible cause is a patent foramen ovale. To explain this more fully we need to know a little bit about foetal life. During their development foetuses retrace our evolutionary pathway. Life developed in an atmosphere of very low oxygen tensions and a foetus has to do the same. During this time of life, excessive oxygen is highly damaging to foetuses and therefore they have to grow inside the body in the low oxygen tensions created in the womb. Indeed the oxygen tensions are equivalent to life at 29,000 feet! If an early foetus developed outside the body, it would quickly die from oxygen toxicity! The foetus gets its oxygen from the placenta - clearly it cannot get oxygen from its own lungs. Therefore blood is shunted within the heart from the right atrium to the left atrium through a hole in the heart called the foramen ovale. This is a flap valve, which bypasses the lungs. Everything changes at birth. At the baby’s first breath, the pressure in the lungs drops dramatically. This effectively sucks blood from the right ventricle, which sucks blood from the right atrium and the flap of flesh over the foramen ovale flops back and closes. In 72% of the population this flap seals up completely for life. In 28% of the normal population the flap does not seal up – it remains as a floppy flap. In normal circumstances this does not matter terribly because the pressure inside the left atrium is always higher than that in the right atrium and that pressure holds this flap shut. Problems arise when the pressure on the right side of the heart exceeds those on the left side and this flaps flops up and allows blood to shunt from right to left, so bypassing the lungs. Thus oxygen collection from the lungs is impaired because some blood does not get there. It is surprising how little a pressure change is needed to open the floppy flap over the foramen ovale. When it has not stuck down, just valsalva manoeuvre will do it.(Valsalva manoeuvre is performed by a moderately forceful attempted exhalation against a closed airway, usually done by closing one's mouth, pinching one's nose shut while pressing out as if blowing up a balloon.) This would occur with sneezing, coughing, straining at stool, sleep apnoea and possibly snoring. I have one patient who gets severe headache with sneezing – this could be explained by a rush of poorly oxygenated blood into the brain. CFS and PFO The heart is particularly susceptible to this problem when it cannot beat strongly and is in a low output state. In this state, the blood pressure falls and the pressure difference between right and left is reduced further. We know this happens in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome and interestingly Dr Cheney has found that in chronic fatigue syndrome 90% of patients have a patent foramen ovale. Because the test for a PFO is not 100% reliable he believes that 100% of CFS patients have a PFO. However this only becomes a problem in low cardiac output states. When the heart goes into a low output state it tries to increase cardiac output initially by the ventricle squeezing harder to empty more. However, when it relaxes, the elastic recoil sucks blood from the left atrium and causes left atrial cavitation, i.e. the left atrium collapses. If the foramen ovale is covered just by a flap, then blood could be sucked from the right atrium directly into the left ventricle. This means that blood does not circulate round the lung and therefore does not become oxygenated. This, of course, would further impair the low cardiac output because oxygen levels in the blood fall so that oxygen supply to tissue is further impaired. Dr Cheney has demonstrated patent foramen ovale in 90% of patients using echocardiogram whilst patients do a Valsalva manoeuvre – he uses a technique called saline bubble test to visualise the blood within the chambers of the heart and can clearly see this shunting taking place. Interestingly this shunting has already been proven in cryptogenic ("unknown cause") migraine and probably explains why some migraine sufferers require high dose oxygen in order to recover. My guess is that this mechanism may well explain why some patients with multiple chemical sensitivity find they can relieve their symptoms with high dose oxygen. However, read on – for some people oxygen given like this makes them much worse! PFO is known to be a cause of migraine, cryptogenic stroke (ie when the cause is unknown), decompression sickness, possibly obstructive sleep apnoea (because during this there is a valsalva like pressures when the sufferer attempts to breath against a closed glottis) and, Cheney reckons, 100% of CFSs. Saline bubble tests for PFO - How Dr Cheney demostrates a PFO For this test to be valid it has to be done properly. 10cc of saline is mixed with 1cc of air to create a froth – this is echogenic (ie Containing structures that reflect high-frequency sound waves and thus can be imaged by ultrasound techniques) and so it can be seen in ECHO cardiography (the bubbles are far too small to cause air embolism!). It must be injected into a leg vein so the bubbles appear in the right atrium from the inferior vena cava which sends a jet of blood directly at the flap covering the foramen ovale (injections into the arm result in a 30% false negative result because there is no such jet effect from the superior vena cava). The patient must then do a valsalva manoeuvre (increase pressure in chest as if straining at stool). The ECHO cardiogram clearly shows blood shunting from the right to the left side of the heart, through a PFO and so bypassing the lungs in 90% of CFS! In patients with cryptogenic stroke one can see these bubbles clearly passing up into the brain when the patient does valsalva! If you are considering tests for a PFO, it is vital the cardiologist appreciates these points or you will get a high false negative rate. Low cardiac output plus a PFO would explain POTs Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia syndrome (POTs) occurs when a CFS sufferer stands for any length of time. During this time the heart is stressed (it is much harder work for the heart to circulate blood standing compared with lying down) and so output gradually falls. It suddenly gets to a critical state when the pressures fall on the left side of the heart, blood is shunted from the right side, the lungs are bypassed, oxygen tensions fall dramatically and unless the patient lies down quickly, he will go unconscious. Does a PFO affect oxygen tolerance? Cheney has shown that in some patients if the proportion of oxygen in air is increased from 21% to 28% this causes closure of the PFO, presumably because the heart can increase its output when there is more oxygen. However if oxygen is increased to 42% the PFO blows open again. Cheney thinks this is because too much oxygen cannot be handled biochemically, there is a rapid rise in free radicals which stop mitochondria working and so the heart output falls! This varies in different individuals but the point here is that oxygen is acting as a modulator. In CFS, Cheney reckons all patients have a PFO and all patients have oxygen toxicity in this way. Depending on your antioxidant status (and most CFSs have poor antioxidant status) oxygen could make things better or worse! CFS sufferers can have physiology like foetuses! All foetusus have a PFO and oxygen is toxic to them. A foetus effectively lives at oxygen tensions of 29,000 feet! CFS patients effectively have mountain sickness. The reason why foetuses are like this is because they do not have the enzymes to protect them against oxygen stress namely superoxide dismutase, glutathione peroxidase and catalase – these enzymes are at 1/200th of adult levels. CFSs have normal arterial blood gasses but venous gasses show low oxygen and high carbon dioxide. In CFS, the problem of oxygen delivery is further compounded because the red cells are “stiff” and cannot get through capillaries, meaning that circulation is slow. We now know this is because of high levels of malondialdehyde on red cell membranes due to oxidative stress. Please see Wikipedia article on malondialdehyde This oxidative stress results from poor antioxidant status – the body cannot deal with free radicals. I have certainly had one patient who has been made very much worse by a phospholipid intravenous infusion – my guess is that this suddenly caused the red cells to become more flexible, oxygen delivery was greatly improved and this caused massive pro-oxidant stress and tissue damage. So oxidative stress will impair mitochondrial function and therefore cardiac output because free radicals impair mitochondrial biochemistry both directly and also indirectly through impaired oxygen delivery. According to Cheney, all these observations point to oxygen and oxygen stress being a control point in chronic fatigue syndrome Oxygen is clearly vital for efficient aerobic metabolism. It allows us, as human beings, to function at speed and this has massive evolutionary advantages. However, if we cannot handle oxygen this would result in massive pro-oxidant stress and we would quickly collapse and die. So what we actually do when we cannot handle oxygen is that we switch back into safe but slow anaerobic metabolism and hope that our body can repair its antioxidant defences quickly so that we can get back to normal life again. Almost certainly this is the mechanism of fatigue after any exertion whether that be the normal exertion of daily life, an acute illness, acute physical exertion, or whatever. Essentially if we cannot handle oxygen we switch back into safe, but slow anaerobic metabolism and effectively we mimic life as a foetus. As I say we have to do this because if we do not recover our antioxidant defences we die from oxygen toxicity! One example of how toxic oxygen can be – if you give 100% oxygen to a new born baby they will quickly go blind. My clinical guess is that the symptom of fatigue is a symptom of poor anti-oxidant status and inability to deal with free radicals. The symptom of fatigue is a protective mechanism – it stops us doing things and so generating more free radicals from mitochondria until the antioxidant systems have recovered. What causes this pro-oxidant stress? The two major sources of free radicals in the body come from mitochondrial metabolism and the P450 detoxification enzyme system. One might think that mitochondria would produce a lot more free radicals than the P450 system because mitochondria are present in every single cell in the body. Interestingly it is the other way round – the P450 system produces many more free radicals. This may be because activity in mitochondria is tucked away within its own cell membrane and the rest of the cell relatively protected. Not so with the P450 detox system. The P450 Detox system The P450 detox system is present in every single cell of the body, but the most activity is found in the liver. About 40% of energy used by the liver supplies the P450 detox system – we need this in order to maintain a safe internal environment. Indeed the largest molecule in the body is catalase – 25% of all protein synthesis in the liver goes towards making this one enzyme – it is essential for mopping up the free radicals generated by P450 enzymes. The P450 detox system is particularly active in human beings and the reason for this is that we eat a very wide range of foods, which are potentially toxic. We need our P450 literally to detoxify our diet. We eat kilograms of food daily which represent a vast, but obviously essential, toxic load. So long as we eat a Stone Age Diet, which does not alert the immune system excessively, we can cope with this comfortably. However, if we eat a toxic diet, which may be toxic because of allergies (immunotoxic), because of natural poisons in foods such as lectins, because of food additives, colourings or flavourings, or because of chemical residues or because of a fermenting gut, then we start to stress our P450 system. By stress, I mean that the free radicals generated overwhelm the antioxidant defences of P450. Indeed this explains nicely why chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers are so intolerant of alcohol (please see Alcohol intolerance in CFS - gives us a clue as to the mechanisms of fatigue) and much prescription medication – this provides yet another load on the P450 system which could result in an outburst of free radicals and pro-oxidant stress. Chemicals such as pesticides and heavy metals are toxic because they can further cause massive release of free radicals from this system. Poor digestion of food, gut fermentation by yeast or bacteria, slow gut transit time would all increase the toxic load emanating from the gut. See Fermentation in the gut and CFS. Mitochondria as a source of free radicals mopped up by SODase One cannot burn sugar in the presence of oxygen to make ATP without producing free radicals. These are, largely speaking, superoxides. Think of them as hot exhaust gases which have to be cooled and detoxified by Superoxide dismutase (SODase) into water. This is achieved with incredible efficiency – one molecule of SODase will detox 100,000 free radicals in one second! Interestingly it achieves this by generating an electrical field and acting like an electrical fly trap. No wonder many people with CFS are electrically sensitive – this messes up the ability of their SODase to deal with free radical stress! Having detoxified a free radical by removing an electron, this electron has to be moved on so that SODase can be reactivated – it does this by passing it on to second line antioxidants (such as vitamin E, vitamin K, bioflavanoids, vitamin D etc) who then pass the electron on to vitamin C – the ultimate repository! The whole chain has to be in place to work efficiently. The antioxidant system Antioxidants protect us from this free radical damage and there is no question that clinically improving antioxidant status is a central part of recovery in chronic fatigue syndromes. One of the most potent free radicals is peroxynitrite, which is formed when superoxides combine with nitric oxide. B12 is the most efficient scavenger of peroxynitrite and probably explains why it has such widespread application in fatigue syndromes – free radicals can be produced for any number of reasons from faulty mitochondrial function to allergies and chemicals causing free radical stress and therefore B12 has widespread appeal. The main front-line antioxidant in the heart and circulation is glutathione peroxidase. Also see Antioxidants. Possible Treatment Strategies - Firstly - address the symptoms. - This can make life more comfortable and that brings about benefits, but the main tool used by conventional medicine is medication and as we have seen, medication further stresses the P450 detox and can make the situation much worse. I think it is unlikely that cardiac surgery to treat the PFO will be helpful - it is the poor energy delivery to the heart that causes the problem and allows the PFO to blow open. - Secondly - address aetiology. - Since CFS is often triggered by viruses and chronic “stealth” infections are often blamed, antivirals, antibiotics and other such medications have been widely used. I have been generally unimpressed by results – indeed many patients are made much worse. This is a bit like treating lung cancer by stopping the patient smoking – the smoking has put in place a train of events which have a momentum of its own. However the key fact is that viruses attack the cooling system – get this right and the virus can be killed! To cause infection, viruses have to shift the redox state of their host in order to be able to replicate. If the redox state of the host is fine, then the virus is quickly killed. However if they are too successful in over-attacking the cooling system then their host (you and me) will die from free radical stress. Viruses have to hit the right balance! Too much and the host does not survive and if the host does not survive, the virus does not survive. - This explains why we all get exposed to viruses but not everyone is equally affected – it partly depends on your redox state as to how efficiently you deal with the virus. - This means that if the CFSs can shift his redox state in his favour, he will stop viral/pathogen replication. Indeed we already know this is the case with HIV infection! - Thirdly - correct redox state and mitochondrial function - this is what my CFS book is largely about! Please see CFS/ME - my book Diagnosis and Treatment of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Myalgic Encephalitis. Correcting mitochondrial function and antioxidant status through all the various techniques has been highly successful in allowing CFS to recover. It involves a whole package of dietary changes, detox techniques, improving sleep, improving micronutrient status etc.. It is a hard path to walk! - However I do have a few patients (and it is just a few) who despite doing all the above to the letter, and having demonstrably normal mitochondrial function tests, improved antioxidant status, quality sleep etc continue with their CFS. But despite this they continue to have marked push/crash problems. This is what Cheney calls stage III maladapted stage. Stage III CFS: the maladapted stage Cheney believes that this third and maladapted stage of chronic fatigue syndrome arises because of abnormal control mechanisms. Normally in a stress situation there is a release of stress hormones from the thyroid gland, the adrenal gland, the pituitary gland in the brain and so on. Dr Cheney has been looking at the heart response when these hormones are applied to controls and to patients with fatigue syndromes. He has developed extracts of these tissues and applies them transdermally. He sees a response in the heart within 30 seconds. This alone is quite astonishing! What he finds is that when he applies these extracts to normal people, the heart improves its function. However, when he applies these extracts to patients with chronic fatigue syndrome the heart response invariably gets worse. Cheney ran a trial whereby he took patients with CFS and for six months gave them transdermal liver extracts. Liver is rich in SODase and catalase. Although they improved with the heart tests, clinically they were no better. It was only when he added a heart extract, rich in glutathione peroxidase, that he saw clinical improvements. What Cheney was doing here I believe was to improve antioxidant status. Cheney thinks he was using these as “cell signalling factors” and believes this may be a way of reversing this “flip” in the HPA axis. I am not sure how to interpret this observation because we are already improving SODase and glutathione peroxidase with nutritional supplements – the only issue we have not looked at directly is catalase and I will ask John McLaren Howard about this! From an evolutionary perspective, the tissues, which have always been prized by primitive societies and wild animals, are the offal meats – heart, liver, kidney etc - over and above muscle meat. Certainly primitive societies are much wiser than us when it comes to food choices! Perhaps this is where psychological techniques could be helpful on CFS? What Cheney is hypothesising from this is that the control mechanisms for chronic fatigue syndrome have flipped. Instead of hormones improving efficiency and function of the heart, when you have a chronic fatigue syndrome they do the opposite. This has to be a protective mechanism. This is where the psychological techniques may be helpful. There is no doubt that these do help some people, but they have the potential to make many worse. The question is why? The key is patient selection. I would argue that psychological techniques can never help people with proven physical lesions! But there will be some people who will have healed physically but their brain does not believe it – and continues to control energy levels. Please see Craig Robinson's chapter in my CFS book, and in particular pages 200-201, located here Catastrophe theory and CFS The brain is constantly monitoring energy available to the body. Endurance athletes do this brilliantly well! There is a lovely story which illustrates this point as reported in New Scientist magazine. A runner who was also a sport’s psychologist, was competing in a marathon and had been told that the entire race was on the flat. At 18 miles he was running comfortably. He came round a corner and suddenly realised he had a mountain to climb. Within a millisecond of appreciating this, he felt the most over-whelming fatigue so he could barely walk and really struggled to complete the course! This cannot be explained by physical mechanisms – the brain suddenly realised there was much more to be done than had been previously appreciated and shut down the system to a level where completion was possible but at a much slower rate. The brain is wired to learn – it does so by association and experience. Interestingly the NMDA receptor is central to the learning process and we know this is activated in inflammation and pro-oxidant stress. It is important to realise that CFS is a protective adaptive state. If one did not switch into a CFS state, then the uncontrolled free radical stress would kill you! Just complete lack of sleep for 2 weeks is sufficient! If we force the system against its will, we risk creating more free radicals and making things much worse! So we have some good questions! What are the answers? I don’t know! What is the treatment for patent foramen ovale? - Probably not cardiac surgery! Phew! The PFO occurs in response to redox stress, 28% of normal people have PFO and do not have CFS! - Can we find an easy test for PFO? How do we know when someone is in stage III and therefore it is safe to try a psychological treatment? - it would be very nice to have an objective test! Presumably in stage III, one’s redox state is that of a normal person. Can we find an easy test for redox state? But what we do know is that all the therapies we are using have an excellent logical basis: Vis: - Reduce generation of free radicals - Rest and pacing - Low toxin diet - Get rid of toxins such as pesticides, heavy metals, VOCs and drug medication all of which are excellent at generating free radicals - Improve ability to mop up free radicals - Improve micronutrient status - Improve length and quality of sleep. That is to say back to basics - The general approach to maintaining and restoring good health. Feedback from Dr John McLaren Howard Redox state is greatly affected by pH (massive change in oxidation/reduction balance for small change in pH). This is particularly true when major components of the redox system are heavily protein-buffered. In CFS patients, the degree to which they switch to anaerobic metabolism is one of the major factors. Those who 'struggle on regardless' soon begin to depend on anaerobic mechanisms and build tolerance to increased lactate (acidosis). This has to be a major stress factor on general and cell-specific redox balance. In the leucocyte respiration studies, we also see another major factor is electron transport/oxidative phosphorylation is uncoupled. Catalase – this is a very interesting area and I have been trying to sort out a way of assessing it that throws light on the sort of mechanisms 'we' explore. There is so much of it, that it is not difficult to measure but rather just difficult to interpret any findings. One thing to keep in mind is that catalase 'reduces' organic forms of metals (including some detoxification conjugates) back to simple organic forms of the metals. This is a real problem in some cases because the inorganic - non fat soluble form cannot then escape the cell. There is so much catalase in cells that this process is inevitable - at least for some toxic metals. As with increases in intracellular calcium, if it promotes apoptosis (ie the regulated cell suicide process known as programmed cell death) then at least the normal cell replacement cycle can continue. However, in some CFS patients we now know that calcium-binding proteins are induced as Ca-Actin binding increases. Please see Wikipedia article on Actin. If that happens with heavy metals then even more damage is possible and normal cell-replacement is not promoted because apoptosis is inhibited (not triggered is a better way of putting it). The high affinity cation binding site of actin that I have investigated extensively re the intracellular calcium problem, is capable of binding a wide range of metals - it has been investigated in terms of cadmium toxicity for example. Once you have my write up on this (it's almost ready and gives full referenced details of the whole process of exploring the i/c Ca issue and Ca-Actin binding) you will see how significant this may be. Not in terms of calcium but for the toxic metals, catalase may be worsening the situation to a very great degree. Back to redox issues, I am at an early stage in looking at a method that uses the instrumentation I use for leucocyte respiration parameters (Strathkelvin microrespirometry system) to see if I can get a meaningful handle on redox issues re CFS. Watch this space. - Stone Age Diet - Alcohol intolerance in CFS - gives us a clue as to the mechanisms of fatigue - Fermentation in the gut and CFS - The general approach to maintaining and restoring good health - CFS/ME - my book Diagnosis and Treatment of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Myalgic Encephalitis Sarah Myhill Limited :: Registered in England and Wales :: Registration No. 4545198 Registered Office: Upper Weston, Llangunllo, Knighton, Powys, Wales LD7 1SL, UK. Tel 01547 550331 | Fax 01547 550339

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Notes on the Bible, by Albert Barnes, , at sacred-texts.com Now about that time - That is, during the time that the famine existed, or the time when Barnabas and Saul went up to Jerusalem. This was probably about the fifth or sixth year of the reign of Claudius, not far from 47 ad. Herod the king - This was Herod Agrippa. The Syriac so renders it expressly, and the chronology requires us so to understand it. He was a grandson of Herod the Great, and one of the sons of Aristobulus, whom Herod put to death (Josephus, Antiq., 18, 5). Herod the Great left three sons, between whom his kingdom was divided - Archelaus, Philip, and Antipas. See the notes on Mat 2:19. To Philip was left Iturea and Trachonitis. See Luk 3:1. To Antipas, Galilee and Perea; and to Archclaus, Judea, Idumea, and Samaria. Archclaus, being accused of cruelty, was banished by Augustus to Vienna in Gaul, and Judea was reduced to a province, and united with Syria. When Philip died, this region was granted by the Emperor Caligula to Herod Agrippa. Herod Antipas was driven as an exile also into Gaul, and then into Spain, and Herod Agrippa received also his tetrarchy. In the reign of Claudius also, the dominions of Herod Agrippa were still further enlarged. When Caligula was slain, he was at Rome, and having ingratiated himself into the favor of Claudius, he conferred on him also Judea and Samaria, so that his dominions were equal in extent to those of his grandfather, Herod the Great. See Josephus, Antiq., book 19, chapter 5, section 1. Stretched forth his hands - A figurative expression, denoting that "he laid his hands on them, or that he endeavored violently to oppress the church." To vex - To injure, to do evil to - κακῶσαί kakōsai. Certain - Some of the church. Who they were the writer immediately specifies. And he killed ... - He caused to be put to death with a sword, either by beheading, or piercing him through. The Roman procurators were entrusted with authority over life, though in the time of Pilate the Jews had not this authority. James, the brother of John - This was the son of Zebedee, Mat 4:21. He is commonly called James the Greater, in contradistinction from James, the son of Alpheus, who is called James the Less, Mat 10:3. In this manner were the predictions of our Saviour respecting him fulfilled, Mat 20:23, "Ye shall indeed drink of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with." And because he saw that it pleased the Jews - This was the principle on which he acted. It was not from a sense of right; it was not to do justice, and to protect the innocent; it was not to discharge the appropriate duties of a magistrate and a king, but it was to promote his own popularity. It is probable that Agrippa would have acted in this way in any circumstances. He was ambitious, vain, and fawning; he sought, as his great principle, popularity, and he was willing to sacrifice, like many others, truth and justice to obtain this end. But there was also a particular reason for this in his case. He held his appointment under the Roman emperor. This foreign rule was always unpopular among the Jews. In order, therefore, to secure a peaceful reign, and to prevent insurrection and tumult, it was necessary for him to court their favor; to indulge their wishes, and to fall in with their prejudices. Alas, how many monarchs and rulers there have been who were governed by no better principle, and whose sole aim has been to secure popularity, even at the expense of law, truth, and justice. That this was the character of Herod is attested by Josephus (Antiq., 19, chapter 8, section 3): "This king (Herod Agrippa) was by nature very beneficent, and liberal in his gifts, and very ambitious to please the people with such large donations; and he made himself very illustrious by the many expensive presents he made them. He took delight in giving, and rejoiced in living with good reputation." To take Peter also - Peter was one of the most conspicuous men in the church. He had made himself particularly obnoxious by his severe and pungent discourses, and by his success in winning people to Christ. It was natural, therefore, that he should be the next object of attack. The days of unleavened bread - The Passover, or the seven days immediately succeeding the Passover, during which the Jews were required to eat bread without leaven, Exo 12:15-18. It was some time during this period that Herod chose to apprehend Peter. Why this time was selected is not known. As it was, however, a season of religious solemnity, and as Herod was desirous of showing his attachment to the religious rites of the nation (Josephus, Antiq., Exo 19:7, Exo 19:3), it is probable that he chose this period to show to them more impressively his purpose to oppose all false religions, and to maintain the existing establishments of the nation. And when he had apprehended him - When he had taken or arrested him. He put him in prison - During the solemnities of this religious festival, it would have been deemed improper to have engaged in the trial of a supposed criminal. The minds of the people were expected to be devoted solely to the services of religion; and hence, Herod chose to retain him in custody until the Passover had ended. To four quaternions of soldiers - A "quaternion" was a company of "four"; consequently the whole number employed here was sixteen. The Romans divided the night into four watches so that the guards could be relieved; those who were on guard occupying three hours, and being then relieved. Of the four who were on guard, two were with Peter in the prison Act 12:6, and two kept watch before the door of the prison. The utmost precaution was taken that he should not escape; and Herod thus gave the most ample assurance to the Jews of his intention to secure Peter, and to bring him to trial. Intending after Easter - There never was a more absurd or unhappy translation than this. The original is simply after the Passover (μετὰ τὸ πάσχα meta to pascha. The word "Easter" now denotes the festival observed by many Christian churches in honor of the resurrection of the Saviour. But the original has no reference to that, nor is there the slightest evidence that any such festival was observed at the time when this book was written. The translation is not only unhappy, as it does not convey at all the meaning of the original, but because it may contribute to foster an opinion that such a festival was observed in the time of the apostles. The word "Easter" is of Saxon origin, and is supposed to be derived from "Eostre," the goddess of Love, or the Venus of the North, in honor of whom a festival was celebrated by our pagan ancestors in the month of April (Webster). Since this festival coincided with the Passover of the Jews, and with the feast observed by Christians in honor of the resurrection of Christ, the name came to be used to denote the latter. In the old Anglo-Saxon service-books the term "Easter" is used frequently to translate the word "Passover." In the translation by Wycliffe, the word "paske," that is, "Passover," is used. But Tyndale and Coverdale used the word "Easter," and hence, it has very improperly crept into our King James Version. To bring him forth to the people - That is, evidently, to put him publicly to death to gratify them. The providence of God in regard to Peter is thus remarkable. Instead of his being put suddenly to death, as was James, he was reserved for future trial; and thus an opportunity was given for the prayers of the church, and for his consequent release. But prayer was made - The church was apprised of his imprisonment and danger, and had no resource but to apply to God by prayer. In scenes of danger there is no other refuge; and the result shows that even in most discouraging circumstances God can hear prayer. Nothing scarcely could appear more hopeless than the idea of rescuing Peter out of the hands of Herod, and out of the prison, and out of the custody of sixteen men, by prayer. But the prayer of faith Was prevalent with God. Without ceasing - Intense, steady, ardent prayer. The word used here ἐκτενής ektenēs is found in only one other place in the New Testament, Pe1 4:8, "Have fervent charity among yourselves." The word has rather the idea that their prayer was earnest and fervent than that it was constant. Of the church - By the church. And when Herod would have brought him forth - When he was about to bring him to be put to death. The same night - That is, the night preceding. The intention of Herod was to bring him out as soon as the Passover was over; but during the night which immediately preceded the day in which he intended to bring him to punishment, Peter was rescued. Peter was sleeping - Here is an instance of remarkable composure, and an illustration of the effects of peace of conscience and of confidence in God. It was doubtless known to Peter what the intention of Herod was. James had just been put to death, and Peter had no reason to expect a better fate. And yet in this state he slept as quietly as if there had been no danger, and it was necessary that he should be roused even by an angel to contemplate his condition and to make his escape. There is nothing that will give quiet rest and gentle sleep so certainly as a conscience void of offence; and in the midst of imminent dangers, he who confides in God may rest securely and calmly. Compare Psa 3:5; Psa 4:8. Between two soldiers - See the notes on Act 12:4. Peter was bound to the two. His left hand was chained to the right hand of one of the soldiers, and his right hand to the left hand of the other. This was a common mode of securing prisoners among the Romans. See abundant authorities for this quoted in Lardner's Credibility, part 1, chapter 10: section 9, London edition, 1829, vol. i. p. 242, 243, etc. And the keepers ... - See Act 12:4. Two soldiers were stationed at the door. We may see now that every possible precaution was used to ensure the safe custody of Peter: (1) He was in prison. (2) he was under the charge of sixteen men, who could relieve each other when weary, and thus every security was given that he could not escape by inattention on their part. (3) he was bound fast between two men. And, (4) He was further guarded by two others, whose business it was to watch the door of the prison. It is to be remembered, also, that it was death for a Roman soldier to be found sleeping at his post. But God can deliver in spite of all the precautions of people; and it is easy for him to overcome the most cunning devices of his enemies. And, behold, the angel of the Lord - See the notes on Act 5:19. Came upon him - Greek: was present with him; stood near him ἐπέστη epestē. And a light shined in the prison - Many have supposed that this was lightning. But light, and splendor, and shining apparel are commonly represented as the accompaniments of the heavenly beings when they visit the earth, Luk 2:9; Luk 24:4; compare Mar 9:3. It is highly probable that this light was discerned only by Peter; and it would be to him an undoubted proof of the divine interposition in his behalf. And he smote Peter on the side - This was, doubtless, a gentle blow or stroke to arouse him from sleep. And his chains ... - This could have been only by divine power. No natural means were used, or could have been used without arousing the guard. It is a sublime expression of the ease with which God can deliver from danger, and rescue his friends. Compare Act 16:26. Gird thyself - When they slept the outer garment was thrown off, and the girdle with which they bound their inner garment, or tunic, was loosed. He was directed now to gird up that inner garment as they usually wore it; that is, to dress himself, and prepare to follow him. Bind on thy sandals - Put on thy sandals; prepare to walk. See the notes on Mat 3:11. Cast thy garment about thee - The outer garment, that was thrown loosely around the shoulders. It was nearly square, and was laid aside when they slept, or worked, or ran. The direction was that he should dress himself in his usual apparel. See the notes on Mat 5:38-42. And wist not - Knew not. That it was true - That it was real. But thought he saw a vision - He supposed that it was a representation made to his mind similar to what he had seen before. Compare Act 10:11-12. It was so astonishing, so unexpected, so wonderful, that he could not realize that it was true. The first and second ward - The word which is here rendered "ward" φυλακήν phulakēn properly denotes "the act of guarding"; but it is most commonly used to denote "a prison, or place of confinement." In this place it seems to denote the guard itself - the soldiers stationed at intervals in the entrance into the prison. These were passed silently, probably a deep sleep having been sent on them to facilitate the escape of Peter. The iron gate - The outer gate, Secured with iron, as the doors of prisons are now. That leadeth unto the city - Or rather into εἰς eis the city. The precise situation of the prison is unknown. It is supposed by some (compare Lightfoot on this place) that the prison was between two walls of the city, and that the entrance to the prison was immediately from the inner wall, so that the gate opened directly into the city. Of his own accord - Itself. It opened spontaneously, without the application of any force or key, thus showing conclusively that Peter was delivered by miraculous interposition. And passed on through one street - Until Peter was entirely safe from any danger of pursuit, and then the angel left him. God had effected his complete rescue, and now left him to his own efforts as usual. And when Peter was come to himself - This expression naturally means, when he had overcome bas amazement and astonishment at the unexpected deliverance, so as to be capable of reflection. He had been amazed by the whole transaction. He thought it was a vision: and in the suddenness and rapidity with which it was done, he had no time for cool reflection. The events of divine providence often overwhelm and confound us; and such are their suddenness, and rapidity, and unexpected character in their development as to prevent calm and collected reflection. Of a surety - Certainly, surely. He considered all the circumstances; he saw that he was actually at liberty, and he was satisfied that it could have been effected only by divine interposition. The expectation of the people - From this it appears that the people earnestly desired his death; and it was to gratify that desire that Herod had imprisoned him. And when he had considered ... - Thinking on the subject; considering what he should do in these circumstances. He came to the house of Mary ... - Probably this house was near him; and he would naturally seek the dwelling of a Christian friend. The mother of John ... - Probably this was the John Mark who wrote the gospel. But this is not certain. Whose surname - Greek: who was called Mark. It does not mean that he had two names conferred, as with us, both of which were used at the same time, but he was called by either, the Greeks probably using the name Mark, and the Jews the name John. He is frequently mentioned afterward as having been the attendant of Paul and Barnabas in their travels, Act 12:25; Act 15:39; Ti2 4:11. He was a nephew of Barnabas, Col 4:10. Where many were gathered together, praying - This was in the night, and it shows the propriety of observing extraordinary seasons of prayer, even in the night. Peter was to have been put to death the next day; and they assembled to pray for his release, and did not intermit their prayers. When dangers increase around us and our friends, we should become more fervent in prayer. While life remains we may pray; and even when there is no human hope, and we have no power to heal or deliver, still God may interpose, as he did here, in answer to prayer. At the door of the gate - Rather the door of the vestibule, or principal entrance into the house. The house was entered through such a porch or vestibule, and it was the door opening into this which is here intended. See the notes on Mat 9:2. A damsel - A girl. Came to hearken - To hear who was there. Named Rhoda - This is a Greek name signifying a rose. It was not unusual for the Hebrews to give the names of flowers, etc., to their daughters. Thus, Susanna, a lily; Hadessa, a myrtle; Tamar, a palm-tree, etc. (Grotius). She opened not the gate - At this time of night, and in these circumstances, the door would be fastened. Christians were doubtless alarmed by the death of James and the imprisonment of Peter, and they would take all possible precautions for their own safety. For gladness - In her joy she hastened to inform those who were assembled of the safety of Peter. Thou art mad - Thou art insane. They seemed to have regarded his rescue as so difficult and so hopeless, that they deemed it proof of derangement that she now affirmed it. And yet this was the very thing for which they had been so earnestly praying. When it was now announced to them that the object of their prayers was granted, they deemed the messenger that announced it insane. Christians are often surprised even when their prayers are answered. They are overwhelmed and amazed at the success of their own petitions, and are slow to believe that the very thing for which they have sought could be granted. It shows, perhaps, with how little faith, after all, they pray, and how slow they are to believe that God can hear and answer prayer. In a revival of religion in answer to prayer, Christians are often overwhelmed and astonished when even their own petitions are granted, and when God manifests his own power in his own way and time. Prayer should be persevered in, and we should place ourselves in a waiting posture to catch the first indications that God has heard us. But she constantly affirmed - She insisted on it. How much better it would have been to have hastened at once to the gate, than thus to have engaged in a controversy on the subject. Peter was suffered to remain knocking while they debated the matter. Christians are often engaged in some unprofitable controversy when they should hasten to catch the first tokens of divine favor, and open their arms to welcome the proofs that God has heard their prayers. Then said they - Still resolved not to be convinced. It is his angel - Any way of accounting for it rather than to admit the simple fact, or to ascertain the simple truth. All this was caused by the little hope which they had of his release, and their earnest desire that it should be so. It was just such a state of mind as is indicated when we say, "The news is too good to e believed." The expression "It is his angel" may mean that they supposed that the "tutelary guardian," or angel appointed to attend Peter, had come to announce something respecting him, and that he had assumed the voice and form of Peter in order to make them certain that he came from him. This notion arose from the common belief of the Jews that each individual had assigned to him, at birth, a celestial spirit, whose office it was to guard and defend him through life. See the notes on Mat 18:10. That the Jews entertained this opinion is clear from their writings. See Kuinoel. Lightfoot thinks that they who were assembled supposed that the angel had assumed the voice and manner of Peter in order to intimate to them that he was about to die, and to excite them to earnest prayer that he might die with constancy and firmness. Whatever their opinions were, however, it proves nothing on these points. There is no evidence that they were inspired in these opinions, nor are their notions countenanced by the Scriptures. They were the mere common traditions of the Jews, and prove nothing in regard to the truth of the opinion one way or the other. Were astonished - They were now convinced that it was Peter, and they were amazed that he had been rescued. As yet they were of course ignorant of the manner in which it was done. But he, beckoning ... - To prevent the noise, and tumult, and transport which was likely to be produced. His wish was, not that there should be clamorous joy, but that they should listen in silence to what God had done. It was sufficient to awe the soul, and produce deep, grateful feeling. A noise might excite the neighboring Jews, and produce danger. Religion is calm and peaceful; and its great scenes and surprising deliverances are rather suited to awe the soul to produce calm, sober, and grateful contemplation, than the noise of rejoicing, and the shoutings of exultation. The consciousness of the presence of God, and of his mighty power, does not produce rapturous disorder and tumult, but holy, solemn, calm, grateful emotion. Go, show these things ... - Acquaint them that their prayer is heard, and that they may rejoice also at the mercy of God. Unto James - James, the son of Alpheus, commonly called the Less. See Act 12:2 note; Act 1:13 note; Mat 10:2 note. And to the brethren - Particularly to the other apostles. And went into another place - Probably a place of greater safety. Where he went is not known. The papists pretend that he went to Rome. But of this there is no evidence. He is mentioned as in Jerusalem again in Acts 15. The meaning is evidently that he went into some place of retirement until the danger was past. No small stir - Amazement that he had escaped, and apprehension of the consequences. The punishment which they had reason to expect, for having suffered his escape, was death. He examined the keepers - The soldiers who were entrusted with his custody. Probably only those who had the special care of him at that watch of the night. The word "examine" here means "to inquire diligently, to make investigation." He subjected them to a rigid scrutiny to ascertain the manner of his escape; for it is evident that Herod did not mean to admit the possibility of a miraculous interposition. Should be put to death - For having failed to keep Peter. This punishment they had a right to expect for having suffered his escape. And he went down ... - How soon after the escape of Peter he went down to Caesarea, or how long he abode there, is not known. Caesarea was rising into magnificence, and the Roman governors made it often their abode. See the notes on Act 8:40. Compare Act 25:1, Act 25:4. This journey of Herod is related by Josephus (Antiq., book 19, chapter 8, section 2). He says that it was after he had reigned over all Judea for three years. And there abode - That is, until his death, which occurred shortly after. We do not learn that he made any further inquiry after Peter, or that he attempted any further persecutions of the Christians. The men on guard were undoubtedly put to death; and thus Herod used all his power to create the impression that Peter had escaped by their negligence; and this would undoubtedly be believed by the Jews. See Mat 28:15. He might himself, perhaps, have been convinced, however, that the escape was by miracle, and afraid to attempt any further persecutions; or the affairs of his government might have called off his attention to other things; and thus, as in the case of the. "persecution that arose about Stephen," the political changes and dangers might divert the attention from putting Christians to death. See the notes on Act 9:31. Thus, by the providence of God, this persecution, that had been commenced, not by popular tumult, but by royal authority and power, and that was aimed at the very pillars of the church, ceased. The prayers of the church prevailed; and the monarch was overcome, disappointed, bummed, and, by divine judgment, soon put to death. And Herod was highly displeased ... - Greek: "bore a hostile mind," intending war. See the margin. The Greek word θυμομαχῶν thumomachōn does not occur elsewhere in the New Testament. It means to meditate war; to purpose war in the mind; or here, probably, to be enraged or angry at them. What was the cause of this hostility to the people of Tyre and Sidon is not mentioned, and conjecture is useless. It is not at all inconsistent, however, with the well known character of Herod. It was probably from some cause relating to commerce. Tyre and Sidon were under the Roman power, and had some shadow of liberty (Grotius), and it is probable that they might have embarrassed Herod in some of his regulations respecting commerce. Tyre and Sidon - See the notes on Mat 11:21. They were north of Caesarea. They came with one accord - Fearing the effects of his anger, they united in sending an embassage to him to make peace. Blastus, the king's chamberlain - See Rom 16:23. The word "chamberlain" denotes an officer who is charged with the direction and management of a chamber or chambers, particularly a bed-chamber. It denotes here a man who had charge of the bed chamber of Herod. Because their country was nourished ... - Was supplied by the territories of Herod. The country of Tyre and Sidon included a narrow strip of land on the coast of the Mediterranean. Of course they were dependent for provisions, and for articles of commerce, on the interior country; but this belonged to the kingdom of Herod; and as they were entirely dependent on his country, as he had power to dry up the sources of their support and commerce, they were the more urgent to secure his favor. And upon a set day - An appointed, public day. This was the second day of the sports and games which Herod celebrated in Caesarea in honor of Claudius Caesar. Josephus has given an account of this occurrence, which coincides remarkably with the narrative here. The account is contained in his "Antiquities of the Jews," book 19, chapter 8, section 2, and is as follows: "Now when Agrippa had reigned three years over all Judea, he came to the city Caesarea, which was formerly called Strato's Tower; and there he exhibited shows in honor of Caesar, upon his being informed that there was a certain festival celebrated to make vows for his safety. At which festival a great multitude was gotten together of the principal persons, and such as were of dignity throughout his province. On the second day of which shows he put on a garment made wholly of silver," etc. Arrayed in royal apparel - In the apparel of a king. Josephus thus describes the dress which Herod wore on that occasion. "He put on a garment made wholly of silver, and of wonderful contexture, and early in the morning came into the theater place of the shows and games, at which time the silver of his garment, being illuminated by the first reflection of the sun's rays upon it, shone after a surprising manner, and was so resplendent as to spread a horror over those that looked intently on him." Sat upon his throne - This does not denote a throne in the usual sense of that word, but "a high seat" in the theater, where he sat, and from whence he could have a full view of the games and sports. From this place he made his speech. Made an oration - Addressed the people.' What was the subject of this speech is not intimated by Luke or Josephus. And the people gave a shout - A loud applause. It is the voice of a god ... - It is not probable that the Jews joined in this acclamation, but that it was made by the idolatrous Gentiles. Josephus gives a similar account of their feelings and conduct. He says, "And presently his flatterers cried out, one from one place, and another from another (though not for his good), that he was a god; and they added, 'Be thou merciful unto us; for although we have hitherto reverenced thee only as a king, yet shall we henceforth own thee as a superior to mortal nature.'" It is true that Josephus says that this was done when they saw his splendid apparel, and that he gives no account of his addressing the people, while Luke describes it as the effect of his speech. But the discrepancy is of no consequence. Luke is as credible an historian as Josephus, and his account is more consistent than that of the Jewish historian. It is far more probable that this applause and adoration would be excited by a speech than simply by beholding his apparel. And immediately the angel of the Lord - Diseases and death axe in the Scriptures often attributed to an angel. See Sa2 24:16; Ch1 21:12, Ch1 21:15, Ch1 21:20, Ch1 21:27; Ch2 32:21. It is not intended that there was a miracle in this case, but it certainly is intended by the sacred writer that his death was a divine judgment on him for his receiving homage as a god. Josephus says of him that he "did neither rebuke them the people nor reject their impious flattery. A severe pain arose in his belly, and began in a most violent manner. And when he was quite worn out by the pain in his belly for five days, he departed this life, in the 54th year of his age, and the 7th year of his reign." Josephus does not mention that it was done by an angel, but says that when he looked up, he saw an owl sitting on a rope over his head, and judging it to be an evil omen, he immediately became melancholy, and was seized with the pain. Because he gave not God the glory - Because he was willing to receive the worship due to God. It was the more sinful in him as he was a Jew, and was acquainted with the true God, and with the evils of idolatry. He was proud, and willing to be flattered, and even adored. He had sought their applause; he had arrayed himself in this splendid manner to excite admiration; and when they carried it even so far as to offer divine homage, he did not reject the impious flattery, but listened stir to their praises. Hence, he was judged; and God vindicated his own insulted honor by inflicting severe pains on him, and by a most awful death. And he was eaten of worms - The word used here is not found elsewhere in the New Testament. A similar disease is recorded of Antiochus Epiphanes, in the Apocrypha, 2 Macc. 9:5, "But the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, smote him with an invisible and incurable plague; for a pain in the bowels that was remediless came upon him, and sore torments of the inner parts Act 12:9, so that worms rose up out of the body of this wicked man," etc. Probably this was the disease known as morbus pedicularis. It is loathsome, offensive, and most painful. See the death of Antiochus Epiphanes described in 2 Macc. 9. With this disease also Herod the Great, grandfather of Herod Agrippa, died (Josephus, Antiq., book 17, chapter 6, section 5). Such a death, so painful, so sudden, and so loathsome, was an appropriate judgment on the pride of Herod. We may here learn: (1) That sudden and violent deaths are often acts of direct divine judgment on wicked people. (2) that people, when they seek praise and flattery, expose themselves to the displeasure of God. His glory he will not give to another, Isa 42:8. (3) that the most proud, and mighty, and magnificent princes have no security of their lives. God can in a moment - even when they are surrounded by their worshippers and flatterers - touch the seat of life, and turn them to loathsomeness and putrefaction. What a pitiable being is a man of pride receiving from his fellow-men that homage which is due to God alone! See Isa. 14. (4) pride and vanity, in any station of life, are hateful in the sight of God. Nothing is more inappropriate to our situation as lost, dying sinners, and nothing will more certainly meet the wrath of heaven. (5) we have here a strong confirmation of the truth of the sacred narrative. In all essential particulars Luke coincides in his account of the death of Herod with Josephus. This is one of the many circumstances which show that the sacred Scriptures were written at the time when they professed to be, and that they accord with the truth. See Lardner's Credibility, part 1, chapter 1, section 6. But the word of God grew ... - Great success attended it. The persecutions had now ceased; and notwithstanding all the attempts which had been made to crush it, stir the church increased and flourished. The liberation of Peter and the death of Herod would contribute to extend it. It was a new evidence of divine interposition in behalf of the church; it would augment the zeal of Christians; it would. humble their enemies, and would fill those with fear who had attempted to oppose and crush the church of God. Returned from Jerusalem - They had gone to Jerusalem to carry alms, and they now returned to Antioch, Act 11:30. When they had fulfilled their ministry - When they had accomplished the purpose for which they had been sent there; that is, to deposit the alms of the church at Antioch in the hands of the eiders of the churches, Act 11:30. John, whose surname was Mark - See the notes on Act 12:12. From this period the sacred historian records chiefly the labors of Paul. The labors of the other apostles are, after this, seldom referred to in this book, and the attention is fixed almost entirely on the trials and travels of the great apostle of the Gentiles. His important services, his unwearied efforts, his eminent success, and the fact that Luke was his companion, may be the reasons why his labors are made so prominent in the history. Through the previous chapters we have seen the church rise from small beginnings, until it was even now spreading into surrounding regions. We have seen it survive two persecutions, commenced and conducted with all the power and malice of Jewish rulers. We have seen the most zealous of the persecutors converted to the faith which he once destroyed, and the royal persecutor put to death by the divine judgment. And we have thus seen that God was the protector of the church; that no weapon formed against it could prosper; that, according to the promise of the Redeemer, the gates of hell could not prevail against it. In that God and Saviour who then defended the church, we may still confide, and may be assured that he who was then its friend has it still "engraved on the palms of his hands," and designs that it shall extend until it fills the earth with light and salvation.

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The purpose of this post is to suggest that the brain has a simple internal language for storing and using memories of objects and events, that this language is common to animals and humans, and as the capacity of the brain expands the language has sufficient power to support human intelligence. In particular it identifies two areas where changes in the learning/teaching mechanisms could have led to a tripping point where it became economical (in evolutionary terms) to develop a larger brain. It suggests that much, if not all, of what we consider intelligence is the result of cultural factors. The following topics are addressed The Black Hole in Brain Research – bridging the gap between the neuron level and intelligence. Evolutionary Pressures on Brain Size – bigger is not necessarily better The Simple Brain Model – the minimum requirements of a learning animal – introducing “Memodes” A More formal Definition of a Memode Introducing CODIL - the history and references to this blue sky research project Why CODIL is relevant - and some factors to be considered Evolving More Brain Power - instructing and programming cultural information What Next? - Ensuring the ideas get followed up 1. The Black Hole in Brain Research An unbelievable amount of very detailed research has been carried out world wide on the inner workings of the brain, into the nature of natural language, how children learn, intelligence in animals and humans, psychology and brain disorders. However if one stands back and takes an overview there is no unified model which allows one to follow a step by step route between the electrical impulses at the neural level and, for example, how a child learns to talk or why we enjoy Shakespeare. The purpose of this discussion document is to go back to first principles and suggest a framework which, with further research could help to bridge this gap. The approach taken is to start by assuming (1) that there are a few basic information processing facilities which any animal capable of modifying their behaviour as a result of learning must have, and (2) that the human brain works in basically the same way – with no major changes – the differences being mainly related to increases in size and the number of links. In effect the approach suggests that a human is just a normal mammal except that, like the giraffe and its neck, or the elephant and its trunk, it has significantly expanded the way one particular organ, the brain, is used. Some of these ideas have been discussed earlier as The Black Hole in the Brain. 2. Evolutionary Pressure on Brain Size It is very easy to assume that a bigger brain is always better but in evolutionary terms this is not the case. Running a brain is an additional (and non-trivial) expense and the more resources expended on the brain the less resources are left for other needs and I have discussed some of the factors in Evolutionary Factors starting on the African Plains. The problem is that running and “loading” the brain with information has a cost, with everything learnt being lost at death. An animal with a bigger brain will need to learn more to “fill it” with knowledge and this will take time, possibly extending the childhood period. If there is any form of “instruction by example” by parents this also has resource implications for the parents. For herd animals it is advantageous for the young animals to play “follow my leader” with the older animals. A young animal does not need to know about predators if there are always older, more experienced animals there (not necessarily of the same species) as long as they run when the herd runs. This reduces the need for larger brains because vital information is automatically shared with minimal “teaching effort” by the older animals. This is developed further in social groups of primates and elephants where there is a positive grandmother effect where the older, more experienced animals can support the younger adults, such as a mother in labour for the first time. Because information is passed positively between generations, knowledge is not completely lost, so there could be advantages of a more “intelligent” brain. A critical factor is how much information can be economically passed between generations – and with the coming of human language (and later writing) there will be a need to evolve a means of faster learning to reduce the learning and teaching times, and possibly a need for passing on learning techniques. This is a factor which must be addressed in the current model. 3. The Simple Brain Model An animal which is capable of learning must have a facility which will remember “objects” and recognise them when they recur. For instance a chimpanzee must be able to recognise a banana, and it would be useful if a mouse could recognise a cat. At this stage we will not consider how this information is encoded in the brain but will simply refer to the unit which stores and subsequently recognises real world items a memode. The job of the sense organs, and the associated parts of the brain is to generate memodes. In a new born – with an “empty” brain these memodes will be stored – and if the associated pattern repeats the memode will be reinforced while the ones which do not repeat will be lost. This will build up a language of “objects” recognised - and this reflects what happens when human babies learn the phonemes that make up the language of their parents. In the real world the animal will be aware of memodes relating to more than one object – and any effective learning will have to relate how objects interact. In the current simple model the current context consists of the most recently activated memodes, which will record what the animal is currently seeing, smelling, etc. At this stage the brain will need to link together memodes which are active at the same time, using a similar learning pattern for the links – with common links being reinforced and uncommon links being lost. Once this has happened the network of linked memodes can start making predictions. To take a simple example where the linked memodes in a chimpanzee represents HUNGER – BANANA – EAT. When the body activates the HUNGER memode the link, in effect, interrogates the BANANA memode to see if it is true – asking “are you currently seeing a banana?” If the answer is yes the link to the HUNGER memode is triggered – and this in turn triggers the action of eating. If no banana is currently being seen the BANANA memode will have been generated by the vision section of the brain so could start a visual search for bananas. Such referrals back to the originating sense areas of the brain could explain why, when thinking about something, some people have a strong sense of seeing, hearing or smelling what they are thinking about – and also relate to the imagery of dreams. How the memodes are linked Let us consider that a mouse might have memodes representing the SIGHT-OF-A-CAT, the SMELL-OF-A-CAT and the SOUND-OF-A-CAT and while often these would occur together they could also be actively singly. If they link together to form a new memode CAT this could be “true” if any one of them was “true”, or is a combination of them was “true”. When we get to thinking about humans and language one can easily add in WORD-FOR-A-CAT as another way of identifying a cat. But the SIGHT-OF-A-CAT memode might similarly link to memodes representing the EYE-OF-A-CAT, the WHISKERS-OF-A-CAT, the SLINKY-MOVEMENT-OF-A-CAT, etc. and these in turn could have links to memodes concerned with even smaller details. This demonstrates an important feature of the model. The memode network is recursive, and, assuming that only some of the links at any stage have to be true, provides a form of inexact (or fuzzy) matching. In humans, and I would assume also animals, one is only aware to the highest level memodes. For instance as a bird watcher I may instantly recognise one bird while being unconscious of the individual features – but if there is a problem I will look closely to see if I can identify an detail which will distinguish between several possibilities. A similar approach can be used to classify hierarchies of different but related objects. For instance the ANIMAL memode would link to CAT, DOG, ELEPHANT, etc, and the CAT memode would linked to individual cats such as TIDDLES, GINGER, THOMAS, etc. Memodes would be in several hierarchies and CAT might be in PET, BIRD_KILLER, etc. as well as ANIMAL. The extent to how far animals can take this degree of generalization is unclear to me, but it is only a variant of the previous example involving the SIGHT, SMALL, and SOUND-OF-A-CAT. There is one other way in which memodes can be linked, and this is when very different things are linked in a single event. A pet dog will link MASTER-STANDING, LEAD-IN_HAND and WALK, and leap up, tail wagging in appreciation, when its master stands up and picks up the lead. Some more intelligent dogs might even attempt to make LEAD-IN-HAND true by picking up the lead and taking it to the master! In many cases a linked series of memodes such as these can be likened to a program statement which interrogates the currently active memodes. if MASTER-STANDING then if LEAD-IN-HAND then WALK 4. A more formal definition of a Memode A memode is the active unit of information in the brain. It represents an object, abstract concept or event which needs to be remembered. While a memode might directly hold a low level piece of information, it will often consist of links to other memodes. Any memode can be highly active in the current context – which means that it is at the focus of the brains attention. Otherwise, If triggered by another memode it can compare itself with the memodes in the current context and recognise if it matches. It can then either signal “true” back to the triggering memode, join the current context, or trigger other nemodes. Some memodes will be linked with the senses, while some will be linked to the brain “outputs” - which will be triggered if the memode enters the current context. In addition each memode will have some kind of learning function associated with it, so that frequently used memodes have a higher priority, while unused memodes eventually get forgotten. In the brain a memode could be a single neuron or a linked group of neurons. This simple model represents what can be considered a minimum for any animal which can learn to recognise a reasonable number of real world entities and make simple decisions. The key question to be asked is how far the human brain works in this way, taking for granted that it has greater capacity in terms of the number of neurons and the number of interconnections. If we start from the bottom up and assume that there are no fundamental differences (apart from size factors) between the animal model, described above, we will either end up showing that there are no fundamental differences or we will be in a better position to understand what they are. Studying the model may also suggest where the main evolutionary pressures were. 5. Introducing CODIL Fortunately there was some research some years ago which used a similar model and while there were differences, which will be discussed later, the experimental research carried out then showed that such a simple approach could pack a lot of processing punch. CODIL started in the 1960s as a piece of blue sky research into alternative information processing architectures which aimed to avoid some of the problems inherent in the conventional stored program computer approach (see The Limitations of the Stored Program Computer). The underlying idea arose from an unconventional approach to handling a very large commercial task (Working with LEO III Computers at SMBP) and further research was actively supported by two of the pioneers of commercial computing in the UK, David Caminer and John Pinkerton, The hope was to provided a “white box” processor, which would allow humans work with it to handle open ended tasks which could not easily be predefined in advance. CODIL was, in effect, the human friendly symbolic assembly language for the proposed new architecture. The basic principles were clearly demonstrated in a series of publications ending in a schools package which demonstrated its ability to handle a wide range of artificial intelligence and other tasks which received excellent reviews, followed by a detailed paper in the top ranking Computer Journal . Unfortunately the project was aborted before the final paper appeared in print for health related reasons. While CODIL was conceived in terms a modified microcode “instruction set” within the central computer processor, the research was carried out with four different software simulations, and each was tested in different ways. The first was simply a test bed to demonstrate that the idea would work. The second was designed to test out a number of commercial data processing tasks on a small scale, and was used to set up a research medical data base and a historical data base. There was also a major excursion into artificial intelligence with TANTALIZE. In 1980 online access became easier and the emphasis switched to using CODIL to support teaching packages and to demonstrate how it might support an interactive publishing network (conceptually a text ancestor of the world wide web). For various reasons the early software was not very portable and with the coming of the the first small personal computers it was decided to demonstrate that the idea was simple enough to fit into a BBC Micro (effective memory 25Kbytes!!!) and the result was MicroCODIL which prove logically far more powerful than its predecessors and which attracted rave reviews from a wide variety of magazines. Unfortunately at the time the MicroCODIL software was being produced there was a suicide that was a major factor leading to the closure of the project in 1988. The final publication appeared in the Computer Journal in 1990. 6. Why CODIL is relevantWhile CODIL was implemented on a stored program computer conceptually it was very different as is explained in the post How Many Trucks will your Helicopter Pull: Computers were originally designed for highly repetitive numerical tasks involving well designed pre-defined algorithms. The underlying mechanisms were never designed to be human-friendly - and to most people the computer in effectively a "magic black box." The more complex the task the more effort has to be put into pre-defining the algorithms and it would be interesting to know how many billions of man years (including time spent up blind alleys and on training) have gone into creating the computer-dependent world we now live it. While the benefits may be enormous, getting there has not been cheap. CODIL starts from the opposite end of the spectrum. It effectively starts on any task from a position of ignorance - with nothing pre-defined. It does not formally break information down in to program and data, and there are no global rules. In effect it works by comparing information which it has just received with copies of information it has received in the past and uses this make simple deductions, nothing more. The fact this works may surprise many familiar with the limitations of the stored program computer, but many tests have shown a wide variety of situations where it demonstrably works. The whole is set up so that the human who is inputting the information can see into the "white box" so that he can understand how the information is being handled. The important thing is that CODIL was an attempt to provide a flexible information tool which will help humans with complex open-ended logical tasks which cannot be fully pre-defined in advance, and to do this it had to model some aspects of how the human brain handles such problems. The detailed working are described in the papers, cited earlier, but the key features are a central “decison making unit” which scans linked lists of “items”, comparing them with a list of items called the “Facts” which provides a working short term memory. The principal difference in the underlying approach is that in CODIL there is a single central processing unit while in the memode model the decision making is distributed over the network. There are many aspects of the CODIL research which could be discussed in considerable detail at this stage to assess their relevance to the memode model but to keep this post within a reasonable length I have selected three where I feel that further work is required - and am very happy to provided information on others on request. CODIL was developed as a tool The first thing to consider when assessing the relevance of the result of the CODIL experiments is that CODIL was designed to be a practical tool which could be used alongside conventional computer systems. It was therefore taken for granted that, for example, any usable package should be able to carry out a comprehensive range of mathematical calculations. It should also be able to handle keyboard input and display what it is doing on a screen, or route it to a printer. For this reason the experimental software packages contained libraries of support routines which are not relevant to the brain model. In the case of the package MicroCODIL about 95% of the software was there to provide a dedicated text editing facility and about a dozen different windows to show the user what the system was doing. (See for example The Use of Colour in Language Syntax Analysis) Such presentation features can safely be ignored in assessing the results of the trials with CODIL and MicroCODIL. In addition counting, arithmetic, formal logic and the more advance mathematical techniques are cultural features alien to our hunter gather ancestors – and to all animals – and are not be considered as as part of the basic memode model – although the ability to acquire such skills is relevant to any model of the evolution of human intelligence. Extending the Network The CODIL network model was not designed with the memode approach in mind and there are several ways in which it needs simplifying to make it more like the the memode model of the brain. The first is related to what could be considered the “bottom level” when actual information is stored. This has been discussed in From Neural Nets to Language which also discusses some of the ideas in this post in more detail. The CODIL Item “MURDERER = MACBETH” effectively indicates that MACBETH is a character string which is a member of the set MURDERER. For the memode model this becomes a linked pair of memodes “MURDERER -> MACBETH” where MACBETH is now also considered a set, which may have members. This can then be extended to provide a broader model than CODIL normally supplies: It also emphasises the need to do further research to consider the specialist areas of the brain, such as the the parts that process sight and sounds, as a continuation of the decision process, and a consideration of the boundary between conscious and unconscious thought. There are also some interesting aspects of the move between serial and parallel processing and the problem of self referential problems. CODIL as a programming language CODIL is a bottom up system which simply scans lists of lists of lists of items and makes simply deductions, with the advantage that there is no need for an explicit pre-defined global algorithm for the task. This means that there is no formal distinction between items which can be used as “data”, as “logic tests” or as “commands” - because any and every item (with a few special cases concerned with input and output) can validly be used in any of these roles. Exactly the same applies to the memode model. But what happens if the person who wants to use CODIL has a task which can be pre-defined? This is perfectly acceptable in that the user can provide lists of items which he only wants to be used in a particular way – in effect as a program. In the simplest case this “program” could just be a single item to be interpreted as an instruction to start by comparing one list with another – and the effect can be very far reaching because of the recursive nature of the decision making process. There are limitations to how far this approach can be taken because CODIL uses associative addressing (unlike conventional computer systems which use numbers for addressing purposes) and as such cannot easily handle algorithms which are based on arrays, although a very limited facility has been built in for handling items with multiple values. While most CODIL “program” are very small the language was used to write one very significant “program” - called TANTALIZE. TANTALIZE was designed to solve logic problems and was named because it succeeded in solving 15 consecutive “Tantalizer” problems (now renamed Enigma) as they were published weekly in the New Scientist during the mid1970s. It was also used to solve many of the similar problems that appears in the Artificial Intelligence literature at the time. Using the terminology of the time TANTALIZE was a series of production rules, represented in CODIL, which queried a human user about the logic problem to be solved. The result was to generate a new series of production rules which were optimised using a version of CODIL with a learning facility. The optimised version of the rules were then “obeyed” to produce the correct logical solution in something approaching the minimum number of steps. The paper of TANTALIZE reported on how the approach compared with other Artificial Intelligence research being carried out at the same time: Compared with other problem solvers, the TANTALIZE problem descriptions are almost always simpler, the time to process problems is often more than an order of magnitude less, and with a mere thousand [lines of code] TANTALIZE provides an unrivalled range of heuristic search and other facilities. Its comparative weakness in algebraic manipulation is more than compensated for by the ease with which it can be extended by the use of CODIL to carry out a wide range of operations. There is no way that the complex set of rules such as those that made up TANTALIZE could evolved on a memode network dependent on dynamic trial and error learning – but the fact that the architecture can support complex algorithms is important when we consider the evolution of human intelligence. In particular there is the real possibility of generating English language statements from the "MACBETH" network illustrated above 7. Evolving more Brain Power The basic memode model assumes that animals which can modify their behaviour based on experience must have a brain that can (a) recognise and remember objects in the real world, (b) link together objects which are associated and (c) can use this information to make simple deductions. If we then assume that the human brain is little more than a scaled up version of the animal brain we need to ask what changes need to evolve in order to support the the kind of intellectual activities humans are capable. In increasing the “capacity” of the brain one could increase the number of memodes, the number (and perhaps the nature) of the links between them, the number of memodes (the Current Context) that can be active at one time, and factors relating to learning and forgetting – some of which relates to the depth of “recursion” which can be supported (i.e. how complex a single chain of thought can be before it starts to forget). The important thing to remember is that, in evolutionary terms, there is no point in having a brain which has more capacity than is needed, and one of the biggest costs will be that associated with learning. The bigger the brain the longer the childhood learning period, the bigger the investment the parents have to put into rearing and “teaching” the youngster, and the more hard-earned knowledge that is lost when the brain dies. This suggests that if one can reduce the cost of learning and/or the ability to transfer significant amounts of knowledge from one generation to another, the costs of having a larger brain fall while the benefits increase. If this happened the bigger brain could make it easier to learn and transfer information and the one has what one might consider an auto-catalysed reaction, where the result of the brain getting bigger is to make it even easier to even bigger. So can we identify a possible trigger point where developing a bigger brain became more economic, triggering an auto-catalysed growth. In general terms the appearance of language must be involved, and it is relevant to see how far this could have been based on the simple memode model. In fact there seem to be two potential trigger points. The first relates to the point where the information passed from an adult to a child is more reliable than the information that the child can learn for itself. When this happens there are evolutionary advantages in the child bypassing the normal learning mechanisms of the basic memode model and directly accepting what is said as gospel. But these is already an “express learning” mechanism in any animal's brain for handling life-threatening events – for the simple reason that you cannot afford to learn by trial and error – and it is probably relevant that in human teaching there is often a “carrot and stick” element in the teaching process. Such a change in learning mechanism will significantly speed learning and reduce the instruction time and could explain the sudden change of gear in the way young children learn once they have got a fair grasp of language. It is interesting to look at the cultural implications of a switch to "speed learning." In evolutionary terms the quicker the exchange of information between parent and child the better. It helps the process if a child asks its parents questions but in the days well before before encyclopedias and public libraries some of the questions – such as “Why does that butterfly have eyes on its wings?” would have been unanswerable and would have no survival value. Rather than waste time or loose authority by admitting the answer is unknown there could be an advantage to the parent in having a stock answer to cover all such questions – such as “the invisible spirit in the oak tree did it.” Because of the way culture works, within a few generations a supernatural origin myth would have come into existence. In addition, because the speed learning mechanism is related to ensuring animals avoid danger, supernatural stories which promise a choice between an unbelievably attractive heaven and the horrors of eternal damnation in hell would be particularly attractive. Of course the religious may not like the fact that what they think was a “God Gene” only exists because humans evolved to accept as correct any statement (true or false) spouted by a suitably authoritative looking human, and that some individuals are more willing to absorb unverified (and unverifiable) information as being correct. The second mechanism relates to “programming the mind.” The work with CODIL, and particularly the problem solver TANTALIZE show that something akin to the memode model can actually be used to support very complex algorithms, although it is not obvious how a individual could create such algorithms using simple learning techniques. On the other hand once language has advanced to the stage of being able to say “here is a recipe for doing ...” you may only need one person to stumble on the way to do something – and transmission of the new information processing technique becomes cultural. Areas where some “programming” help could be relevant would be the handling of numbers (expanding to much of mathematics and formal logic) and the syntax structures of the many different human languages.If this is the case there is no need for any special biological evolution to support such human mental activities. This all suggests that the human brain could work using virtually identical decision making mechanisms to an animal's brain, and that most if not all of what seems intelligence is due to cultural factors relating to learning technigques. This does not mean that other changes are not significant. In this context the recent work on the SRGAP2 gene is interesting. This gene is connected with the connections between the neurons, the form SRGAP2a is common to chimpanzees and humans. However the gene has duplicated itself twice with the second duplication probably been relevant to the split between the Australophithecus and Homo lines. The duplication of the gene appears to have introduced a step function in the number of connections between neurons, which at the very least would have affected the cost effectiveness of the brain – and which might, for example made some differences in the nature of the links. Other changes associated with the size and capacity of the brain may have also had a step effect. 8. What Next? Of course humans are something special in terms with what they have done on this planet, and the information they have collectively assembled. But how far is all this due to culture and how far are humans exceptional in purely evolutionary terms. Among the mammals we have giraffes with very long necks, elephants with prehensile noses, bats that fly, and legless whales which can swim deep in the sea. The purpose of this post is to argue that from the biological point of view humans are just mammals with big heads (in both senses of the phrase) and that demonstrate that a simple memode model, supported by blue sky experimental research on CODIL, plus changes in learning stimulated by language and culture, may be sufficient to explain our intelligence. Of course I am aware that there are very many more questions to be answered, and outstanding problems to be solved, before the ideas can become ether firmly established or disproved. If I was a young scientist trying to find out how to bridge the “Black Hole” in the centre of brain research I would be raring to go. But of course I am not. I have long retired, having given up active scientific research years ago, in part for medically related reasons, and I have neither the (life)time, energy or resources to follow the ideas through to a polished conclusion. However I can still “think research” and if anyone wants to explore the ideas posted here in more detail I am very happy to exchange information on this blog, or in otherways brainstorm the issues. Earlier Brain Storms - The Black Hole in Brain Research - Evolutionary Factors starting on the African Plains - Requirements of a target Model - Some Factors in choosing a Model - CODIL and Natural Language - Getting rid of those pesky numbers - Was Douglas Adams right about the Dolphins - The Evolution of Intelligence - From Neural Nets to Language - The Limitations of the Stored Program Computer

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Winston Churchill — His Other Life Unit 1 : Text A 21st Century College English: Book 2 Unit 1: Text A Lead-in Activities Lead-in ActivitiesLead-in ActivitiesLead-in Activities Text Organization Text OrganizationText OrganizationText Organization Reading & Writing Skills Reading & Writing SkillsReading & Writing SkillsReading & Writing Skills Language Points Language PointsLanguage PointsLanguage Points Guided Practice Guided PracticeGuided PracticeGuided Practice Assignment AssignmentAssignment Lead-in Activities 1.Who was Winston Churchill? 1.Who was Winston Churchill? Do you know something about him? 2.What is it that makes someone great? Warm-up Questions Churchill began his love affair with painting amid disastrous circumstances. The process of Churchill’s learning painting, which showed his gift for painting. It was painting that rescued him when the deaths of his mother and 3 － year-old daughter gave him another great grief. Churchill’s great success in painting. Conclusion: Painting brought joy, peace, and hope to Churchill. para. 1-3 para. 4-8 para. 9-10 para. 11-12 para. 13 Text Organization 1.Major event and then briefly outline what led up to it or how it happened 1.Major event and then briefly outline what led up to it or how it happened. 2.Figurative language is a special type of comparison. Personification attributes human qualities and abilities to inanimate objects, animals, abstractions, and events. When we refer to China as “mother country”, we use personification as comparison model. In text A, the author compares “canvas” to “victim”. More examples: More examples: The racing car strained impatiently at the starting line. The racing car strained impatiently at the starting line. King of the jungle, the lion strode across the plain. King of the jungle, the lion strode across the plain. Reading & Writing Skills Winston Churchill — His Other Life by Mary Soames Text A: Intensive Study Winston Churchill — His Other Life Winston Churchill — His Other Life by Mary Soames 1 My father, Winston Churchill, began his love affair with painting in his 40s, amid disastrous circumstances. As First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, he had been deeply involved in a campaign in the Dardanelles that could have shortened the course of a bloody world war. But when the mission failed, with great loss of life, Churchill paid the price, both publicly and privately: He was removed from the Admiralty and lost his position of political influence. Winston Churchilllove affaircircumstancesDardanellesbloody world warmissionpaid the priceWinston Churchilllove affaircircumstancesDardanellesbloody world warmissionpaid the price Intensive Study 2 Overwhelmed by the disaster – “I thought he would die of grief,”said his wife, Clementine – he retired with his family to Hoe Farm, a country retreat in Surrey. There, as Churchill later recalled, “The muse of painting came to my rescue!” Overwhelmedretreatcame to my rescueOverwhelmedretreatcame to my rescue 3 One day when he was wandering in the garden, he chanced upon his sister-in-law sketching with watercolors. He watched her for a few minutes, then borrowed her brush and tried his hand – and the muse worked her magic. From that day forward, Winston was in love with painting. chanced upontried his handchanced upontried his hand Intensive Study 4 Delighted with anything that distracted Winston from the dark thoughts that overwhelmed him, Clementine rushed off to buy whatever paints and materials she could find. Watercolours, oil paints, paper, canvas — Hoe Farm was soon filled with everything a painter could want or need. 5 Painting in oils turned out to be Winston's great love – but the first steps were strangely difficult. He contemplated the blank whiteness of his first canvas with unaccustomed nervousness. He later recalled: contemplated Intensive Study 6 “Very hesitantly I selected a tube of blue paint, and with infinite precaution made a mark about as big as a bean on the snow-white field. At that moment I heard the sound of a motorcar in the drive and threw down my brush in a panic. I was even more alarmed when I saw who stepped from the car: the wife of Sir John Lavery, the celebrated painter who lived nearby. Intensive Study 7 “'Painting!' she declared. 'What fun. But what are you waiting for? Let me have the brush — the big one.' She plunged into the paints and before I knew it, she had swept several fierce strokes and slashes of blue on the absolutely terrified canvas. Anyone could see it could not hit back. I hesitated no more. I seized the largest brush and fell upon my wretched victim with wild fury. I have never felt any fear of a canvas since.” plunged intobefore I knew itfell uponplunged intobefore I knew itfell upon Intensive Study 8 Lavery, who later tutored Churchill in his art, said of his unusual pupil's artistic abilities: “Had he chosen painting instead of politics, he would have been a great master with the brush.” Intensive Study 9 In painting, Churchill had discovered a companion with whom he was to walk for the greater part of his life. Painting would be his comfort when, in 1921, the death of his mother was followed two months later by the loss of his and Clementine's beloved three- year-old daughter, Marigold. Overcome by grief, Winston took refuge at the home of friends in Scotland — and in his painting. He wrote to Clementine:“I went out and painted a beautiful river in the afternoon light with red and golden hills in the background. Many loving thoughts... Alas, I keep feeling the hurt of Marigold.” comfortOvercometook refuge comfortOvercometook refuge Intensive Study 10 Life and love and hope slowly revived. In September 1922 another child was born to Clementine and Winston: myself. In the same year, Winston bought Chartwell, the beloved home he was to paint in all its different aspects for the next 40 years. Intensive Study 11 My father must have felt a glow of satisfaction when in the mid-1920s he won first prize in a prestigious amateur art exhibition held in London. Entries were anonymous, and some of the judges insisted that Winston's picture — one of his first of Chartwell — was the work of a professional, not an amateur, and should be disqualified. But in the end, they agreed to rely on the artist's honesty and were delighted when they learned that the picture had been painted by Churchill. Entries Intensive Study 12 Historians have called the decade after 1929, when Winston again fell from office, his barren years. Politically barren they may have been, as his lonely voice struggled to awaken Britain to the menace of Hitler, but artistically those years bore abundant fruit: of the 500-odd Churchill canvases in existence, roughly half date from 1930 to 1939. odd Intensive Study 13 Painting remained a joy to Churchill to the end of his life. “Happy are the painters,” he had written in his book Painting as a Pastime, “for they shall not be lonely. Light and colour, peace and hope, will keep them company to the end of the day.” And so it was for my father. keep them companyAnd so it was for my fatherkeep them companyAnd so it was for my father (776 Words) Intensive Study Winston Churchill W inston Churchill, a British Conservative statesman, orator, and writer, was noted for his leadership during World War II. He held various posts under both Conservative and Liberal governments, including First Lord of the Admiralty (1911-1915, 1939- 1940), and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924 -1929) before becoming Prime Minister (1940-1945, 1951-1956). His writings include The World Crisis (1923 -1929), The Second World War (1948 -1953), and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956 -1958). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. Text-related Information love affair — romance between two people who love each other but who are not married to each other; great enthusiasm or liking (for sth.) e.g. The girl’s love affair with the 60-year-old man worries her parents..The girl’s love affair with the 60-year-old man worries her parents.. She started her love affair with ballet when she was only six.She started her love affair with ballet when she was only six. circumstances n. (pl.) —conditions of a situation which has an effect on what is done or on the way sth. is done e.g. In some circumstances it may be necessary for the manager to come here in person. In some circumstances it may be necessary for the manager to come here in person. Even under the most favourable circumstances this is not easy. Even under the most favourable circumstances this is not easy. The Dardanelles Campaign I t lasted from Feb. 1915 to Jan. 1916, and was a concerted military campaign against Turkey waged by Britain and France. The campaign, which had been expected to be a risky yet promising one, ended in the arduous retreat of British forces with a casualty of 213,980 men and heavy loss and damage to warships. The losing campaign led to Winston Churchill’s removal from the Admiralty. The Dardanelles is the strait between the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara, separating European from Asian Turkey. Text-related Information a bloody world war It refers to World War I (1914 — 1918). The war was fought mainly in Europe and the Middle East, in which the Allies — mainly France, Russia, Britain, Italy and the US defeated the Central Powers — principally Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Text-related Information mission n. — an important job sb. is sent to do in another place, esp. for a military or political purpose e.g. The foreign minister’s mission to Paris is to negotiate a cease-fire. The foreign minister’s mission to Paris is to negotiate a cease-fire. It is his sole mission to expand the company’s business abroad.It is his sole mission to expand the company’s business abroad. price n. — what must be given, done, or undergone to obtain or compensate for sth. e.g. We paid a heavy price for the victory, for we lost 10,000 soldiers. We paid a heavy price for the victory, for we lost 10,000 soldiers. Translate This is a small price to pay for independence. Key这是为独立付出的小小代价。 overwhelm vt. — make (sb.) feel completely helpless, astonished, or embarrassed. Translate Fear overwhelmed me. e.g. At the age of forty, he was overwhelmed with work, illness and family problems. At the age of forty, he was overwhelmed with work, illness and family problems. More to learn More to learn Overwhelmed by the disaster, … A past participial phrase, usually that of a transitive verb, can function as an adverbial modifying the main verb of the sentence to indicate cause, time, condition, concession, etc. Model As he was overwhelmed by the disaster, he retired with his family to a country retreat in Surrey. — Overwhelmed by the disaster, he retired with his family to a country retreat in Surrey. More to do More to do Drill 1. We were startled by the appearance of a mouse, so we promptly decided to clean our room. 2. Because they’re tired of their own cooking, they’ve decided to go to a restaurant for a change. Startled by the appearance of a mouse, we promptly decided to clean our room. Tired of their own cooking, they’ve decided to go to a restaurant for a change. Overwhelmed by the disaster, … retreat n. — a quiet or private place that one goes in order to rest or to concentrate on a particular problem or task. e.g. a summer retreat a summer retreat a weekend retreat a weekend retreat come/go to the/one’s rescue — help sb. when they are in danger or difficulty Translate士兵们救起了这个快淹死的人。 e.g. We were about to close down the business, but the bank came to our rescue. We were about to close down the business, but the bank came to our rescue. I was embarrassed as I couldn’t remember his name; fortunately Mary came to my rescue. I was embarrassed as I couldn’t remember his name; fortunately Mary came to my rescue. Key The soldiers went to the rescue of the drowning man. chance upon/on — meet or discover unexpectedly Translate He chanced upon the solution to the problem. He chanced upon the solution to the problem. e.g. She chanced upon some old love letters her husband kept in the back of the drawer. She chanced upon some old love letters her husband kept in the back of the drawer. I chanced upon an old friend in the street yesterday. I chanced upon an old friend in the street yesterday. try one’s hand (at/doing sth.) — try a new activity to test one’s ability; make an inexperienced attempt e.g. After she lost her job, she thought she’d try her hand at writing a novel. After she lost her job, she thought she’d try her hand at writing a novel. I tried my hand at repairing the bike, but without much success. I tried my hand at repairing the bike, but without much success. contemplate vt. — look at (sth.) for a long time in a quiet and very thoughtful way; gaze at e.g. She lay back on the grass to contemplated the high, blue sky. She lay back on the grass to contemplated the high, blue sky. The lonely little boy contemplated the waves at the seashore. The lonely little boy contemplated the waves at the seashore. plunge into 1)push (sth.) suddenly and deeply into (sth.else) 2)get involved in (sth.) suddenly, without thinking carefully or preparing for it e.g. Heather plunged her hands deep into her pockets. Heather plunged her hands deep into her pockets. She plunged bravely into the debate. She plunged bravely into the debate. before sb. know it — (informal) very quickly and suddenly e.g. At this time of the year, you could catch cold before you know it. At this time of the year, you could catch cold before you know it. Translate嫌疑人很快就被带到了警察局。 Key The suspects were taken to the police station before they knew it. fall upon — attack suddenly and violently e.g. Terrorists were falling upon men and women in the street. Terrorists were falling upon men and women in the street. Translate强盗们从树后袭击了他。 Key The robbers fell upon him from behind the trees. comfort n. — (a person or thing that brings) relief from worries, unhappiness, or disappointment e.g. The President’s visit has given some comfort to the earthquake victims. The President’s visit has given some comfort to the earthquake victims. His occasional visits and phone calls are a comfort to his parents in their old age. His occasional visits and phone calls are a comfort to his parents in their old age. overcome vt. — overpower or overwhelm in body or mind e.g. The firefighters were overcome by smoke. The firefighters were overcome by smoke. Receiving the prize in honour of her dead father, she was overcome with emotion. Receiving the prize in honour of her dead father, she was overcome with emotion. Translate要克服恶习并不容易。 Key It is not easy to overcome a bad habit. It is not easy to overcome a bad habit. take refuge in — find protection, help or relief in a place, person, action, etc. e.g. During the frequent air-raids people took refuge in their cellars. During the frequent air-raids people took refuge in their cellars. Translate The troubled movie star took refuge in silence. The troubled movie star took refuge in silence. Key麻烦缠身的电影明星以沉默来逃避一切。 entry n. — the act of entering; a person, thing or group that is entered in a race, competition, etc. e.g. Entry into the competition is free to all citizens. Entry into the competition is free to all citizens. Organizers of the speech contest have received over 10 entries. Organizers of the speech contest have received over 10 entries. odd a. — (used after a number) with some extra; or so e.g. twenty odd years ago twenty odd years ago six hundred odd children six hundred odd children thirty-odd years thirty-odd years 二十多年前 六百多个学生 三十多岁 keep sb. company — 陪伴某人 e.g. Don’t worry. I’ll keep you company until your husband comes back. Don’t worry. I’ll keep you company until your husband comes back. The old couple were grateful for Mary’s company. The old couple were grateful for Mary’s company. Translate他总是很高兴与漂亮姑娘做伴。 Key He is always glad of pretty girls’ company. He is always glad of pretty girls’ company. And so it was for my father. 1.His shoes are cheap, so is his suitcase. He plays golf well, so does his brother. He plays golf well, so does his brother. So + auxiliary verb + subject So + auxiliary verb + subject adding new information adding new information Compare the following groups of sentences: More to learn More to learn And so it was for my father. 2.I said I would come, and so I will. — You have forgotten your hat. — You have forgotten your hat. — Ah, yes, so I have. — Ah, yes, so I have. So + subject +auxiliary verb So + subject +auxiliary verb expressing agreement expressing agreement Compare the following groups of sentences: More to do More to do And so it was for my father. Drills 1.I hear you had a quarrel with your parents yesterday. _______ （ 的确如此 ）, but it has been made up already. 2.In the end, I decided to apply to medical school, and ________________ （ 我兄弟也申请读医 ）. 3.She recalls her father in this article in an emotional way. __________ （ 的确是这样 ）. There’s a lot of feeling in it. __________ （ 的确是这样 ）. There’s a lot of feeling in it. So I did So did my brother So she does III. Fill in the blanks with the words given below. Change the form where necessary. 1. I’ve always envied painters and poets — I have no _____ abilities at all. 2.He’s struggling to _____ his fear of flying, but he still panics sometimes when he has to board a plane. accustomedprecautioncampaignartisticinfiniteplungedisastrousovercomereviveretreat distractmission Vocabulary artistic overcome Ex. III, p. 11 《读写教程 II 》 : Ex. III, p. 11 3.She held her newborn baby with _____ tenderness. 4.The whole nation was _____ into profound grief when Princess Diana died in an accident. Vocabulary III. Fill in the blanks with the words given below. Change the form where necessary. accustomedprecautioncampaignartisticinfiniteplungedisastrousovercomereviveretreat distractmission infinite plunged 5.The volunteers’ _____ is to work with the police to reduce crime on the streets of New York. 6.The city is planning a public _____ to awaken people to the problem of noise pollution. Vocabulary III. Fill in the blanks with the words given below. Change the form where necessary. accustomedprecautioncampaignartisticinfiniteplungedisastrousovercomereviveretreat distractmission mission campaign 7.He was knocked unconscious by a stone, and after I _____ him, he didn’t recognize me. _____ him, he didn’t recognize me. 8.Once their books are open, A students don’t let anything _____ them from their studies. Vocabulary III. Fill in the blanks with the words given below. Change the form where necessary. accustomedprecautioncampaignartisticinfiniteplungedisastrousovercomereviveretreat distractmission revived distract 9.Amanda wasn’t feeling well that day but she performed in the play with her _____ ease. 10.When you feel overwhelmed by the complications of life in the big city, it’s good to _____ to the countryside for a few days. Vocabulary III. Fill in the blanks with the words given below. Change the form where necessary. accustomedprecautioncampaignartisticinfiniteplungedisastrousovercomereviveretreat distractmission accustomed retreat 11.In times of war, people usually buy and store more food as a _____ against shortage. 12.The closing of the cigarette factory had _____ effects on the town’s economy. III. Fill in the blanks with the words given below. Change the form where necessary. accustomedprecautioncampaignartisticinfiniteplungedisastrousovercomereviveretreat distractmission precaution disastrous Vocabulary Ex. IX, p. 16 《读写教程 II 》 : Ex. IX, p. 16 IX.Read the following carefully and choose one of the colored words or expressions to make the passage complete in meaning. Cloze Churchill's childhood was an unhappy and lonely/alone one. A speech defect ( 缺陷 ), which he never entirely overwhelmed/overcame, made him a shy and hesitant child, and his only refuge/retreat was the friendship of Mrs. Everest, his beloved nurse. His poor performance at school led his disappointed father to send him to the Royal Military College – and to make matters worse, Winston failed the entrance exam ( 入学考试 ) twice before finally/in the end managing to pass it. Cloze Cloze Once there, however/although, his abundant talent for the art of war became clear, and he graduated 20th in a class of 130. In 1895, the year his father died, he entered the army and was sent to Cuba, there/where he discovered his talent for writing. Churchill was delighting/delighted when his reports on the Cuban War of Independence ( 古巴独立战争 ) attracted wide attention, and he seriously contemplated/revived a career as a journalist. Cloze Churchill's entry/retreat into politics was not a promising one: He lost his first election mission/campaign, although only by a narrow margin. To distract/rescue himself from this shameful failure, he fell upon/plunged into action, going to South Africa to report on the war there for London Morning Post. After a month/Within a month of his arrival, he had won fame for his part in the dramatic rescue/refuge of a train that had been taken under control by the enemy. Cloze The train was freed, but Churchill was taken prisoner; and his fame was doubled when/then less than a month later he escaped from the prison. Returning to Britain as a military hero he again stood for election to Parliament in 1900 and won by an overwhelming/ overcoming margin. Ex. XI, p. 17 《读写教程 II 》 : Ex. XI, p. 17 XI. Translate the following sentences into English. Translation Translation 1. 老伴六十多岁时中风去世时， 那位 72 岁的退休教授不胜悲痛。 无人 依靠的生活对他来说将是非常困难的。 died of a stroke When his wife died of a stroke in her sixties, the 72-year-old retired professor was overwhelmed with grief. Life would be hard for him without anyone to rely on. was overwhelmed with grief rely on Translation 2. 两位业余画家上个月在伦敦举办了一次个人画展。许多人前去参观， 其中包括一些著名的专业画家。 amateur painter Two amateur painters held an exhibition of their pictures last month in London. Many people went to see it, including a few celebrated professionals. went to see it professional Translation 3. 当 20 世纪 80 年代中期， 7 名宇航员在 “ 挑战者 ” 号的灾难中遇难时，全世 界一下子陷入了震惊与悲痛中。 the Challenger disaster When seven astronauts died in the Challenger disaster in the mid-1980s, it plunged the whole world into shock and grief. plunged into shock and grief Translation 4. 在结束了其第二届首相任期之后，她仍积极参与政治事务。当政府遇 到困难时，她屡次前来帮忙。 second prime ministry After completing her second prime ministry, she remained actively involved in political affairs. She came to the rescue several times when the government was in difficulty. involved in came to the rescue Translation 5. 大选失败后，史密斯博士隐退到一个小村庄，在那里尝试耕作。 the election campaign After his failure in the election campaign, Dr. Smith retired to a small village, where he tried his hand at farming. retired tried his hand at Translation 6. 只要你一辈子不停地努力工作，你在回忆往事时就会感到心满意足 的。 keep working hard As long as you keep working hard all your life, you will recall your past with a glow of satisfaction. recall with a glow of satisfaction 7. 我们必须唤醒人们认识到环境保护的重要性。否则，就为时太晚了。 Translation awaken … to... We must awaken people to the importance of environmental protection, or it will be too late. environmental protection or 8. 那位官员因卷入一件政治丑闻而被撤职。如果早知会落到这般地步， 他当初也许就会以不同的方式行事了。 Translation being involved in That official was removed from office for being involved in a political scandal. Had he known this would happen, he might have acted differently. was removed from office had he known might have Structured Writing Now practice writing a paragraph that starts with a main event and goes on to describe what led up to it. Major event my love affair with English/amid very artistic circumstances What led up to it new radio/ wonderful English song/ not understand a single word singing everywhere/ night and day/ without words English/ my rescue I had just bought a new radio, and I heard the most wonderful English song – but I couldn’t understand a single word. I found myself singing the song everywhere, night and day, but without words. That’s when the miracle of English came to my rescue. I began my love affair with English amid every artistic circumstances. Here are some major events for you to chose from as topics for your own paragraph. my sister Stephanie/ her love affair with television/ second grade/ hightly emotional circumstances I started my love affair with football… My brother began his love affair with stamp collecting… Structured Writing more details more details more details more details Major event What led up to it a quarrel/ her best friend alone and lonely every day after school/ nothing to do television/ her rescue my sister Stephanie/ her love affair with television/ second grade/ hightly emotional circumstances Structured Writing My sister Stephanie began her love affair with television in the second grade amid highly emotional circumstances. She had had a quarrel with her best friend, and found herself alone and lonely every day after school with nothing to do. That’s when the miracle of television came to her rescue. Structured Writing A Sample Paragraph Assignment 1.Revision of Text A: ClozeEx. IXp.16ClozeEx. IXp.16 TranslationEx. XIp.17TranslationEx. XIp.17 2.Preview of Text B: Comprehension Checkp. 29Comprehension Check p. 29

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IMAGINE SEVERAL HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE, living on some of Canada's most expensive real estate, trapped by cold, swirling water. Picture jets grounded at the low-lying Vancouver International Airport; visualize the TransCanada highway impassible in either direction; conjure three rail lines underwater. Phone and internet systems are down. Food supplies in local grocery stores are decimated within four days. Freight has difficulty getting in and out of the Port of Vancouver, causing nationwide economic disruptions. After all of that has sunk in, mix in sewage from several medium-to-large cities as well as 600,000 metric tonnes of floating cars, dead animals and other debris. This could happen if British Columbia’s Fraser River, the tenth-longest river in the country, rises to levels last seen in the late 1800s, when the worst flood in the Lower Mainland’s recorded history deluged flat farmland and burgeoning riverside communities with water as far as the eye could see. The Fraser Basin Council (FBC), a non-profit organization concerned with flood management, predicts that with climate change and sea level rise, there’s a one in three chance this could happen in the next fifty years. Most people think “ocean” when they think of Vancouver, forgetting about the broad river rolling by the city’s back door. But the Fraser—whose tributaries drain a third of the province—plays a key role in the city’s geography. At 1,375 kilometres long, its headwaters start in the Rockies, near the Alberta border, and rush northwest through mountain valleys, picking up volume all the way to Prince George. Just past the dry Chilcotin, the Fraser squeezes into a deeply incised canyon. Kilometres of white water later, including a contortion through a narrow passage called Hells Gate, the river finally widens at Hope. At this point, barely five metres above sea level, the mighty Fraser sweeps through 160 kilometres of flat, floodable cities such as Chilliwack and Port Coquitlam, before meeting up with Richmond and Vancouver at the river’s mouth. The danger time on the Fraser is during the spring freshet, when meltwater from the winter snow races out of the mountains and down towards the sea. Most years the flow is manageable, but every once in a while the rushing river becomes unwieldy. A new report, released in May 2016 by the FBC, tallies the vulnerability that communities face in British Columbia’s otherwise idyllic but ever-growing Lower Mainland. Adding it all up, the FBC report predicts that when the Fraser breaches its banks, it can cause losses valued at $2.6 billion to private houses, $3.8 billion in commercial buildings, $880 million in public institutions, $4.6 billion in infrastructure and $1.6 billion in agricultural lands—approximately $13.5 billion in total. “MOST PEOPLE NEVER BELIEVE how high the water will rise,” says natural hazards expert John Clague, a bookish-looking professor of Earth sciences at Simon Fraser University. Seventeen-year-old Betty Mitchell didn’t. In spring of 1948, she lay fully clothed atop the bedcovers in her Abbotsford home, waiting for the coming flood. By 8 AM on May 31, the warning siren was wailing. The dike near Mitchell’s home lifted and crumbled under the pressure—up river near Hope, it was measured at 17,000 cubic metres per second, up from its average of 2,700—and an eight-foot wall of water burst through. Mitchell, who described her experience to historian K. Jane Watt in the 2006 book High Water: Living with the Fraser Floods, said her mother and younger brother fled while she and her father stayed behind to move the furniture up as high as they could. There had been lots of warning. A few days before, according to Watt, the Langley High School graduating class was pulled from their prom to help shore up the dikes. The boys and girls were sent home to change out of their prom attire and report for sandbag and kitchen duty respectively. Betty Mitchell spent the day preceding the flood making lunches for the volunteers working on the dikes. As she leaned over to hand her uncle a sandwich, he sunk into the spongy, water-logged soil constituting the only barricade between acres of farmland and the river—an indication of how precarious some of the berms were. “They hauled him up and he carried on,” Mitchell told Watt. When the dikes broke, it was as if bombs had been detonated underneath them. Whole houses were spotted afloat. Described as the “monstrous child of quiet snow” in a newsreel later that year, the huge snow pack, cool spring temperatures and an abrupt shift to record heat—all the unique elements needed for a flood on a river the size of the Fraser—brought on the second-worst deluge in BC’s recent history. By the time all was said and done, five feet of water filled Mitchell’s one-storey family home. “We were putting things up a little higher, thinking we would be all right, but we weren’t,” she recounted. News of the 1948 flood dominated the press for weeks. Many Vancouverites, cut off by floodwater but safe in their oceanfront homes, donated bags to fill with sand, took in the displaced and raised money to help those along the riverfront. Six weeks later, the water finally went back down. Eventually, memories of the flood receded. People either moved away, got older or passed on. But a river never forgets. Ask local First Nations and you’ll find out that the Fraser Valley has always been known as a flood zone. The Stó:lō—the People of the River—describe at least one Biblical-style scenario in their oral history from countless generations ago. Stó:lō researcher Keith Carlson, in his 2010 book The Power of Place, the Problem of Time, quotes Old Pierre, an informant to anthropologist Diamond Jenness in 1936: “It rained and rained without ceasing until the rivers over owed their banks, the plains flooded and the people fled for shelter to the mountains where they anchored their canoes to the summits with long ropes of twisted cedar boughs.” Soon the storm knocked some of these canoes afloat and boats crowded with people washed away. Carlson explains that weather events such as floods have had huge impacts, and have even changed settlement patterns in the area. Because of the Great Flood, some Stó:lō, whose territory extends along the Fraser River, are said to have washed up in what is now northern Washington. Others floated away and settled near Bella Coola. HUMANS HAVE ALWAYS LIVED BY RIVERS. John Clague points out that the deltas of the world—the Nile, the Euphrates, the Ganges—are heavily populated, because floodplains are at and easy to build on. They also provide ample water, rich soil for agriculture, and access to fish and waterfowl. “There is a reward to living on a floodplain,” Clague says. But like the Stó:lō, almost every culture has their own flood story, often connected to the wrath of an angry deity, and these narratives underline the dangers of water as a force. Watt states that in the past, people better understood the risks of living by the river. Early settlers had “water consciousness.” “They were intimately involved with the Fraser and its tributaries,” she writes. “They considered flooding a natural event, part of the movement of seasons, and something they had to contend with in order to farm where they did.” When a flood occurred, neighbours helped each other evacuate; after the river went down, they’d get together to shovel out the sludge, rebuild and carry on. What would yesterday’s inhabitants of the Fraser Valley think, writes Watt, if they could peer forward to today? The implications of flooding are more serious now than they were before, says Clague, because development is on the rise. In recent years, riverfront has become the new oceanfront in the Lower Mainland’s hot real estate market. Scores of homebuyers have ocked to areas once known more for sawmills and shipyards than luxury condos. Developments in Richmond, New Westminster and Fort Langley promise a blend of sunsets, bird watching and recreational opportunities, as well as glimpses of tugboats navigating the still-working river. But as the water laps gently along the banks, Neil Peters, retired inspector of dikes for the BC government and a longtime advocate for better flood management practices, thinks that buyers might be getting more than they bargained for. “People don’t take things seriously unless they’ve seen it with their own eyes,” says Peters. He asserts that BC’s leaders should heed the warning provided by the 2013 floods in Alberta, where intense rain swelled a series of rivers in the southern part of the province, washing out sections of the TransCanada and flooding riverside neighbourhoods in Canmore, Calgary, High River and more. Five people died, including an elderly woman trapped in her ground floor apartment and four others who were swept away by the rushing waters. In some areas, the power was out for over a week, schools were closed and bus routes cancelled. The damage from the floods cost upwards of $5 billion to repair. Alberta’s disaster underlines how devastating a flood can be to people and property. In BC, we know the flood is coming, says Peters, and we also know that the havoc will surpass anything the rains in Alberta wrought. Peters’ biggest concerns are for Chilliwack and the just-above-sea-level-city of Richmond. In Chilliwack, more than 40,000 people’s homes, at least twenty schools, four fire halls, the Chilliwack General Hospital and the airport could be inundated if the river reaches 1894 levels. Peters is even more concerned for Richmond. Although the city has one of the best-funded dike systems in the region, Richmond is vulnerable to both the river and the sea. Rising sea levels due to climate change compound Peters’ fears, but there are other factors at play. In 2003, for example, a dike at neighbouring Queensborough, New Westminster, failed. The potential disaster took place at a pump station and concrete structure known as a flood box. This key piece of flood protection infrastructure consists of a pipe with a control valve that cuts through the dike, forcing rainwater built up behind the barrier to flow away from houses and into the river. In the early morning hours of June 15, the professionally engineered dike around this culvert—inspected and approved by city officials just two days before—collapsed without warning. The river flooded in. According to Peters, this happened during a time when the flow of the river was moderate. “If it happened when [the flow was high], in twenty-four to thirty-six hours Richmond would be flooded to the point that people couldn’t get out,” he says. Almost 200,000 individuals would have been affected. There was minimal damage, thanks to quick action taken by municipal staff, but Peters points to a forensic analysis that found inadequate fill materials had been used. The soil inside the berm had been simply slipping away. Queensborough, one of many hot new waterfront neighbourhoods, saw its population increase by 2,500 between 2001 and 2011 alone, thanks in part to municipally sanctioned efforts to refresh industrial lands. With so many moving onto the riverfront, Peters notes that this close call illustrates one of the most pressing issues identified in the FBC’s report—the state of the Lower Mainland’s 500 kilometres of dikes. At present, 96 percent of the assessed dikes do not meet provincial standards. The last time a major flood hit the area, 2,000 homes washed away, and 16,000 of the area’s 50,000 residents were temporarily evacuated. Today, almost 325,000 people live in the same flood-prone lands. Altogether, counting Agassiz, Chilliwack, Abbotsford, Mission, Maple Ridge, Port Coquitlam, Pitt Meadows, Coquitlam, Surrey, Delta and Richmond, more than two million people could be affected by the coming flood. In the years since the last major flood, property values have also ballooned. Take Richmond, for example: in 1948, you could buy a new house for under $10,000. In June 2016, the median price for a detached home was $1.7 million. Moreover, people don’t live in plank houses anymore. Simple construction methods, prevalent in the early part of the 20th century—wooden board walls, basic wiring—meant that houses filled with mud could, if worst came to worst, be cleaned out and lived in again. But today’s drywall, once wet, becomes a health hazard. Expensive appliances are toast. Wall-to-wall carpets turn into a soggy mess and complicated wiring for things such as basement movie theatres become their own horror show. When the flood hit in 1948, a national disaster was declared. Thirty thousand civilians laboured to stabilize the dikes and help rescue some 25,000 animals. Three thousand army and navy personnel were assigned to the fight. Still, so much was destroyed. Today, the stakes are even higher. THE LOWER MAINLAND EXPERIENCED the very worst the river had to offer in 1894. The Fraser crested at an incredible 7.9 metres, inundating the valley as far as the eye could see. At the time, few people lived in the area and the provincial government, barely up and running, had few funds to contribute to protecting flood- prone lands. According to Peters, the disaster led to a hodgepodge of makeshift dikes, but no region-wide plan. Fifty years went by with no floods and people became complacent. The dikes grew over with brambles and trees and, as Betty Mitchell and her family discovered, this compounded the impact of BC’s second-worst flood. Officials got serious about dike management after that, says Peters. By July 1948, a three-person team called the Fraser Valley Dyking Board had been established, and they began ordering construction, repair and reconstruction of protective berms. Standards were implemented, money was spent, especially in the 1970s and ’80s, and people began to feel safe again. In 2006, the FBC and provincial government took a fresh look at the Fraser River, incorporating staff’s understanding of the 1894 flood. Modellers realized that most of the barriers in place today would be overtopped—or in the worst-case scenario, fail completely—if that level of water came down again. Rigorous new standards demand seismic upgrade work as well as additional height on the vast majority of the valley’s flood protection infrastructure. “You have to remember that when the river flooded in 1894, the water spread everywhere,” Peters says, explaining the height discrepancy. Chilliwack was awash from the Agassiz bridge to the United States border, a full fifty kilometres to the south. Parts of New Westminster, Pitt Meadows, Abbotsford and Langley were underwater, yet the river still reached the highest level on record. Dikes built on the river’s edge—protecting against overflow—have consequently narrowed the width of the river and cut off back channels that once reduced the main tributary flow. This means that during heavy flooding, Peters says, high water has nowhere else to go but over the top of the dikes. Since most of the present-day dikes were built more than forty years ago, maintenance and design are also reoccurring issues. The FBC report rated 69 percent of dikes poor to fair and deemed 18 percent unacceptable. In short, what happened in Queensborough could happen again, soon, with greater consequences. The FBC report also identified another significant gap in flood management protection: sixty First Nations reserves along the river are vulnerable. At Shxwhá:y, a village on the edge of the Fraser River near Chilliwack, community members got hold of any large earth moving machines they could to build a makeshift berm in 2007, when the waters rose to dangerous levels. It was touch-and-go for several days, with cold water lapping against sandbags and earth, but in the end the community was safe. According to Shxwhá:y chief executive officer Murray Sam, the present-day village site was once a seasonal settlement area. Pre-contact, the Stó:lō peoples migrated with the seasons from up the Chilliwack River Valley to the mouth of the Fraser. But when the Indian Act was passed in 1876, that freedom to move was squashed. Now, the majority of Shxwhá:y’s 409 members live off-reserve. They got tired of packing stuff up every time the waters rose, Sam says. As far back as 1894, local newspapers reported that the First Nations suffered worst from the floods, and this injustice is still felt today. “The government placed us on the water,” says Kwantlen elder Hazel Fallardeau-Gludo, whose family lived on McMillan Island, about fifty kilometres west of Shxwhá:y. In 1948, her family had huge gardens for vegetables and orchards of plums, pears and cherry trees. The family never bought supplies at the grocery store; everything they ate was grown, caught and preserved. They raised cattle and chickens. Even the ducks, says Fallardeau-Gludo, who was eight years old at the time of the flood, were plucked and sealed into jars. When the floodwater came, her grandmother had to leave behind her crystal glasses and delicate blue and white china—the kind that Fallardeau-Gludo herself now shows visitors in her capacity as an interpreter at Fort Langley National Historic Site. Fallardeau-Gludo says that in 1948, Kwantlen community members were evacuated from their homes and brought to a farmer’s field in Langley. None of their non-First Nations neighbours offered to take anyone in, she says, and they were later housed in the community hall, shuffling upstairs to get out of the way when the dances were held every Saturday night. McMillan Island’s most recent floods took place in 2007 and 2012. Fallardeau-Gludo, who now lives on higher ground, says she would never live on that island (which is still unprotected by dikes) again. She’s lost family members to the river and she’s worried for people who have built big houses. “That river roars; it is so foamy, so fast,” she says. The lack of protection for First Nations reserves is seen a serious problem by environmental consultant Rene Crawshaw. Crawshaw’s family arrived in Chilliwack three generations back and his grandfather built a house six years before the 1948 flood. Like the Shxwhá:y, his family home is on the wrong side of the dike. Crawshaw is one of a group of citizens protesting Chilliwack’s latest plans for upgrading the dikes: instead of continuing a dike along the river’s edge (which would help protect three reserves along with others like him), the city is considering extending a zig-zagging wall of gravel. This wall would be located in front of dozens of homes along a jumble of streets on town land. Homes, businesses and graveyards on the reserves— just metres away—will be left on their own to survive when the flood comes. Shxwhá:y CEO Sam says that the community has partnered on feasibility studies in the past with other levels of government, and he knows that building a brand new dike to protect them won’t be cheap. The Chilliwack Times reported that according to city staff, the cost of protecting the handful of houses on Sam’s and the other reserves could be more than $50 million. “With so few houses, we’re a low priority,” Sam says. If the city, the neighbouring First Nations and the federal government don’t come together soon, Sam says his community will have to take things into their own hands. IN THE NETHERLANDS—much of which is below sea level—the Dutch have developed a $3.3 billion plan, known as “Room for the River,” which is shifting flood protection away from the age-old solution of raising dike heights. The plan’s alternatives include moving dikes farther back from the riverbed, creating development-adjacent canals for high-water periods and lowering the riverbed. To achieve this, residents have had homes demolished, relocated or raised, and farmers have had to move their crops. The idea isn’t to stop the water, which will eventually come, but to develop areas with floodwater in mind. Other solutions from around the world include constructing flood-proof homes that don’t allow water in, or ensuring critical electronics and system equipment are not housed below flood levels. These fixes aren’t cheap or easy, but they are forward-thinking, making areas resilient rather than resistant to flooding. Former dike inspector Peters says that BC has a lot to learn from the Netherlands. “On a governance level, we’ve only been dealing with floods in British Columbia for just over one hundred years,” he says. “It’s not long enough to form our psyche around the best way to do things.” Prior to 1975, Peters says, there wasn’t even any legislation about development in floodplains. Then in June 1972, a brand-new subdivision in Kamloops was inundated by the North Thompson River. Old photos show families in small boats trying to retrieve goods from their yellow-sided split-levels. Luckily the event took place midday when people weren’t asleep. This catastrophe led the province to create new legislation requiring anyone building within new subdivisions in floodplains to apply for a permit and follow strict regulations. But in 2003, the province backtracked, passing on the responsibility for approving development in floodplains to municipalities. Furthermore, Peters points out that provincial guidelines—such as the one requiring that foundations be built on raised ground, or the one stipulating the distances a building must be back from a watercourse—are only guidelines and not required by provincial law. The FBC hopes that a multi-jurisdictional flood management strategy will achieve some creative solutions closer to home, and the provincial government has committed $1 million to help realize this goal. For his part, Peters says the Lower Mainland could address its flooding concerns with a Netherlands-style big idea that could stop the problem at the source. First conceived of in the 1970s, the McGregor diversion project proposed the development of an upriver dam that could redirect some of the Fraser River’s waters to the Peace River during high-water times, diminishing the flow so that the dikes downstream could better withstand what was left. Although it was deemed unacceptable due to the impact on fish habitat and other environmental concerns, Peters says this type of project is still relevant today. Without a backup plan, Peters says, we’ll be left with an uncontrolled river and insufficient dikes. AFTER THE RIVER RECEDED in 1948, people returned home to find their fruit trees destroyed and their chickens dead. Family heirlooms and photographs were gone forever. Mildew and mould climbed walls. The stench was awful. The damage was heartbreaking. According to Peters, the way forward in British Columbia is clear: “The geography of the Fraser Valley doesn’t give us a lot of choice,” he says. “It’s either the valley floor or the mountainsides.” In other words, the people living in the floodplain are there to stay. Municipal, federal and provincial policies should, therefore, enshrine flood protection into its most basic governance and planning departments—and this includes big-ticket projects as well as ongoing flood management strategies, such as ensuring all new construction is built above flood levels. Peters recommends that people who’ve never witnessed a flood before educate themselves. It’s up to us, he says, to decide whether we’re comfortable with the risk. But it’s also up to our governments to put a larger plan in place. Otherwise, when the big flood comes, we may follow in Betty Mitchell’s footsteps, finding out that putting things up a little higher just won’t do. In the conclusion to her comprehensive history of high water on the Fraser River, K. Jane Watt writes that the solutions are as complex as the problem, often illuminating an “irreconcilable debate” between “polar opposites”—settlers versus First Nations, environmentalists versus developers, humans versus ecology. Watt emphasizes a different, but equally important, priority: a return to water consciousness. “Just as it’s in a river’s nature to flood,” she writes, “it’s human nature to forget what floods can do.”

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Governments have been busy criminalizing Indigenous claims to consultation that challenge extractive models of development. Indigenous opposition to extractivism ultimately promotes self-determination rights, questioning the states’ authority over land by placing its sovereignty into historical context. In that sense, Indigeneity is a valuable approach to understanding world politics. This article was originally published in E-International Relations’ free-to-download Edited Collection, Restoring Indigenous Self Determination: Theoretical and Practical Approaches. Republished under a Creative Commons License. Indigeneity is an unusual way to think about International Relations (IR). Most studies of world politics ignore Indigenous perspectives, which are rarely treated as relevant to thinking about the international (Shaw 2008; Beier 2009). Yet Indigenous peoples are engaging in world politics with a dynamism and creativity that defies the silences of our discipline (Morgan 2011). In Latin America, Indigenous politics has gained international legitimacy, influencing policy for over two decades (Cott 2008; Madrid 2012). Now, Indigenous political movements are focused on resisting extractive projects on autonomous territory from the Arctic to the Amazon (Banerjee 2012; Sawyer and Gómez 2012). Resistance has led to large mobilized protests, invoked international law, and enabled alternative mechanisms of authority. In response, governments have been busy criminalizing Indigenous claims to consultation that challenge extractive models of development. Indigenous opposition to extractivism ultimately promotes self-determination rights, questioning the states’ authority over land by placing its sovereignty into historical context. In that sense, Indigeneity is a valuable approach to understanding world politics as much as it is a critical concept to move beyond state-centrism in the study of IR. The Consolidation of Indigenous Resistance against Extractivism Indigenous peoples are contesting extractive projects in various, complementary ways. Collective marches have multiplied as an immediate means of resistance throughout the Americas. In 2012, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador led thousands of people on a 15-day, 400-mile March for Life, Water, and the Dignity of Peoples, demanding a new water law, the end of open-pit mining, and a stop to the expansion of oil concessions. Within days, a similar mobilization took over Guatemala City. The Indigenous, Peasant, and Popular March in Defense of Mother Earth covered 212 kilometers to enter the capital with nearly 15,000 people protesting mining concessions, hydroelectric plants, and evictions. In Bolivia, various marches demanded consultation as the government prepared to build a highway within the Indigenous Territory and National Park Isidoro Sécure (TIPNIS). From Canada’s Idle No More movement to the protests against damming the Xingú River Basin in Brazil, Indigenous movements are rising and demanding they be allowed to participate in decisions affecting their territories. Protests are at the core of global Indigenous agendas. In 2013, the Fifth Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples of the Abya Yala encouraged communities to step-up resistance in light of the threat posed by state-sponsored extractivism. This is what Indigenous women were doing when they walked from Amazon territories to Quito, Ecuador, denouncing government plans to drill without consultation in the Yasuní reserve. Local protests are not trivial or irrelevant in world politics. Rather, they are part of a larger effort to transform local concerns into international politics. Indigenous peoples have remarkable expertise in international law and are savvily leveraging their rights to consultation and self-determination guaranteed in the ILO Convention 169 (1989) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) (UN General Assembly 2008). They have won emblematic legal battles at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), at times obliging states to recognize Indigenous territorial authority. In the decade-long case of Sarayaku v. Ecuador, the IACHR upheld the right of free, prior, and informed consent with a binding sentence against the Ecuadoran State for allowing a foreign oil company to encroach on ancestral lands without consultation during the 1990s. A 2011 petition by communities of the Xingú River basin led the IACHR to order Brazil’s government to halt the construction of the Belo Monte Dam. The Mayan Q’eqchi’ expanded jurisdiction by taking Hudbay Minerals to Court in Canada for crimes committed at an open-pit nickel mine in Guatemala. In Canada, two Manitoba First Nations used their own legal systems in 2013 to serve eviction notices to mining companies operating illegally on their land.1 International pressure is significant, yet states frequently eschew what they perceive to be uncomfortable mechanisms of accountability. Courts may validate Indigenous resistance, and UN reports warn against the catastrophic impact of extractive industries, but Brazil continued to build the Belo Monte Dam and Peru’s government did not consider suspending the Camisea gas project of drilling 18 wells on protected territories that have been home to Amazonian peoples in voluntary isolation (Feather 2014). Nevertheless, states that evade prior consultation obligations only foster Indigenous inventiveness. In the absence of official mechanisms of consultation, people establish autonomous ones. Local communities of the Kimsacocha area took matters in their own hands after years of being ignored, demanding Ecuador’s government consult them on a mining project in the highlands. In 2011, they organized a community-based consultation without the authorization of the state that was nevertheless legitimized by the presence of international observers (Guartambel 2012). The community voted 93% in favour of defending water rights and against mining in the area. Autonomous forms of prior consultation are increasingly common in Latin America. In Guatemala alone, there have been over sixty community-based consultations since 2005 (MacLeod and Pérez 2013). Contesting States of Extraction Indigenous resistance has been the target of severe government repression, ranging from judicial intimidation to assassinations of activists. Mobilizations against the Congo mine in Cajamarca, Peru, led President Ollanta Humala to declare a state of emergency and unleash military repression. An estimated 200 activists were killed in Peru between 2006 and 2011 for resisting extractivism (Zibechi 2013). Colombia’s government, in turn, declared protests against the mining industry illegal. In Ecuador, about 200 people have been criminalized for contesting the corporatization of natural resources. Many have been charged with terrorism. Violent repression against TIPNIS protesters in Bolivia revealed that even Evo Morales, Latin America’s first elected Indigenous president, is willing to use force to silence demands for consultation. Various activists opposing the multinational mining giant AngloGlod Ashanti have been assassinated. Argentina’s Plurinational Indigenous Council, which calls for an end to extractivism, has recorded eleven assassinations since 2010. The Observatory of Mining Conflicts in Latin America (OCMAL) estimates there are currently 195 active conflicts due to large-scale mining. Peru and Chile lead the list with 34 and 33 conflicts respectively, followed by Mexico with 28, Argentina with 26, Brazil with 20, and Colombia with 12. Mega-mining alone affects nearly 300 communities, many of which are located on Indigenous territories. This wave of intense criminalization indicates the expansion of the extractive frontier. In Peru, where anti-extractivist unrest toppled two cabinets under the Humala government and led to the militarization of several provinces, mineral exploration expenditures increased tenfold in a decade. In 2002, 7.5 million hectares of land had been granted to mining companies; by 2012 the figure jumped to almost 26 million hectares, or 20% of the country’s land. Nearly 60% of the province of Apurímac has been granted to mining companies. In Colombia, about 40% of land is licensed to, or being solicited by, multinational companies for mineral and crude mining projects (Peace Brigades International 2011). According to OCMAL, 25% of the Chile’s territory was under exploration or operation as of 2010. In 2013, Mexico’s government opened the state-controlled energy sector to foreign investment, changing legislation to allow private multinationals to prospect for the country’s oil and natural gas resources for the first time since 1938. The problem is that governments are largely licensing Indigenous land. In 2010, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues reported that Colombian mining concessions had been awarded in 80% of the country’s legally recognized Indigenous territories. Colombia’s government has 8.8 million hectares of Indigenous reserves designated as oil areas and granted 168 mining licenses on Indigenous reserves in 2011. Extractive industries lead to evictions, toxic waste, and resource scarcity, creating conflicts over water, soil, and subsoil. Open-pit mining uses unsustainable amounts of water. The controversial Marlin mine, partly funded by the World Bank in 2004, and today fully owned by Goldcorp, uses in one hour the water that a local family uses over 22 years (Van de Sandt 2009).2 In Chile, mining consumes 37% of the electricity produced in the country – which will reach 50% in a few years – compared to 28% for industry and 16% for the residential sector. This requires the Chilean State to continually expand energy sources, thereby accelerating displacement and the transfer of agricultural land to hydroelectric projects. Conflicts against extractivism should not be dismissed as only concerning Indigenous peoples. They encompass larger debates about the role of extractivism in politics and contest a development model based on the corporatization of natural resources. In particular, they reveal the continuous role of resource exploitation as a strategy to finance states. Governments are prioritizing extractive industries as key engines of growth, although there is ample evidence that extractive industries create relatively few jobs. President Juan Manuel Santos promised to turn Colombia into a mining powerhouse because it attracts quick investment. Opening Ecuador to mega-mining financed much of President Correa’s third re-election. In fact, his unexpected policy shift to approve drilling within the Yasuní Reserve is explained largely by his government’s urgent need for cash. China, which holds over 35% of Ecuador’s foreign debt and financed 12% of its budget in 2013, buys about 60% of the country’s oil and is expected to pre-buy Yasuní oil (Guevara 2013). Indigenous claims against extractive projects contest a world system based on predation and usurpation. In Guatemala, mining is managed by long-standing political elites and inscribed in the colonial genealogy of power. In many instances, the entrepreneurs promoting mining today are the scions of the same oligarchical families that have controlled Indigenous land and peoples for centuries (Casaús 2007). The political economy of extractivism encompasses global inequalities of exploitation, within and among states. About 75% of the world’s mining companies are registered in Canada, and most operate in the so-called Global South (Deneault et al. 2012). Extractive industries in the North rely on alliances with national elites to exploit natural resources of peoples and places historically marginalized from power politics. Indigeneity as a Way to Rethink International Relations Claims against extractivism are ultimately claims to the right of self-determination. The unilateral expropriation of land for mining today is a continuation of the Doctrine of Discovery. It conceptualized the New World as terra nullis, authorizing colonial powers to conquer and exploit land in the Americas. It also paved the way for a paradigm of domination that outlasted colonial times to evolve into a broader – and more resilient – self-arrogated right of intervention embodied by the modern state (Wallerstein 2006). Today, the idea of “empty” lands survives in extractivist practices. Large-scale mining by multinational corporations perpetuates the human abuse and resource appropriation initiated by Spanish colonizers centuries ago in the Bolivian mines of Potosi. International rights to self-determination may have replaced Papal Bulls, yet the political economy of looting natural resources on Indigenous lands continues, now in the name of development. In this context, Indigeneity is a privileged site for the study of international relations. First and foremost, the extent and sophistication of Indigenous political praxis is relevant to any explanation of world politics. The rise of anti-extractivism as a politics of contestation against state exploitation calls for alternative sites of governance, such as the Inuit Circumpolar Council (Shadian 2013). Indigenous claims are shaping political practice, framing international legislation, and destabilizing assumptions about stateness. They seek the redistribution of rights as much as the uprooting of the concentration of power in the state. In that sense, Indigenous claims to consultation challenge the authority of states over natural resources as much as Westphalian forms of sovereignty. Second, Indigeneity disrupts state sovereignty (Ryser 2012). The UNDRIP became the longest and most hotly debated human rights instrument in UN history because the expansion of Indigenous rights is intrinsically related to issues of state authority over territory. Rights to self-determination entail the recognition of plural forms of territorial authority in competition with states. Indigeneity is attributed to peoples who have historically been excluded from projects of state-making. Yet it contributes much more than making visible historically excluded groups. It refers to a politics that both precedes the state and lies outside of it. It is the constitutive “other” of the modern state, marked by a co-constitutive history that explains why Indigenous politics vary depending on different processes of state-formation. Consequently, Indigeneity is vital to a discipline dedicated to studying relations among states precisely because it is intrinsically related to state-formation. Standing outside of, and prior to, the state makes Indigenous standpoints valuable in terms of thinking critically about world politics and imagining what post-national political assemblages may look like (Sassen 2008). Finally, Indigeneity is a strategic perspective in expanding scholarly debates on what constitutes IR. Indigenous experiences complement and broaden official national histories with forgotten or repressed narratives (O’Brien 2010), thus expanding methodological assumptions on how to do IR (Jackson 2010). Its precedence over the modern state encompasses alternative worldviews to think about the international beyond stateness. Indigeneity thus defies core epistemological foundations about power. In particular, it historicizes the state and sovereignty, moving away from Eurocentric conceptions of the world (Hobson 2012) and breaking with the discipline’s unreflective tendencies (Tickner 2013). The vibrancy of Indigenous struggles not only confirms the inadequacy of the state, echoing calls to provincialize Europe’s political legacies (Chakrabarty 2000), but it also provides concrete experiences of what the international can actually look like within and beyond the state (Tickner and Blaney 2013). Indigeneity is therefore doubly valuable for world politics. In addition to contributing alternative praxis of the international, it instigates critical theory to expand disciplinary borders. Indigeneity is a valuable category of analysis for world politics. Indigenous experiences offer a fuller understanding of the world we live in. Integrating indigenous perspectives in the study of IR speaks to the ability to extend our political practice beyond the ivory tower. It is not a category of analysis that concerns merely Indigenous peoples, just as racism is not a matter for people of African descent only, or post-colonial studies the domain of previously colonized societies. The entire thrust of Indigeneity is that the non-state is the business of the state, and that there are alternative pathways available to decolonize the discipline. Stripping IR of its state-centrism invites us to reflect upon the entrenched colonialism of international relations. Indigenous perspectives will hopefully inspire scholars to adventure beyond the conventional borders of the discipline. After all, opening an alternative locus of authority is nothing short of revolutionary. Banerjee, S. (2012) Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point. New York: Seven Stories Press. Beier, J.M. (2009) International Relations in Uncommon Places: Indigeneity, Cosmology, and the Limits of International Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Casaús, M. E. (2007) Guatemala: Linaje y racismo. Guatemala: F&G Editores. Chakrabarty, D. (2008) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cott, D.L.V. (2008) Radical democracy in the Andes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deneault, A., Denis, M. and Sacher, W. (2012) Paradis sous terre: comment le Canada est devenu la plaque tournante de l’industrie minie`re mondiale. Montre´al: E´cosocie´te´. Feather, C. (2014) Violating rights and threatening lives: The Camisea gas project and indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. Moreton-in-Marsh, United Kingdom: Forest Peoples Programme. Guartambel, C.P. (2012) Agua u oro: Kimsacocha, la resistencia por el água. Cuenca, Ecuador: Universidad Estatal de Cuenca. Guevara, F. E. (2013, December 10) “La explotación del Yasuní: reprimarizacioón de la economía del Ecuador.” Opción- Ecuador. Hobson, J.M. (2012) The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory 1760-2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, P.T. (2010) The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics. New York: Routledge. MacLeod, M. and Pérez, C. (2013) Tu’n Tklet Qnan Tx’otx’, Q’ixkojalel, b’ix Tb’anil Qanq’ib’il, En defensa de la Madre Tierra, sentir lo que siente el otro, y el buen vivir. La lucha de Doña Crisanta contra Goldcorp. México: CeActl. Madrid, R.L. (2012) The Rise of Ethnic Politics in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morgan, R. (2011) Transforming Law and Institution: Indigenous Peoples, the United Nations and Human Rights. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate. O’Brien, J.M. (2010) Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Peace Brigades International. (2011) “Mining in Colombia: At What Cost?” Colombia Newsletter, 18: 1–47. Self-Determination as Anti-Extractivism Ryser, R.C. (2012) Indigenous Nations and Modern States: The Political Emergence of Nations Challenging State Power. New York: Routledge. Sassen, S. (2008) Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sawyer, S. and Gomez, E.T. (2012) The Politics of Resource Extraction: Indigenous Peoples, Multinational Corporations and the State. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shadian, J.M. (2013) The Politics of Arctic Sovereignty: Oil, Ice and Inuit Governance. New York: Routledge. Shaw, K. (2008) Indigeneity and Political Theory: Sovereignty and the limits of the political. New York: Routledge. Tickner, A.B. (2013) “Core, periphery and (neo)imperialist International Relations.” European Journal of International Relations, 19(3): 627–46. Tickner, A.B. and Blaney, D.L. (2013) Claiming the International. New York: Routledge. UN General Assembly. (2008) United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples resolution / adopted by the General Assembly. 2 October 2007, UN. Doc. A/RES/61/295. Van de Sandt, J. (2009) Mining Conflicts and Indigenous Peoples in Guatemala. The Hague: Cordaid. Wallerstein, I.M. (2006) European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power. New York: The New Press. Zibechi, R. (2013, October 27) “Latin America Rejects the Extractive Model in the Streets.” Americas Program. Available at: http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/10983 (Accessed 29 January 2014). 1 A delegation from the Red Sucker Lake First Nation descended on the work camp of Mega Precious Metals, Inc., a mineral exploration company, to stop them from working and demand that they vacate the land immediately. The Mathias Colomb First Nation issued a similar order to Hudbay Mining and Smelting Co., Ltd. and the Province of Manitoba. 2 According to the company’s own social and environmental impact report, the Marlin mine consumes about 250 thousand liters of water every hour (MacLeod and Pérez 2013).

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Neurobehavioural effects of developmental toxicity by Dr Philippe Grandjean, MD , Philip J Landrigan, MD Neurodevelopmental disabilities, including autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, and other cognitive impairments, affect millions of children worldwide, and some diagnoses seem to be increasing in frequency. Industrial chemicals that injure the developing brain are among the known causes for this rise in prevalence. In 2006, we did a systematic review and identified five industrial chemicals as developmental neurotoxicants: lead, methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, arsenic, and toluene. Since 2006, epidemiological studies have documented six additional developmental neurotoxicants—manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, and the polybrominated diphenyl ethers. We postulate that even more neurotoxicants remain undiscovered. To control the pandemic of developmental neurotoxicity, we propose a global prevention strategy. Untested chemicals should not be presumed to be safe to brain development, and chemicals in existing use and all new chemicals must therefore be tested for developmental neurotoxicity. To coordinate these efforts and to accelerate translation of science into prevention, we propose the urgent formation of a new international clearinghouse. Disorders of neurobehavioural development affect 10–15% of all births,1 and prevalence rates of autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder seem to be increasing worldwide. Subclinical decrements in brain function are even more common than these neurobehavioural developmental disorders. All these disabilities can have severe consequences—they diminish quality of life, reduce academic achievement, and disturb behaviour, with profound consequences for the welfare and productivity of entire societies. The root causes of the present global pandemic of neurodevelopmental disorders are only partly understood. Although genetic factors have a role, they cannot explain recent increases in reported prevalence, and none of the genes discovered so far seem to be responsible for more than a small proportion of cases. Overall, genetic factors seem to account for no more than perhaps 30–40% of all cases of neurodevelopmental disorders. Thus, non-genetic, environmental exposures are involved in causation, in some cases probably by interacting with genetically inherited predispositions. Strong evidence exists that industrial chemicals widely disseminated in the environment are important contributors to what we have called the global, silent pandemic of neurodevelopmental toxicity.The developing human brain is uniquely vulnerable to toxic chemical exposures, and major windows of developmental vulnerability occur in utero and during infancy and early childhood. During these sensitive life stages, chemicals can cause permanent brain injury at low levels of exposure that would have little or no adverse effect in an adult. In 2006, we did a systematic review of the published clinical and epidemiological studies into the neurotoxicity of industrial chemicals, with a focus on developmental neurotoxicity. We identified five industrial chemicals that could be reliably classified as developmental neurotoxicants: lead, methylmercury, arsenic, polychlorinated biphenyls, and toluene. We also noted 201 chemicals that had been reported to cause injury to the nervous system in adults, mostly in connection with occupational exposures, poisoning incidents, or suicide attempts. Additionally, more than 1000 chemicals have been reported to be neurotoxic in animals in laboratory studies. We noted that recognition of the risks of industrial chemicals to brain development has historically needed decades of research and scrutiny, as shown in the cases of lead and methyl mercury. In most cases, discovery began with clinical diagnosis of poisoning in workers and episodes of high-dose exposure. More sophisticated epidemiological studies typically began only much later. Results from such studies documented developmental neurotoxicity at much lower exposure levels than had previously been thought to be safe. Thus, recognition of widespread subclinical toxicity often did not occur until decades after the initial evidence of neurotoxicity. A recurring theme was that early warnings of subclinical neurotoxicity were often ignored or even dismissed. David P Rall, former Director of the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, once noted that “if thalidomide had caused a ten-point loss of intelligence quotient (IQ) instead of obvious birth defects of the limbs, it would probably still be on the market”.Many industrial chemicals marketed at present probably cause IQ deficits of far fewer than ten points and have therefore eluded detection so far, but their combined effects could have enormous consequences. In our 2006 review, we expressed concern that additional developmental neurotoxicants might lurk undiscovered among the 201 chemicals then known to be neurotoxic to adult human beings and among the many thousands of pesticides, solvents, and other industrial chemicals in widespread use that had never been tested for neurodevelopmental toxicity. Since our previous review, new data have emerged about the vulnerability of the developing brain and the neurotoxicity of industrial chemicals. Particularly important new evidence derives from prospective epidemiological birth cohort studies. In this Review, we consider recent information about the developmental neurotoxicity of industrial chemicals to update our previous report. Additionally, we propose strategies to counter this pandemic and to prevent the spread of neurological disease and disability in children worldwide. Unique vulnerability of the developing brain The fetus is not well protected against industrial chemicals. The placenta does not block the passage of many environmental toxicants from the maternal to the fetal circulation, and more than 200 foreign chemicals have been detected in umbilical cord blood. Additionally, many environmental chemicals are transferred to the infant through human breast milk. During fetal life and early infancy, the blood–brain barrier provides only partial protection against the entry of chemicals into the CNS. Moreover, the developing human brain is exceptionally sensitive to injury caused by toxic chemicals, and several developmental processes have been shown to be highly vulnerable to chemical toxicity. For example, in-vitro studies suggest that neural stem cells are very sensitive to neurotoxic substances such as methyl mercury. Some pesticides inhibit cholinesterase function in the developing brain, thereby affecting the crucial regulatory role of acetylcholine before synapse formation. Early-life epigenetic changes are also known to affect subsequent gene expression in the brain. In summary, industrial chemicals known or suspected to be neurotoxic to adults are also likely to present risks to the developing brain. The unique vulnerability of the brain during early life and indicates how developmental exposures to toxic chemicals are particularly likely to lead to functional deficits and disease later in life.Exposures in early life to neurotoxic chemicals can cause a wide range of adverse effects on brain development and maturation that can manifest as functional impairments or disease at any point in the human lifespan, from early infancy to very old age. New findings about known hazards Recent research on well-documented neurotoxicants has generated important new insights into the neurodevelopmental consequences of early exposures to these industrial chemicals. Joint analyses that gathered data for lead-associated IQ deficits from seven international studies support the conclusion that no safe level of exposure to lead exists. Cognitive deficits in adults who had previously shown lead-associated developmental delays at school age suggest that the effects of lead neurotoxicity are probably permanent Brain imaging of young adults who had raised lead concentrations in their blood during childhood showed exposure-related decreases in brain volume. Lead exposure in early childhood is associated with reduced school performance and with delinquent behaviour later in life. Developmental neurotoxicity due to methylmercury occurs at much lower exposures than the concentrations that affect adult brain function. Deficits at 7 years of age that were linked to low-level prenatal exposures to methylmercury were still detectable at the age of 14 years. Some common genetic polymorphisms seem to increase the vulnerability of the developing brain to methylmercury toxicity. Functional MRI scans of people exposed prenatally to excess amounts of methylmercury showed abnormally expanded activation of brain regions in response to sensory stimulation and motor tasks Because some adverse effects might be counterbalanced by essential fatty acids from seafood, statistical adjustment for maternal diet during pregnancy results in stronger methyl mercury effects. Average activation during finger tapping with the left hand in three adolescents with increased prenatal methylmercury exposure (A) and three control adolescents (B). The control participants activate the premotor and motor cortices on the right, whereas participants exposed to methylmercury activate these areas bilaterally. Prenatal and early postnatal exposures to inorganic arsenic from drinking water are associated with cognitive deficits that are apparent at school age. Infants who survived the Morinaga milk arsenic poisoning incident had highly raised risks of neurological disease during adult life. The developmental neurotoxicity of polychlorinated biphenyls has been consolidated and strengthened by recent findings. Although little new information has been published about the developmental neurotoxicity of toluene, much has been learned about the developmental neurotoxicity of another common solvent, ethanol, through research on fetal alcohol exposure. Maternal consumption of alcohol during pregnancy, even in very small quantities, has been linked to a range of neurobehavioural adverse effects in offspring, including reduced IQ, impaired executive function and social judgment, delinquent behaviour, seizures, other neurological signs, and sensory problems. Newly recognised developmental neurotoxicants Prospective epidemiological birth cohort studies make it possible to measure maternal or fetal exposures in real time during pregnancy as these exposures actually occur, thus generating unbiased information about the degree and timing of prenatal exposures. Children in these prospective studies are followed longitudinally and assessed with age-appropriate tests to show delayed or deranged neurobehavioural development. These powerful epidemiological methods have enabled the discovery of additional developmental neurotoxicants. Cross-sectional data from Bangladesh show that exposure to manganese from drinking water is associated with reduced mathematics achievement scores in school children. A study in Quebec, Canada, showed a strong correlation between manganese concentrations in hair and hyperactivity. School-aged children living near manganese mining and processing facilities have shown associations between airborne manganese concentrations and diminished intellectual function and with impaired motor skills and reduced olfactory function. These results are supported by experimental findings in mice. A meta-analysis of 27 cross-sectional studies of children exposed to fluoride in drinking water, mainly from China, suggests an average IQ decrement of about seven points in children exposed to raised fluoride concentrations. Confounding from other substances seemed unlikely in most of these studies. Further characterisation of the dose–response association would be desirable. The occupational health literature suggests that solvents can act as neurotoxicants, but the identification of individual responsible compounds is hampered by the complexity of exposures. In a French cohort study of 3000 children, investigators linked maternal occupational solvent exposure during pregnancy to deficits in behavioural assessment at 2 years of age. The data showed dose-related increased risks for hyperactivity and aggressive behaviour. One in every five mothers in this cohort reported solvent exposures in common jobs, such as nurse or other hospital employee, chemist, cleaner, hairdresser, and beautician. In Massachusetts, USA, follow-up of a well-defined population with prenatal and early childhood exposure to the solvent tetrachloroethylene (also called perchlorethylene) in drinking water showed a tendency towards deficient neurological function and increased risk of psychiatric diagnoses. Acute pesticide poisoning occurs frequently in children worldwide, and subclinical pesticide toxicity is also widespread. Clinical data suggest that acute pesticide poisoning during childhood might lead to lasting neurobehavioural deficits. Highly toxic and bioaccumulative pesticides are now banned in high-income nations, but are still used in many low-income and middle-income countries. In particular, the organochlorine compounds dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), its metabolite dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene (DDE), and chlordecone (Kepone), tend to be highly persistent and remain widespread in the environment and in people’s bodies in high-use regions. Recent studies have shown inverse correlations between serum concentrations of DDT or DDE (which indicate accumulated exposures), and neurodevelopmental performance. Organophosphate pesticides are eliminated from the human body much more rapidly than are organochlorines, and exposure assessment is therefore inherently less precise. Nonetheless, three prospective epidemiological birth cohort studies provide new evidence that prenatal exposure to organophosphate pesticides can cause developmental neurotoxicity. In these studies, prenatal organophosphate exposure was assessed by measurement of maternal urinary excretion of pesticide metabolites during pregnancy. Dose-related correlations were recorded between maternal exposures to chlorpyrifos or other organophosphates and small head circumference at birth—which is an indication of slowed brain growth in utero—and with neurobehavioural deficits that have persisted to at least 7 years of age. In a subgroup study, MRI of the brain showed that prenatal chlorpyrifos exposure was associated with structural abnormalities that included thinning of the cerebral cortex. Herbicides and fungicides might also have neurotoxic potential. Propoxur a carbamate pesticide, and permethrine,58 a member of the pyrethroid class of pesticides, have recently been linked to neurodevelopmental deficits in children. The group of compounds known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) are widely used as flame retardants and are structurally very similar to the polychlorinated biphenyls. Experimental evidence now suggests that the PBDEs might also be neurotoxic. Epidemiological studies in Europe and the USA have shown neurodevelopmental deficits in children with increased prenatal exposures to these compounds.Thus, the PBDEs should be regarded as hazards to human neurobehavioural development, although attribution of relative toxic potentials to individual PBDE congeners is not yet possible. Other suspected developmental neurotoxicants A serious difficulty that complicates many epidemiological studies of neurodevelopmental toxicity in children is the problem of mixed exposures. Most populations are exposed to more than one neurotoxicant at a time, and yet most studies have only a finite amount of power and precision in exposure assessment to discern the possible effects of even single neurotoxicants. A further problem in many epidemiological studies of non-persistent toxicants is that imprecise assessment of exposure tends to obscure associations that might actually be present.63 Guidance from experimental neurotoxicity studies is therefore crucial. In the assessment of potential developmental neurotoxicants, we have used a strength of evidence approach similar to that used by the International Agency for Research on Cancer for assessing epidemiological and experimental studies. Phthalates and bisphenol A are added to many different types of plastics, cosmetics, and other consumer products. Since they are eliminated rapidly in urine, exposure assessment is complicated, and such imprecision might lead to underestimation of the true risk of neurotoxicity. The best-documented effects of early-life exposure to phthalates are the consequence of disruption of endocrine signalling.64 Thus, prenatal exposures to phthalates have been linked to both neurodevelopmental deficits and to behavioural abnormalities characterised by shortened attention span and impaired social interactions. The neurobehavioural toxicity of these compounds seems to affect mainly boys and could therefore relate to endocrine disruption in the developing brain. In regard to bisphenol A, a prospective study showed that point estimates of exposure during gestation were linked to abnormalities in behaviour and executive function in children at 3 years of age. Exposure to air pollution can cause neurodevelopmental delays and disorders of behavioural functions. Of the individual components of air pollution, carbon monoxide is a well-documented neurotoxicant, and indoor exposure to this substance has now been linked to deficient neurobehavioural performance in children.Less clear is the reported contribution of nitrogen oxides to neurodevelopmental deficits, since these compounds often co-occur with carbon monoxide as part of complex emissions. Tobacco smoke is a complex mixture of hundreds of chemical compounds and is now a well-documented cause of developmental neurotoxicity. Infants exposed prenatally to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from traffic exhausts at 5 years of age showed greater cognitive impairment and lower IQ than those exposed to lower levels of these compounds. Perfluorinated compounds, such as perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctane sulphonate, are highly persistent in the environment and in the human body, and seem to be neurotoxic. Emerging epidemiological evidence suggests that these compounds might indeed impede neurobehavioural development. Developmental neurotoxicity and clinical neurology Exposures in early life to developmental neurotoxicants are now being linked to specific clinical syndromes in children. For example, an increased risk of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder has been linked to prenatal exposures to manganese, organophosphates, and phthalates. Phthalates have also been linked to behaviours that resemble components of autism spectrum disorder. Prenatal exposure to automotive air pollution in California, USA, has been linked to an increased risk for autism spectrum disorder. The persistent decrements in intelligence documented in children, adolescents, and young adults exposed in early life to neurotoxicants could presage the development of neurodegenerative disease later in life. Thus, accumulated exposure to lead is associated with cognitive decline in the elderly. Manganese exposure may lead to parkinsonism, and experimental studies have reported Parkinson’s disease as a result of developmental exposures to the insecticide rotenone, the herbicides paraquat and maneb, and the solvent trichloroethylene.Any environmental exposure that increases the risk of neurodegenerative disorders in later life requires urgent investigation as the world’s population continues to age. The expanding complement of neurotoxicants In our 2006 review, we expressed concern that additional developmental neurotoxicants might lie undiscovered in the 201 chemicals that were then known to be neurotoxic to human adults, in the roughly 1000 chemicals known to be neurotoxic in animal species, and in the many thousands of industrial chemicals and pesticides that have never been tested for neurotoxicity. Exposure to neurotoxic chemicals is not rare, since almost half of the 201 known human neurotoxicants are regarded as high production volume chemicals. Our updated literature review shows that since 2006 the list of recognised human neurotoxicants has expanded by 12 chemicals, from 202 (including ethanol) to 214 (table 1 and appendix)—that is, by about two substances per year. Many of these chemicals are widely used and disseminated extensively in the global environment. Of the newly identified neurodevelopmental toxicants, pesticides constitute the largest group, as was already the case in 2006. In the same 7-year period, the number of known developmental neurotoxicants has doubled from six to 12. Although the pace of scientific discovery of new neurodevelopmental hazards is more rapid today than in the past, it is still slower than the identification of adult neurotoxicants. The gap that exists between the number of substances known to be toxic to the adult brain and the smaller number known to be toxic to the much more vulnerable developing brain is unlikely to close in the near future. This discrepancy is attributable to the fact that toxicity to the adult brain is usually discovered as a result of acute poisoning incidents, typically with a clear and immediate association between causative exposure and adverse effects, as occurs for workplace exposures or suicide attempts. By contrast, the recognition of developmental neurotoxicity relies on two sets of evidence collected at two different points in time: exposure data (often obtained from the mother during pregnancy), and data for the child’s postnatal neurobehavioural development (often obtained 5–10 years later). Because brain functions develop sequentially, the full effects of early neurotoxic damage might not become apparent until school age or beyond. The most reliable evidence of developmental neurotoxicity is obtained through prospective studies that include real-time recording of information about exposure in early life followed by serial clinical assessments of the child. Such research is inherently slow and is hampered by the difficulty of reliable assessment of exposures to individual toxicants in complex mixtures. Consequences of developmental neurotoxicity Developmental neurotoxicity causes brain damage that is too often untreatable and frequently permanent. The consequence of such brain damage is impaired CNS function that lasts a lifetime and might result in reduced intelligence, as expressed in terms of lost IQ points, or disruption in behaviour. A recent study compared the estimated total IQ losses from major paediatric causes and showed that the magnitude of losses attributable to lead, pesticides, and other neurotoxicants was in the same range as, or even greater than, the losses associated with medical events such as preterm birth, traumatic brain injury, brain tumours, and congenital heart disease Total losses of IQ points in US children 0–5 years of age associated with major risk factors, including developmental exposure to industrial chemicals that cause neurotoxicity Loss of cognitive skills reduces children’s academic and economic attainments and has substantial long-term economic effects on societies. Thus, each loss of one IQ point has been estimated to decrease average lifetime earnings capacity by about €12 000 or US$18 000 in 2008 currencies. The most recent estimates from the USA indicate that the annual costs of childhood lead poisoning are about US$50 billion and that the annual costs of methylmercury toxicity are roughly US$5 billion. In the European Union, methylmercury exposure is estimated to cause a loss of about 600 000 IQ points every year, corresponding to an annual economic loss of close to €10 billion. In France alone, lead exposure is associated with IQ losses that correspond to annual costs that might exceed €20 billion.98 Since IQ losses represent only one aspect of developmental neurotoxicity, the total costs are surely even higher. Evidence from worldwide sources indicates that average national IQ scores are associated with gross domestic product (GDP)—a correlation that might be causal in both directions.Thus, poverty can cause low IQ, but the opposite is also true. In view of the widespread exposures to lead, pesticides, and other neurotoxicants in developing countries, where chemical controls might be ineffective compared with those in more developed countries, developmental exposures to industrial chemicals could contribute substantially to the recorded correlation between IQ and GDP. If this theory is true, developing countries could take decades to emerge from poverty. Consequently, pollution abatement might then be delayed, and a vicious circle can result. The antisocial behaviour, criminal behaviour, violence, and substance abuse that seem to result from early-life exposures to some neurotoxic chemicals result in increased needs for special educational services, institutionalisation, and even incarceration. In the USA, the murder rate fell sharply 20 years after the removal of lead from petrol,102 a finding consistent with the idea that exposure to lead in early life is a powerful determinant of behaviour decades later. Although poorly quantified, such behavioural and social consequences of neurodevelopmental toxicity are potentially very costly. Prevention of developmental neurotoxicity caused by industrial chemicals is highly cost effective. A study that quantified the gains resulting from the phase-out of lead additives from petrol reported that in the USA alone, the introduction of lead-free petrol has generated an economic benefit of $200 billion in each annual birth cohort since 1980,103 an aggregate benefit in the past 30 years of over $3 trillion. This success has since been repeated in more than 150 countries, resulting in vast additional savings. Every US$1 spent to reduce lead hazards is estimated to produce a benefit of US$17–220, which represents a cost-benefit ratio that is even better than that for vaccines. Furthermore, the costs associated with the late-life consequences of developmental neurotoxicity are enormous, and the benefits from prevention of degenerative brain disorders could be very substantial. New methods to identify developmental neurotoxicants New toxicological methods now allow a rational strategy for the identification of developmental neurotoxicants based on a multidisciplinary approach.A new guideline has been approved as a standardised approach for the identification of developmental neurotoxicants. However, completion of such tests is expensive and requires the use of many laboratory animals, and reliance on mammals for chemicals testing purposes needs to be reduced. US governmental agencies have established the National Center for Computational Toxicology and an initiative—the Tox 21 Program—to promote the evolution of toxicology from a mainly observational science to a predominantly predictive science. In-vitro methods have now reached a level of predictive validity that means they can be applied to neurotoxicity testing. Some of these tests are based on neural stem cells. Although these cell systems do not have a blood–brain barrier and particular metabolising enzymes, these approaches are highly promising. As a further option, data for protein links and protein–protein interactions can now be used to explore potential neurotoxicity in silica, thus showing that existing computational methods might predict potential toxic effects. In summary, use of the whole range of approaches along with clinical and epidemiological evidence, when available, should enable the integration of information for use in at least a tentative risk assessment. With these methods, we anticipate that the pace of scientific discovery in developmental neurotoxicology will accelerate further in the years ahead. Conclusions and recommendations The updated findings presented in this Review confirm and extend our 2006 conclusions. During the 7 years since our previous report, the number of industrial chemicals recognised to be developmental neurotoxicants has doubled. Exposures to these industrial chemicals in the environment contribute to the pandemic of developmental neurotoxicity. Two major obstacles impede efforts to control the global pandemic of developmental neurotoxicity. These barriers, which we noted in our previous review and were recently underlined by the US National Research Council, are: large gaps in the testing of chemicals for developmental neurotoxicity, which results in a paucity of systematic data to guide prevention; and the huge amount of proof needed for regulation. Thus, very few chemicals have been regulated as a result of developmental neurotoxicity. The presumption that new chemicals and technologies are safe until proven otherwise is a fundamental problem. Classic examples of new chemicals that were introduced because they conveyed certain benefits, but were later shown to cause great harm, include several neurotoxicants, asbestos, thalidomide, diethylstilboestrol, and the chlorofluorocarbons. A recurring theme in each of these cases was that commercial introduction and wide dissemination of the chemicals preceded any systematic effort to assess potential toxicity. Particularly absent were advance efforts to study possible effects on children’s health or the potential of exposures in early life to disrupt early development. Similar challenges have been confronted in other public health disasters, such as those caused by tobacco smoking, alcohol use, and refined foods. These problems have been recently termed industrial epidemics. To control the pandemic of developmental neurotoxicity, we propose a coordinated international strategy (panel). Mandatory and transparent assessment of evidence for neurotoxicity is the foundation of this strategy. Assessment of toxicity must be followed by governmental regulation and market intervention. Voluntary controls seem to be of little value. Recommendations for an international clearinghouse on neurotoxicity The main purpose of this agency would be to promote optimum brain health, not just avoidance of neurological disease, by inspiring, facilitating, and coordinating research and public policies that aim to protect brain development during the most sensitive life stages. The main efforts would aim to: •Screen industrial chemicals present in human exposures for neurotoxic effects so that hazardous substances can be identified for tighter control •Stimulate and coordinate new research to understand how toxic chemicals interfere with brain development and how best to prevent long-term dysfunctions and deficits •Function as a clearinghouse for research data and strategies by gathering and assessing documentation about brain toxicity and stimulating international collaboration on research and prevention •Promote policy development aimed at protecting vulnerable populations against chemicals that are toxic to the brain without needing unrealistic amounts of scientific proof The three pillars of our proposed strategy are: legally mandated testing of existing industrial chemicals and pesticides already in commerce, with prioritisation of those with the most widespread use, and incorporation of new assessment technologies; legally mandated premarket evaluation of new chemicals before they enter markets, with use of precautionary approaches for chemical testing that recognise the unique vulnerability of the developing brain; and the formation of a new clearinghouse for neurotoxicity as a parallel to the International Agency for Research on Cancer. This new agency will assess industrial chemicals for developmental neurotoxicity with a precautionary approach that emphasises prevention and does not require absolute proof of toxicity. It will facilitate and coordinate epidemiological and toxicological studies and will lead the urgently needed global programmes for prevention. These new approaches must reverse the dangerous presumption that new chemicals and technologies are safe until proven otherwise. They must also overcome the existing requirement to produce absolute proof of toxicity before action can be started to protect children against neurotoxic substances. Precautionary interpretation of data about developmental neurotoxicity should take into account the very large individual and societal costs that result from failure to act on available documentation to prevent disease in children.Academic research has often favoured scepticism and required extensive replication before acceptance of a hypothesis, thereby adding to the inertia in toxicology and environmental health research and the consequent disregard of many other potential neurotoxicants. Additionally, the strength of evidence that is needed to constitute “proof” should be analysed in a societal perspective, so that the implications of ignoring a developmental neurotoxicant and of failing to act on the basis of available data are also taken into account. Finally, we emphasise that the total number of neurotoxic substances now recognised almost certainly represents an underestimate of the true number of developmental neurotoxicants that have been released into the global environment. Our very great concern is that children worldwide are being exposed to unrecognised toxic chemicals that are silently eroding intelligence, disrupting behaviours, truncating future achievements, and damaging societies, perhaps most seriously in developing countries. A new framework of action is needed.

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Born: 120 AD Birthplace: Samsat, Turkey Died: c. 180 AD Location of death: Athens, Greece Cause of death: unspecified Race or Ethnicity: White Nationality: Ancient Greece Executive summary: Dialogues of the Dead Lucian, Greek satirist of the Silver Age of Greek literature, born at Samosata on the Euphrates in northern Syria. He tells us in the Somnium or Vita Luciani, that, his means being small, he was at first apprenticed to his maternal uncle, a sculptor of the stone pillars called Hermae. Having made an unlucky beginning by breaking a marble slab, and having been well beaten for it, he absconded and returned home. Here he had a dream or vision of two women, representing Statuary and Literature. Both plead their cause at length, setting forth the advantages and the prospects of their respective professions; but the youth decides to pursue learning. For some time he seems to have made money following the example of Demosthenes, on whose merits and patriotism he expatiates in the dialogue Demosthenis Encomium. He was very familiar with the rival schools of philosophy, and he must have well studied their teachings; but he lashes them all alike, the Cynics, perhaps, being the chief object of his derision. Lucian was not only a skeptic; he was a scoffer and a downright unbeliever. He felt that men's actions and conduct always fall far short of their professions and therefore he concluded that the professions themselves were worthless, and a mere guise to secure popularity or respect. Of Christianity he shows some knowledge, and it must have been somewhat largely professed in Syria at the close of the 2nd century. In the Philopatris, though the dialogue so called is generally regarded as spurious, there is a statement of the doctrine of the Trinity, and the "Galilaean who had ascended to the third heaven", and "renewed" by the waters of baptism, may possibly allude to St. Paul. The doctrines of the "Light of the world" and that God is in heaven making a record of the good and bad actions of men, seem to have come from the same doubtful authorship. To understand them aright we must source, though the notion of a written catalogue of human actions to be used in judgment was familiar to Aeschylus and Euripides. As a satirist and a wit Lucian occupies in prose literature the unique position which Aristophanes holds in Greek poetry. But whether he is a mere satirist, who laughs while he lashes, or a misanthrope, who hates while he derides, is not very clear. In favor of the former view it may be said that the two main objects of his ridicule are mythology and the sects of philosophy; in favor of the latter, his bitter exposure of imposture and chicanery in the Alexander, and the very severe attacks he makes on the "humbug" of philosophy, which he everywhere assails with the most acrimonious and contemptuous epithets. As a writer Lucian is fluent, easy and unaffected, and a close follower of the best Attic models, such as Plato and the orators. His style is simpler than Plutarch's, and some of his compositions, especially the Dialogues of the Gods and of the Marine Deities, and, above all, the Dialogues of the Dead, are models of witty, polished and accurate Greek composition. Not less clever, though rather lax in morality, are other dialogues which remind us somewhat of the letters of Alciphron. The sarcasms on the popular mythology, the conversations of Pluto, Hermes, Charon and others of the powers in Hades, show a positive disbelief in any future state of existence. The model Lucian followed in these dialogues, as well in the style as in the sparkling and playful repartee, was the Platonic conversations, founded on the drama, of which the dialogue may be called the prose representative. Aristotle never adopted it, perhaps regarding it as beneath the true dignity of philosophy. The dialogue, in fact, was revived and improved by Lucian. For rhetoric loved to talk, expatiate and declaim, while dialectic strove to refute by the employment of question and answer, often in the briefest form. Lucian evinces a perfect mastery over a language as wonderful in its inflections as in its immense and varied vocabulary; and it is a well-merited praise of the author to say that to a good Greek scholar the pages of Lucian are almost as easy and as entertaining as an English or French novel. It is true that he employs some forms and compounds which were not in use in the time of Plato or Demosthenes, and, as one who lived under Roman rule, has a tendency towards Latinisms. But his own sentiments on the propriety of diction are shown by his reproof to Lexiphanes, "if anywhere you have picked up an out-of-the-way word, or coined one which you think good, you labor to adapt the sense of it, and think it a loss if you do not succeed in dragging it in somewhere, even when it it not really wanted." Lucian founded his style, or obtained his fluency, from the successful study of rhetoric, by which he appears to have made a good income from composing speeches which attracted much attention. At a later period in life he seems to have held a lucrative legal office in Egypt, which he retained until his death. His extant works are so numerous that of some of the principal only a short sketch can be given. More than 80 pieces have come down to us under his name (including three collections of 71 shorter dialogues), of which about 20 are spurious or of doubtful authorship. To properly understand them we must remember that the whole moral code, the entire "duty of man" was included, in the estimation of the pagan Greek, in the various schools of philosophy. As these were generally rivals, and the systems they taught were more or less directly antagonistic, truth presented itself to the inquirer, not as one, but as manifold. The absurdity and impossibility of this forms the burden of all of Lucian's writings. He could only form one conclusion, that there is no such thing as truth. One of the best written and most amusing treatises of antiquity is Lucian's True History, forming a rather long narrative in two books, which suggested Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Rabelais's Voyage of Pantagruel and Cyrano de Bergerac's Journey to the Moon. It is composed, the author tells us in a brief introduction, not only as a pastime and a diversion from severer studies, but avowedly as a satire on the poets and logographers who had written so many marvellous tales. He names Ctesias and Homer; but Hellanicus and Herodotus, perhaps others still earlier, appear to have been in his mind. The only true statement in his History, he wittily says, is that it contains nothing but lies from beginning to end. The main purport of the story is to describe a voyage to the moon. He set out, he tells us, with fifty companions, in a well-provisioned ship, from the "Pillars of Hercules", intending to explore the western ocean. After eighty days' rough sailing they came to an island on which they found a Greek inscription, "This was the limit of the expedition of Heracles and Dionysus"; and the visit of the wine-god seemed attested by some miraculous vines which they found there. After leaving the island they were suddenly carried up, ship and all, by a whirlwind into the air, and on the eighth day came in sight of a great round island shining with a bright light, and lying a little above the moon. In a short time they are arrested by a troop of gigantic "horse-vultures" and brought as captives to the "man in the moon", who proves to be Endymion. He is engaged in a war with the inhabitants of the sun, which is ruled by King Phaėthon, the quarrel having arisen from an attempt to colonize the planet Venus (Lucifer). The voyagers are enlisted as "Moonites", and a long description follows of the monsters and flying dragons engaged in the contest. A fight ensues, in which the slaughter is so great that the very clouds are tinged with red. The long description of the inhabitants of the moon is extremely droll and original. After descending safely into the sea, the ship is swallowed by a huge "sea serpent" more than 100 miles long. The adventures during the long confinement in the creature's belly are most amusing; but at last they sail out through the chinks between the monster's teeth, and soon find themselves at the "Fortunate Islands." Here they meet with the spirits of heroes and philosophers of antiquity, on whom the author expatiates at some length. The tale comes to an abrupt end with an allusion to Herodotus in the promise that he "will tell the rest in his next books." Another curious and rather long treatise exists, the authorship of which is regarded as doubtful. Parts of the story are coarse enough; the point turns on one Lucius visiting in a Thessalian family, in which the lady of the house was a sorceress. Having seen her changed into a bird by anointing herself with some potent drug, he resolves to try a similar experiment on himself, but finds that he has become an ass, retaining, however, his human senses and memory. The mistake arose from his having filched the wrong ointment; however, he is assured by the attendant, Palaestra, that if he can but procure roses to eat, his natural form will be restored. In the night a party of bandits break into the house and carry off the stolen goods into the mountains on the back of the unfortunate donkey, who gets well beaten for stumbling on the rough road. Seeing, as he fancies, some roses in a garden, he goes in quest of them, and again gets beaten as a thief by the gardener. After many adventures with the bandits, he attempts to run away, but is caught. A council is held, and he is condemned to die together with a captive girl who had essayed to escape on his back. Suddenly, however, soldiers appear, and the bandits are arrested. Again the ass escapes "to the great and populous city of Beroea in Macedonia." Here he is sold to a strolling conjurer, afterwards to a market-gardener; and both experiences are alike painful. Again he passes into the possession of a cook, where he gets fat and sleek on food more suited to his concealed humanity than the hard fare he has of late lived upon. At last, during an exhibition in the theater, he sees some roses being carried past, and, making a successful rush to devour them, he recovers his former shape. "I am Lucius", he exclaims to the wondering president of the exhibition, "and my brother's name is Caius. It was a Thessalian witch that changed me into a donkey." Thus all ends well, and he returns safe to his country. The treatise On the Syrian Goddess (Mylitta, the moon-goddess, the Semitic Aphrodite) is written in the Ionic dialect in imitation perhaps of the style of Herodotus, though the resemblance is by no means close. The writer professes to be an Assyrian, and to describe the wonders in the various temples of Palestine and Syria; he descants on the eunuchs of Syria and the origin of the self-imposed privation of manhood professed and practised by the Galli. The account of the temples, altars and sacrifices is curious, if really authentic; after the manner of Pausanias it is little more than a list, with the reasons in most cases added, or the origin of the custom explained. De Morte Peregrini is a narrative of one Proteus, a Cynic, who after professing various doctrines, and among them those of Christianity, ended his own life by ascending a burning pyre. Bis accusatus ("Twice Accused") is a dialogue beginning with a satire on the folly of the popular notion that the gods alone are happy. Zeus is represented as disproving this by enumerating the duties that fall to their lot in the government of the world, and Hermes remarks on the vast crowds of philosophers of rival sects, by whose influence the respect and worship formerly paid to the gods have seriously declined. A trial is supposed to be held under the presidency of a goddess, between the Academy, the Porch, the schools of the Cynics and Epicureans, and Pleasure, Revelry, Virtue, Luxury, etc., as variously impugned or defended by them. Then Conversation and Rhetoric come before the court, each having an action for defamation to bring against Syrus the essayist, who of course is Lucian himself. His defense is heard, and in both cases he is triumphantly acquitted. This essay is brilliant from its clever parodies of Plato and Demosthenes, and the satire on the Socratic method of arguing by short questions and answers. The Lover of Lying discusses the reason why some persons seem to take pleasure in falsehood for its own sake. Under the category of lying all mythology (e.g. that of Homer and Hesiod) is included, and the question is asked, why the hearers of such stories are amused by them? Quack remedies, charms and miraculous cures are included among the most popular kinds of falsehood; witchcraft, spiritualism, exorcism, expulsion of devils, spectres, are discussed in turn, and a good ghost story is told. An anecdote is given of Democritus, who, to show his disbelief in ghosts, had shut himself up in a tomb, and when some young men, dressed up with death's heads, came to frighten him at night, he did not even look up, but called out to them, "Stop your joking." This treatise, a very interesting one, concludes with the reflection that truth and sound reason are the only remedies for vain and superstitious terrors. The dialogue Navigium seu Vota ("The Ship or the Wishes") gives an apparently authentic account of the measurements and fittings of an Egyptian ship which has arrived with a cargo of corn at the Peiraeus, driven out of its course to Italy by adverse winds. The full length is 180 feet, the breadth nearly 50, the depth from deck to the bottom of the hold 43 feet. The "wishes" turn on a party of friends, who have been to see the ship, declaring what they would most desire to possess. One would have the ship filled with gold, another a fine house with gold plate; a third would be a "tyrant" with a large force devoted to his interests; a fourth would like to make himself invisible, enter any house that he pleased, and be transported through the air to the objects of his affection. After hearing them all, the first speaker, Lycinus (Lucian), says that he is content with the privilege of laughing heartily at the vanity of human wishes, especially when they are those of professed philosophers. The dialogue between Philo and Lycinus, Convivium seu Lapithae, is a very amusing description of a banquet, at which a party of dignified philosophers quarrelled over their viands at a marriage feast, and came to blows. The style is a good imitation of Plato, and the scene reminds one of the "clients' dinner" in the fifth satire of Juvenal. Matters come to a climax by the attempt of one of the guests, Zenothemis, to secure for himself a fatter fowl which had been served to his next neighbour Hermon. Each seizes his bird and hits the other with it in the face, at the same time pulling his beard. Then a general fight ensues. The story is a satire on philosophy, the favourite topic of a writer who believed neither in gods nor in men. The Piscator ("Fisherman"), a dialogue between Lucian, Socrates, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato and others, commences with a general attack on the author as the enemy of philosophy. Socrates proposes that the culprit should be tried, and that Philosophia should assist in the prosecution. Lucian declares that he does not know where such a person lives, long as he has been looking for her. She is found at last, but declares Lucian has never disparaged her, but only impostors and pretenders under her name. He makes a long defense, abusing the philosophers in the sort of language in which some schools of theologians abuse the monks of the middle ages. The trial is held in the Acropolis of Athens, and the sham philosophers, dreading a verdict against them, throw themselves from the rock. A Cynic flings away his scrip in the hurry, and on examination it is found to contain, not books or loaves of bread, but gold coins, dice and fragrant essences. At the end Lucian baits his hook with a fig and a gold coin, and catches gluttonous strollers in the city while seated on the wall of the Acropolis. The Voyage Home opens with the complaint that Charon's boat is kept waiting for Hermes, who soon appears with his troop of ghosts. Among them is one Megapenthes, who, as his name is intended to express, mourns greatly over the life he has just left. Amusing appeals are made by other souls for leave to return to life, and even bribes are offered to the presiding goddess of destiny, but Clotho is inexorable. The moral of the piece is closely like that of the parable of Dives and Lazarus: the rich and prosperous bewail their fate, while the poor and afflicted find rest from their troubles, and have no desire to return to them. Lucian shows the same bitter dislike of tyrants which Plato and the tragic writers display. The heavy penalty is adjudged to Megapenthes that he may ever remember in the other world the misdeeds done in life. The Sales of Lives is an auction held by Zeus to see what price the lives of philosophers of the rival sects will bring. A Pythagorean, who speaks in the Ionic dialect, first undergoes an examination as to what he can teach, and this contains an enumeration of the doctrines usually ascribed to that sect, including metempsychosis. He is sold for a pittance and is succeeded by Diogenes, who avows himself the champion of truth, a cosmopolitan, and the enemy of pleasure. Socrates brings two talents, and is purchased by Dion, tyrant of Syracuse. Chrysippus, who gives some specimens of his clever quibbles, is bought for a handsome sum, Aristotle for double Chrysippus' price, while Pyrrho the skeptic (or one of his school), who professes to "know nothing" brings a tenth, "because he is dull and stupid and has no more sense than a grub." But the man raises a doubt, "whether or not he has really been bought", and refuses to go with the purchaser until he has fully considered the matter. Timon is a very amusing and witty dialogue. The misanthrope, once wealthy, has become a poor farm laborer, and reproaches Zeus for his indifference to the injustice of man. Zeus declares that the noisy disputes in Attica have so disgusted him that he has not been there for a long time. He tells Hermes to conduct Plutus to visit Timon, and see what can be done to help him. Plutus, who at first refuses to go, is persuaded after a long conversation with Hermes, and Timon is found by them digging in his field. Poverty is unwilling to resign her votary to wealth; and Timon himself is with difficulty persuaded to turn up with his mattock a crock of gold coins. Now that he has once more become rich, his former flatterers come cringing with their congratulations and respects, but they are all driven off with broken heads or pelted with stones. Between this dialogue and the Plutus of Aristophanes there are many close resemblances. Hermotimus is one of the longer dialogues, Hermotimus, a student of the Stoic philosophy for twenty years, and Lucian (Lycinus) being the interlocutors. The long time -- forty years at the least -- required for climbing up to the temple of virtue and happiness, and the short span of life, if any, left for the enjoyment of it, are discussed. That the greatest philosophers do not always attain perfect indifference, the Stoic ultimatum, is shown by the anecdote of one who dragged his pupil into court to make him pay his fee, and again by a violent quarrel with another at a banquet. Virtue is compared to a city with just and good and contented inhabitants; but so many offer themselves as guides to the right road to virtue that the inquirer is bewildered. What is truth, and who are the right teachers of it? The question is argued at length, and illustrated by a peculiar custom of watching the pairs of athletes and setting aside the reserved combatant at the Olympian games by the marks on the ballots. This, it is argued, cannot be done until all the ballots have been examined; so a man cannot select the right way until he has tried all the ways to virtue. But to know the doctrines of all the sects is impossible in the term of a life. To take a taste of each, like trying a sample of wine, will not do, because the doctrines taught are not, like the crock of wine, the same throughout, but vary or advance day by day. A suggestion is made that the searcher after truth should begin by taking lessons in the science of discrimination, so as to be a good judge of truth before testing the rival claims. But who is a good teacher of such a science? The general conclusion is that philosophy is not worth the pursuit. "If I ever again", says Hermotimus, "meet a philosopher on the road, I will shun him, as I would a mad dog." The Anacharsis is a dialogue between Solon and the Scythian philosopher, who has come to Athens to learn the nature of the Greek institutions. Seeing the young men performing athletic exercises in the Lyceum, he expresses his surprise at such a waste of energy. This gives Socrates an opportunity of descanting at length on training as a discipline, and emulation as a motive for excelling. Love of glory, Solon says, is one of the chief goods in life. The argument is rather ingenious and well put; the style reminds us of the minor essays of Xenophon. Other of Lucian's works include the Alexander (or False Prophet), Prometheus, Menippus, Life of Demonax, Toxaris, Zeus Tragoedus, The Dream or the Cock, Icaromenippus (an amusing satire on the physical philosophers). They are of considerable literary value. Ran Away From Home Risk Factors: Gout Is the subject of books: Lucian and His Influence in Europe, 1979, BY: Christopher Robinson Lucian's Satire, 1981, BY: Jennifer Hall Author of books: Dialogues of the Gods Dialogues of the Dead The Passing of Peregrinus The Auction of Lives Do you know something we don't? Submit a correction or make a comment about this profile Copyright ©2014 Soylent Communications

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The relationship between calcium and alkalinity is one of the most discussed chemical phenomena in reef tanks. It is also one that is frequently misunderstood. Both calcium and alkalinity (to be defined below) are required by a host of organisms that form calcium carbonate skeletons and shells. In a closed system like a reef tank, they can quickly become depleted. Consequently, it is imperative that aquarists ensure that appropriate levels are maintained. Aquarists have developed many different ways of supplementing calcium and alkalinity in reef tanks. None of these are perfect, and all can lead to problems if not used properly. This article will explain the relationship between calcium and alkalinity in reef tanks as a backdrop to such supplementation. With a greater appreciation for this relationship, I hope that problems involving calcium and alkalinity issues can be reduced. To set the stage for discussions to follow, the list below shows the manner in which calcium and alkalinity are intertwined in reef tanks: | Natural seawater has specific amounts of calcium and alkalinity that organisms have evolved to use. | Corals and other calcifying organisms take a specific ratio of calcium and alkalinity from the water to form calcium carbonate. | Some supplements (CaCO3/CO2 reactors; limewater; balanced two-part additives) add calcium and alkalinity to the water in a specified ratio. | Calcium and carbonate (a component of alkalinity) can precipitate from the water column if the product of the concentration of each of them rises too high. a consequence of these various interactions, the relationship between calcium and alkalinity in reef tanks is complicated. In this article, I will endeavor to disentangle these interactions. Figure 1. The Acropora sp. on the left is an active consumer of calcium and alkalinity as it forms its skeleton, while the yellow polyps (Parazoanthus gracilis) are not. Figure 2. Mushrooms (Actinodiscus and Discosoma sp.) and polyps (Palythoa sp.) do not consume much calcium or alkalinity. Alkalinity itself is a complex term that requires some understanding before proceeding to involve calcium in our discussion. For a detailed article on alkalinity, try In short, total alkalinity is a measure of how much acid it takes to lower the pH of the water sample to the bicarbonate endpoint. That is, how much acid it takes to lower the pH to the point where one has added enough acid to potentially convert all of the bicarbonate (HCO3-) to carbonic acid (H2CO3). During such an addition of acid (called a titration), a variety of things are happening, but those most important in this context are that carbonate is converted into bicarbonate (1) H+ + CO3- - à HCO3 and bicarbonate is converted into carbonic acid: (2) H+ + HCO3- à H2CO3 In seawater, this endpoint occurs at about pH 4.2. So an alkalinity titration involves adding acid to the tank water until a pH indicating dye (or a mixture of dyes) changes color and indicates that the endpoint (pH 4.2) has been reached. Other things besides carbonate and bicarbonate contribute to seawater alkalinity. In normal seawater, these are a small part of the total, with bicarbonate contributing about 90% of the total, carbonate about 7% (though this depends substantially on the pH), borate about 3 percent, and everything else occurring in much smaller percentages (as you can see since these total 100%). In reef tanks, this distribution can become skewed significantly because borate can be substantially elevated, and the pH can be far from that of normal seawater (8.2; reef tanks typically range from pH 7.8 to pH 8.6). Do We Care About Alkalinity? The primary reason that we care about alkalinity is that when organisms build calcium carbonate skeletons, they effectively remove calcium and carbonate from the water column. If we had a handy way to measure carbonate, or especially bicarbonate, which corals use as their source of carbonate, we would likely have little interest in alkalinity. Unfortunately, measuring bicarbonate directly is difficult. Measuring alkalinity is very easy, and we use it as a surrogate measure for carbonate Figure 3. Coralline algae are, in some tanks, the largest consumers of calcium and Calcium is in some ways simpler to understand than alkalinity, but it too has its complications. This article is one part of a series that will show the many facets of calcium in the ocean and in reef tanks. Calcium is one of the major ions in normal seawater, comprising about 1.2% by weight of the solids (410 ppm). Variations in the calcium concentration in the oceans are most often caused by changes in salinity. Most of the calcium ions in seawater are present as free ions, but some of them are ion paired to anions, especially sulfate, forming the neutral ion pair CaSO4. Calcium also forms ion pairs with carbonate and bicarbonate. These comprise a small fraction of the total calcium, but comprise a fairly large portion of the total carbonate (along with magnesium, about two thirds of the total carbonate). These ion pairs lower the concentration of free carbonate, and thereby help to inhibit precipitation of calcium carbonate, but that's getting ahead of ourselves in this explanation. Solubility of Calcium Carbonate In surface seawater, calcium carbonate is supersaturated (although in deep water it is undersaturated for reasons described in this link). That is, there is already more in solution than would form by trying to dissolve solid CaCO3 into the water. It also means that calcium and carbonate are poised to precipitate any time they are given the opportunity (e.g., appropriate seed crystals and a lack of crystallization inhibitors such as magnesium and phosphate). The equilibrium constant for the dissolution and precipitation of calcium carbonate is shown below: (3) K = [Ca++][CO3--] When K exceeds a particular value (the Ksp), the water is supersaturated. If K is less than this value, then the water is undersaturated, and calcium carbonate solid in the water can dissolve. This relationship is normally defined using the supersaturation parameter, which is symbolized as (4) W = [Ca++][CO3--]/Ksp When W = 1, the solution is exactly saturated. When W exceeds one, it is supersaturated, and when W is less than 1, the solution is undersaturated. In normal seawater, W ~ 3 for aragonite and W ~ 5 for calcite, though these values have been steadily dropping as carbon dioxide has been added to the atmosphere, reducing the seawater pH. Aragonite and calcite are just different crystal forms of calcium carbonate. Calcite is slightly more stable, and hence is slightly less soluble than aragonite (i.e., has a lower Ksp). Organisms can precipitate both aragonite (pteropods and corals) and calcite (foraminifera and cocoliths), but most of the precipitation in reef tanks is aragonite (although certain organisms such as abalone form both). Reef tanks often have higher alkalinity and higher calcium than seawater, and hence are more supersaturated than seawater. In tanks with a high pH (such as many tanks using limewater) the supersaturation is also higher than in seawater. At the same alkalinity, if you raise the pH, you convert some of the bicarbonate into carbonate: (5) HCO3 - + à CO3- - + H+ Within the pH range of most reef tanks (up to about pH 8.5 or so), the amount of carbonate present is approximately linear with the hydrogen ion (H+) concentration because of the relationship seen in equation (5). So if the pH rises from 7.5 to 8.5, there is approximately a ten-fold increase in the carbonate concentration. From pH 8.0 to 8.5, the increase in carbonate is about threefold. Combining these various factors, here are some combinations of calcium, alkalinity, and pH that have equal supersaturation with respect to aragonite: W = 1 (risky: dissolution of aragonite begins here) |pH = 7.7 ||pH = 8.2 |Calcium = 410 ppm Calcium = 340 ppm |Alkalinity = 2.5 meq/L ||Alkalinity = 1.0 meq/L W = 3 (typical of normal seawater) |pH = 8.2 ||pH = 8.0 ||pH = 8.4 = 2.5 meq/L = 4.0 meq/L = 2.5 meq/L W = 6 (non-biological precipitation is more likely) |pH = 8.2 || pH = 8.2 = 5.0 meq/L = 2.5 meq/L |pH = 8.0 || pH = 8.7 Calcium = 410 ppm = 8.0 meq/L = 2.5 meq/L = 410 ppm = 4.2 meq/L How should one think about supersaturation? The higher it is, the more likely it is that precipitation of calcium carbonate will occur. The reason for this is straightforward: if the "pressure" to precipitate calcium carbonate becomes too high, these inhibiting processes will be overwhelmed, and precipitation will take place. As we will see later, there are things that deter the precipitation of calcium carbonate. If W is reasonably low, some precipitation will take place before the inhibiting mechanisms take control of the crystal surface and prevent further precipitation. This process is what happens in normal seawater. If W is too high, a bigger precipitation event can take place before being halted. In the worst cases, this can lead to a snowstorm of calcium carbonate particulates throughout the tank. Such snowstorms can occur, for example, when too much limewater is added to the tank. In that case, the pH rises and converts much of the bicarbonate to carbonate. W is then driven to unstable levels, and a massive precipitation event takes place. Calcification by corals is also impacted considerably by the supersaturation of calcium carbonate. As W declines from normal values, calcification by corals becomes slower. Likewise, at higher W, calcification is increased. Many aquarists take advantage of this relationship by boosting W above natural levels. They are thereby able to attain greater growth rates, but run a greater risk of abiotic precipitation of calcium carbonate in the tank than their colleagues maintaining more normal calcium and alkalinity levels. Why Doesn’t Calcium Carbonate Precipitate in Tank Water? This is an immensely complicated chemical problem, and one that relies on the kinetics of precipitation and dissolution far more than it relies on the much simpler field of thermodynamics. Nevertheless, we can make some progress toward understanding it on a level that most aquarists will appreciate. Why doesn't it precipitate? Actually, it does in nearly every tank. A better question to ask is: Why doesn't it happen to a greater extent? Precipitation can begin when one of two things occurs: || Calcium carbonate seed crystals are added to the water. In reef tanks, the addition of fresh calcium carbonate sand will often suffice. This addition will initiate the precipitation of calcium carbonate (likely containing some magnesium and strontium as well). ||The supersaturation is pushed to unusually high levels. This can be caused by a rise in pH, a rise in temperature (as on a heater; Figure 1), or more obviously, by a rise in either calcium or carbonate. Figure 4. An aquarium heater with a thin coating of calcium carbonate on the portions that get hot. This coating collected in a few months. After a year or two in the aquarium, this coating can become so thick that large chunks can be broken off. Corals actually use a combination of these two things to precipitate calcium carbonate: they artificially raise W near the growing surface of their calcium carbonate skeleton (the details of which form the basis of a future article in Still, even when precipitation begins, it is often stopped almost immediately by a combination of several things: || The most important thing happening in normal seawater to inhibit calcium carbonate precipitation is the binding of magnesium to the growing crystal surface. In a sense, it poisons the surface for further precipitation of calcium carbonate, forming a mixed carbonate of calcium and magnesium (the effects of magnesium are discussed in this linked || Magnesium also forms ion pairs with carbonate ions and thereby reduces their free concentration, making precipitation less likely. || Phosphate adsorbs onto the growing crystal surface, inhibiting it just as magnesium does. In a reef tank this may become more important than in the ocean as phosphate is often elevated in reef tanks. This link provides some data on the binding of phosphate to aragonite || Organic molecules can also adsorb onto the growing crystal surface and inhibit further precipitation of calcium carbonate. Again, the process may be much more important in reef tanks where organic levels are typically higher than in the ocean (here's a link to a discussion and some data/calculations). There is an extensive discussion of all of these issues in "Captive Seawater Fishes" by Stephen Here's a good way for non-chemists to think of the solubility scenario occurring in typical reef tanks. First, let's discuss what happens in pure (fresh) water with dissolved Each dissolved calcium ion is randomly floating around in the solution. Occasionally, it randomly bumps into a calcium carbonate surface. If it is a clean surface, it has a good chance of sticking. The higher the concentration of calcium, the more likely it is that ions are impinging onto the surface and sticking. This same dynamic holds true for carbonate ions. At the same time, each calcium ion on the surface of the calcium carbonate can randomly come off of the crystal surface, and go into solution. Again, the same is true for carbonate ions. After a balance has been established, the system has reached the exact level of saturation, with the overall number of ions coming off of the surface equaling the number going down onto it. This process is precisely how the solubility limit of any solid is determined. It is a surprise for many aquarists to learn that solubility is dynamic even at saturation, with ions dissolving off of the surface and precipitating onto it very rapidly, although in equal numbers. Now consider a solution that is supersaturated. In pure (fresh) water, there will be more ions precipitating onto the surface than dissolving off of it, and the crystal grows. At the same time the concentration of ions in solution decreases. The crystal growth continues until the solid has taken enough ions from solution so that dissolution and precipitation are again balanced. In reef tank water the situation is complicated by the phenomena described above involving magnesium, phosphate, and organics. In a sense, what happens is that the calcium ions (and carbonate ions) are less likely to stick to the surface when magnesium, phosphate, and organics are present. Consequently, the supersaturation can be maintained. However, if W is too large, these phenomena can be overcome. Suppose a tiny portion of an aragonite crystal becomes "exposed" with no coating of magnesium, phosphate, or organics. When W is low enough, these covering ions will probably take over before much calcium carbonate can precipitate. However, if W is too large, calcium and carbonate will "rain" down on the growing surface faster than the inhibiting molecules, and precipitation can continue until something stops it. In a runaway precipitation event, it may not be stopped until the calcium and alkalinity levels have declined to more normal levels, the "rain" has declined to a "drizzle," and the inhibiting ions can again cover the crystal surface. Calcium Carbonate Mathematics One of the interesting features of seawater is that there is a lot more calcium than there is alkalinity. By this I mean that if all of the calcium in seawater (410 ppm; 10.25 meq/L) were to be precipitated as calcium carbonate, it would use up a total alkalinity of 20.5 meq/L. In a less drastic scenario, let's say that calcium carbonate is formed from tank water starting with an alkalinity of 3 meq/L and that it is allowed to drop to 2 meq/L. How much has the calcium declined? It is surprising for many people to learn that the calcium would only drop by 20 ppm. Consequently, many aquarists observe that their calcium levels are relatively stable, but alkalinity can vary substantially. This is exactly what one would expect based on the fact that the tank already has an abundance of calcium. Another result of the mathematics is that there is a series of combinations of calcium and alkalinity that are "balanced." Balanced can mean different things to different people, but one meaning is that the solution can be formed by starting with seawater, and then either adding or subtracting calcium carbonate. This can be attained, for example, if one starts with seawater and then adds a "balanced mix of calcium and alkalinity" as would be provided by a calcium carbonate/carbon dioxide reactor, by limewater, or by a balanced two-part additive. To be sure, these combinations are not "recommended" combinations, but rather ones that have a special relationship to natural seawater. Some of these issues are discussed in For example, the table below shows a series of balanced combinations of calcium and alkalinity in modified seawater: 12 (possible CaCO3/CO2 Reactor Effluent) A direct relative of this type of balanced tank water is a balanced additive. In this context, a balanced additive is one where the entire calcium and alkalinity contents can be theoretically combined to form calcium carbonate (with CO2 added or subtracted as necessary). In this context, the following solutions are balanced: (saturated calcite/air in water) 2,700 (typical two part additive) Any calcium and alkalinity additive that claims to be balanced, ought to provide these ratios. In some cases the alkalinity may not be fully present initially, but only comes about through biological processing of the alkalinity component (e.g., calcium acetate where the acetate does not provide all of its alkalinity until it is biologically metabolized to carbon dioxide and hydroxide; it is the hydroxide that provides the alkalinity). Nevertheless, one should be able to show that such balanced additives will have these properties. I hope that this article has provided a useful background to the complex relationship between two of the most important chemical parameters in a reef tank: calcium and alkalinity. They are related in ways that are obvious, including the fact that corals use them together to form calcium carbonate skeletons. This particular relationship drives much of the activity involving calcium and alkalinity supplementation in reef tanks. They are also related in ways that are much more subtle, including the fact that they can abiotically precipitate to form calcium carbonate in the tank. Sorting these relationships out can be very useful in correcting calcium and alkalinity imbalances in tanks, and moreover, in preventing them from happening in the first place. For those interested in highly detailed mathematical treatments, the book "Aquatic Chemistry Concepts" by Pankow is ideal. For treatments specific to seawater, Millero's book "Chemical Oceanography" is one of the best.

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Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19) The first Clobber Passage I’d like to unpack is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction in Genesis 19. Take a poll of your average church-going folk, and likely you’ll discover that the most popular answer to the following question, Why did God destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, would be: because of homosexuality. The traditional perspective on this story is that because of the rampant sinfulness of the people of the cities Sodom and Gomorrah, and specifically the sin of homosexuality, God “rained down sulfur and fire from heaven,” and “destroyed the cities of the valley” (Gen 19:23-29). Why would God take such drastic actions against two entire cities? Destroying men, women, children… killing hundreds of people? “Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave,” said God to Abraham (Gen 18:20). Evidently, whatever they were doing had gotten bad enough that the people around them (presumably?) cried out to God against them. Their sin was so grave that both God and people outside their communities had had enough. So God planned to visit to “see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me.” (Question: why did God need to visit the city to find out on God’s own if it was as bad as was rumored? Especially when just eight verses earlier God was able to “magically” hear Sarah laughing from inside her tent? Interesting. But we’ll save that for another day.) Calling Out God for Being Unjust What happened next, as the story goes, was a fascinating dialogue between Abraham and God. Abraham bargains with God, interceding on behalf of Sodom. He essentially shows more compassion than God does, as the story goes. Saying, “would you really destroy a city full of wicked people when there might very well be some righteous/innocent people there as well?” Abraham said, “what if I can find 50 righteous people in the city, will you call off your plans of destruction?” Abraham called out God for not doing what is just. And God acquiesced. But Abraham kept going… “what if I can only find 45?” “Sure,” said God, “I’ll spare the whole place for 45.” “Okay, how about 30?” “Fine. I’ll spare them if you can find 30 righteous people.” And then, ridiculously so, like the husband who isn’t satisfied with just getting to go play golf with his buddies, have lunch at the clubhouse, then hit the pub afterwards to watch the big game, but STILL calls his wife to ask if he could go over to his buddy’s house to play videogames all night, Abraham asked, “Well, I’ve come this far… how about 10, God… what if I can find just 10 decent people in the whole city. You can’t honestly justify killing an entire city then, can you?!” God, who didn’t seem to mind Abraham wagering with God and questioning the Divine sense of justice, relented. “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it,” God replied. (Gen 18:22-33) We never get to know if Abraham was successful or not in finding just 10 righteous people. I suppose you could argue that since the story eventually ended with Sodom and Gomorrah being destroyed, that that shows Abraham was unsuccessful. But that isn’t how the story plays out. We never are told if Abraham even had a chance to find 10 righteous people. The story goes straight from Abraham and God wheeling and dealing to two angels immediately travelling to Sodom at night. And, after the infamous disaster that was An Evening in Sodom, the next day brought forth the burning sulfur and fire. So who knows if God was just joking around with Abraham, never really intending on changing plans. Or, maybe it’s possible that this story was never told to reflect the exact historical accuracy of what actually happened. But, for the sake of this series (and its probable audience), I will assume that the Genesis account is a reasonably accurate description of the events that took place. (Sidenote: Archaeologists have uncovered several sites around the Dead Sea that could possibly be the ancient ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah. And each of these sites confirm that incredible devastation was caused by some sort of burning sulfur, and entire cities were leveled. There are really some fascinating discoveries being made. Read here and here if you’re curious. I offer this sidenote because I think that there indeed was an historical event that involved the decimating of the Cities of the Plain, i.e. Sodom and Gomorrah. Whether or not it happened precisely the way Genesis retells, or precisely when Genesis suggests, is another matter. But, as I said, for the sake of this series I will move forward under the assumption that Genesis 19 is an accurate retelling of those events.) So what DID happen that fateful night in Sodom? And based on what the author of Genesis tells us, can we deduce that homosexuality was a primary (or even secondary?) sin of Sodom’s that led to their demise? Do any other Biblical writers reflect on this story, and if so, what do they have to say? Here’s what I’d like to do in Part III: - Walk through the story in Genesis 19, asking questions and making observations along the way. - Once we’ve made it through the story, I’ll draw out some bigger observations about what the story tells us and what it doesn’t tell us. - Then we’ll take the traditional understanding of this story, lay it over the top of what we’ve discovered thus far, and see what emerges. - What do other Biblical Authors have to say about what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah, and why? - Does Genesis 19 function, in any way, as Biblical support for the sinfulness of same-sex attraction, same-sex relationships, gay people, or any other issue relating to sexuality (homo or hetero)? The two angels came to Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them and bowed himself with his face to the earth and said, “My lords, please turn aside to your servant’s house and spend the night and wash your feet. Then you may rise up early and go on your way.” They said, “No; we will spend the night in the town square.” But he pressed them strongly; so they turned aside to him and entered his house. And he made them a feast and baked unleavened bread, and they ate. The story begins with the two angels, who just recently departed from partying with God and Abraham in chapter 18, entering the city of Sodom at night. Lot, who possibly was functioning as the gate-keeper, greets them and invites them to his house to spend the night. When they decline and suggest they’ll just stay in the town square, Lot seems to panic, and “presses them strongly,” the writer tells us, to come to his place instead. Lot had been with these people in this city for possibly more than 20 years. He knew their ways and he knew that it would not be safe or wise for two visitors to stay the night in the town square. So he strongly encouraged them to come to his place, where he made them a nice meal and they prepared to turn in for the night. But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house. And they called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know them.” They finished eating and were getting ready for bed, when suddenly a great commotion arose outside. Evidently, word had gotten out that two outsiders had come to Sodom for the evening, and this caused the men of the city to come and surround the house. Now, estimates for the population of Sodom (based on some of the archaeological studies mentioned above) are between 600-1200 people. Just to get an idea of what is happening, let’s say 900 people lived in Sodom, which would equal approximately 450 men. What does the story say? “The men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man.” Wow. Every single man, the story says, came to surround the house of Lot and demand access to the town visitors. Young men (read here: boys). Old men. All the men. And what do they ask? “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us that we may know them.” (At this point, I could spend some time on the word “know” in this verse. It is the Hebrew word yada (which immediately brings all new light to that Seinfeld episode, doesn’t it…). I could point out how yada appears over 900 times in the Hebrew scriptures, and only 14 (1%) of those times is it used as a euphemism for “have sex with.” But I won’t. Some people take this line of reasoning and say that the men didn’t want to have sex with the visitors, only that they wanted to interrogate them. It’s a convenient argument, but I don’t think it holds water. If for no other reason than because just a few verses later in the story Lot offers his daughters to the men, daughters who “have not known any man.” I doubt he was saying, “my daughters have never gotten to sit down and get to know other men before, so why don’t you interrogate them for a while?” Moving on…) No, I think it’s safe to say that the 450 or so men and boys of the city wanted to have sexual relations with the visitors. They wanted to know them in the Biblical sense. Lot went out to the men at the entrance, shut the door after him, and said, “I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Behold, I have two daughters who have not known any man. Let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please. Only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.” This is what Lot was afraid of. This is why he pressed so strongly that the two visitors not stay in the town square. He had lived with these people for 20 years or more, and was terrified at what they might do to his guests. “I beg you,” he says, “do not act so wickedly.” And then, in a sadly-ironic moment, Lot offers his two virgin daughters as a substitute. Speaking of acting wickedly… #fail But Lot’s primary concern was that no harm would come to the men taking shelter under his roof. 450 men and boys forcing themselves on two men was not a good thing, in any shape or form. It is no wonder that the wickedness of Sodom (and Gomorrah) was well known throughout the area. Gang rape like this does not go unnoticed. Neither to God nor to people in the surrounding communities. But they said, “Stand back!” And they said, “This fellow came to sojourn, and he has become the judge! Now we will deal worse with you than with them.” Then they pressed hard against the man Lot, and drew near to break the door down. But the men reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them and shut the door. And they struck with blindness the men who were at the entrance of the house, both small and great, so that they wore themselves out groping for the door. The men and boys of Sodom, who had surrounded Lot’s house, were now thoroughly pissed off that Lot was denying them their fun. “Who is this outsider, this Lot fellow, who thinks he can come to our city and judge us? He will have a worse fate than the two visitors when all is said and done!” Not only were these men and boys planning on gang-raping the two visitors, but also they were now intending on doing even worse to Lot. Does it get worse? Unfortunately (or, rather, fortunately) the men and boys didn’t know whom they were messing with. Our modern day saying of “don’t bring a knife to a gun fight” is a direct descendant of the ancient saying, “don’t bring a rape party to the house of angelic beings.” (It’s true. Don’t bother Googling it.) The two men rescued Lot from the attackers and proceeded to blind all 450 of them… “the small ones AND the great ones” (weird statement, isn’t it?). Evidently the men’s newfound blindness caused them to grope about for the door, eventually leading to them wearing themselves out. Can you picture 450 blind men and blind boys, blind GREAT and SMALL men and boys, excuse me, groping about in the dark for a door? I’m telling ya, the Bible is full of weird stories. Anyways, the net result is that Lot was spared and the 450 men and boys gave up their hopes of gang-raping two visitors. Then the men said to Lot, “Have you anyone else here? Sons-in-law, sons, daughters, or anyone you have in the city, bring them out of the place. For we are about to destroy this place, because the outcry against its people has become great before the LORD, and the LORD has sent us to destroy it.” So Lot went out and said to his sons-in-law, who were to marry his daughters, “Up! Get out of this place, for the LORD is about to destroy the city.” But he seemed to his sons-in-law to be jesting. The two men urged Lot to go and get whomever he wanted to save and then get the heck out of dodge. Evidently, Lot was informed, the two men were about to set fire to the rain (thanks Adele, for the theme song) and burn the houses down! (Which again begs the question: was God fooling around with Abraham? The two men make it sound like they were sent there for the purpose of destroying the city all along. Hmmm…) And we are reminded, from the two men, that “because the outcry against the people of Sodom had become great before the LORD” that the city would be destroyed. God had heard people’s cries against the inhabitants of these cities and now God has firsthand evidence of their wickedness. Lot tried to get his future sons-in-law to come with them and escape, but they thought the old kook was just jesting about. I’ll bet they regretted that decision. Show some respect for your elders, boys. A Few Observations Lot Was Well Informed – If the city of Sodom was only about 900 people big, then someone who lived there for 20 years would certainly have been well acquainted with the people, the customs, the culture and the vibe of the city. 900 people is smaller than most people’s High Schools, and think about how much you “knew” about different cliques, groups, tribes, classes, etc. And that was only after being with those people for a couple years! So it is safe to imagine that Lot knew the men (and the women and the children) of Sodom well. Probably each one by name. It was not a large city (sidenote: if you checked out the above archaeology sites you may have discovered that fairly recently a site has been discovered that some are claiming were the Cities of the Plain, which included Sodom and Gomorrah. At these locations were burial sites with over 1 million buried bodies! This suggests that Sodom could have possibly been several hundred thousand people large! TOTALLY different from the more established and generally more accepted location and size of the other Sodom site. It’s an interesting exercise to read through this story with both sizes of cities in mind. Can you imagine 100,000 men and boys surrounding a house, all wanting some gang-rape action? Sometimes it is impractical, if not impossible, to read the Bible as literally as some would have you.) Lot knew what happened to visitors because he knew the people of Sodom and probably even more likely because he had witnessed it before. Which is probably why the author of the story tells us that he strongly pressed them to stay at his place and not in the town square. Entire Cities Can’t be Gay – The story goes to great lengths to tell us that every single man in the city of Sodom had stormed the house of Lot that night. Old men. Young men. Boys. And if the traditional understanding of this passage is that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of their rampant homosexuality, then are we really supposed to accept that in a city of 900 people, that 100% of the 450 men and boys were all gay? Even the highest estimates on how often gay people are born are 1 in 10. And even in the most concentrated gay cities in the world (think San Francisco) there isn’t even close to the ratio of gay-to-straight men that this story suggests, should we accept that the men of Sodom were homosexuals. It is ridiculous to think that the men in this story were gay men. An entire male population of any city cannot be gay. And if they are, you probably wouldn’t see any children there. Rape is Not the Same Thing as Consensual Sex – I feel like this point shouldn’t have to be stressed, but these boys and men in Sodom wanted to rape the two visitors! Do I really have to explain that this is inherently and fundamentally and categorically a different thing altogether than a situation where one person who is attracted to another person of the same gender wants to have consensual sex? That alone should give a person pause enough to consider why people think that homosexuality was the grave sin of these cities. If you are a person (and they do exist, trust me) who cannot separate in your mind gay-sex from rape, then you have different issues that I can’t help you with. Add to all of this the “gang” part of the story and you start to drift even farther away from anything having to do with homosexuality. This atrocious offense the men and boys of Sodom wanted to commit against these visitors was not to inflict their homosexualness upon them. No, it was to gang rape them. And consider for a moment what’s going on: there are boys in this mob that want to actively partake in this rape. What kind of people create a society where young boys would join a mob in the hopes of participating in rape? This is not a city full of men and women who were born gay and discovered that they have attraction to their own gender… No, this is a city of foul and debase creatures so sick and demented that they’ve trained their children to rape visitors. For pity’s sake, stop thinking of Sodom as a “city full of gay people” and start recognizing what the story is trying to tell you. It’s a city full of evil people. And again, if you shrug your shoulders and brush this off and just think, “what’s the difference?” then I don’t know what to say to you. That’s just sad. (Not to mention wrong and factually inaccurate). It’s Not About Sex, It’s About Power and Control – If you’ve ever watched Criminal Minds, or CSI, or any of those procedural dramas, you’ve probably come across episodes dealing with rape. And what do they always tell you (especially in Criminal Minds)? The attacker does not rape their victims because they are attracted to them (even if in some cases there is an attraction). Rape is not about sex, it’s about power and control. It’s about anger, hatred and sometimes vengeance. Even more so, gang rape is not about attraction or sex. It is about exerting your power and control over someone else. We know that in ancient cultures it was a common practice for the victorious armies to rape the defeated armies (often the generals or other high ranking officials). This was not because the one army was full of gay men (well maybe it was, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell didn’t exist yet). No, it was a tactic that announced in no uncertain terms that “we won and we now control you… you are weak and we are strong.” In this story we have two visitors entering an evil-infested city at night. The men and boys of Sodom wanted not to have sex with them because they were attracted to them, but they wanted to show their power and control. Exert their might and show dominance. When you consider it was gang-rape these men and boys wanted to do, and when you consider the cultural practice of raping outsiders and foreigners to show your power and control over them, it becomes harder and harder to argue a case that these men were homosexuals and God destroyed the cities because of homosexuality. It wasn’t about sex. It wasn’t about homosexuality. Rape has nothing to do with a loving relationship. It was about power and control. Big difference. Gay Men Don’t Want to Have Sex with Women – One thing traditionalists point to as evidence for their interpretation is that when Lot offered his daughters to the men they refused. Well, since they didn’t want to have sex with two girls, but instead wanted to have sex with two men, then clearly they must be gay. Case closed. Burn the place down. Since I’ve already shown that this story has nothing to do with attraction and sex, I will point out here that what is often overlooked is the very nature of Lot’s offer. If Lot lived with these people for 20 years, and knew them all by name, and knew that they were gay (assuming the traditional perspective for the moment), then why on earth would he offer them two girls? If they are gay men wanting to have gay gang-rape sex with two other men, why would Lot think they would have any interest in his daughters? Very illogical. And before you can argue back, it should also be acknowledged that assuming (as I am) that Lot knew the men and knew they only wanted to rape the men out of a sickness and evilness for the sake of power and control (and twisted fun?), then it also wouldn’t make sense for him to offer his daughters. Because that would not have satisfied their desire to exercise dominance over the visitors. So why did Lot offer his daughters? I don’t know. Perhaps it was a last ditch effort to protect the two men. Hospitality was such an incredibly huge thing for people in the ancient world (especially the Hebrew people) that he might have been trying any idea possible to prevent what clearly would have been the most egregious breach of hospitality. But if they were homosexuals, then Lot would have known they were homosexuals and therefore would not have offered his daughters as a consolation prize. There’s Nothing Gay About This Story Nothing in Genesis 19 states or even suggests that the men and/or women of Sodom were people who were born with same-sex attractions. Nothing in Genesis 19 states or even suggests that the men and/or women of Sodom were practicing a gay lifestyle. If you were to have crashed on a desert island as a baby and grow up all by yourself with nothing but coconuts and a Bible that washed ashore, you would not read this story and come to the following conclusion: the people of Sodom were gay… and since they practiced homosexuality God clearly destroyed them. No, the only way you can logically make a connection like that is if you already come to this story with the presupposition that homosexuality in any form is wrong, evil, sinful, etc. Then, and only then, would you read this story and in it find confirmation that God destroyed them because of homosexuality. But at that point, you are merely proof texting and practicing good ol’ eisegesis. Genesis 19 is a story about (among other things) a society that was completely out of sync with the heart of God. A debase and deviant people, where they would regularly gang rape visitors. Where they would abuse their children in such fashions that they would also take part in acts of evil such as gang rape. A people deserving, in the eyes of the author, of the judgment of God. A conclusion supported by other Biblical authors. But not because of homosexuality. The text just simply does not support such a conclusion. Not only that, but other Scripture passages give us even further insight in to why God acted out such harsh judgment on the peoples of Sodom and Gomorrah. Speaking of “other Biblical writers” who weigh in on the destruction of Sodom, it will precisely be to that that we will turn in the second half of Part III. To be continued…

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From LawGuru Wiki Go Buy Reductil Online now! - For the nightclub located in Sheffield, UK see Corporation (nightclub). A corporation is a legal person which, while being composed of natural persons, exists completely separately from them. This separation gives the corporation unique powers which other legal entities lack. The extent and scope of its status and capacity is determined by the law of the place of incorporation. Investors and entrepreneurs often form joint stock companies and incorporate them to facilitate a business; as this form of business is now extremely prevalent, the term corporation is often used to refer specifically to such business corporations. Corporations may also be formed for political, religious or charitable purposes (not-for-profit corporations), or as government or quasi-governmental entities (public corporations). Legal status The law typically views a corporation as a fictional person, a legal person, or a moral person (as opposed to a natural person); United States law recognises this as corporate personhood. Under such a doctrine (obviously a legal fiction), a corporation enjoys many of the rights and obligations of individual persons, such as the ability to own property, sign binding contracts, pay taxes, have certain constitutional rights, and otherwise participate in society. (Note that corporations do not possess all the rights appertaining to individuals: in most jurisdictions, for example, a corporation cannot become a citizen and vote.) In common law countries, the classic statement of this principle is found in Lennard's Carrying Co Ltd v Asiatic Petroleum Co Ltd AC 705, where Lord Haldane said: - "My Lords, a corporation is an abstraction. It has no mind of its own any more than it has a body of its own; its active and directing will must consequently be sought in the person of somebody who is really the directing mind and will of the corporation, the very ego and centre of the personality of the corporation." The most salient features of incorporation include: - Limited Liability - Unlike in a partnership or sole proprietorship, members of a corporation hold no liability for the corporation's debts and obligations: see leading case in common law, Salomon v. Salomon & Co. AC 22. As a result their "limited" potential losses cannot exceed the amount which they contributed to the corporation as dues or paid for shares. The economic rationale for this lies in the fact that it allows anonymous trading in the shares of the corporation by virtue of eliminating the corporation's creditors as a stakeholder in such a transaction. Without limited liability, a creditor would not likely allow any share to be sold to a buyer of at least equivalent creditworthiness as the seller. Limited liability further allows corporations to raise funds for riskier enterprises by removing risks and costs from the owners and shifting them onto creditors and to other members of society, thereby creating an externality. Another rationale sometimes offered for limited liability is reducing the amount that an investor can lose reduces the time and effort required to determine whether a stock is risky, thus adding liquidity to the stock market - in contrast to the very illiquid market for partnership interests (however, given the due diligence already exercised by institutional and other large investors, and the availability of insurance, it is questionable whether added liability would increase the costs of determining risk sufficiently to impair the liquidity of the stock market). In any event, a lender or other creditor can require a personal guarantee on a loan to a corporation (normally a small corporation), thus introducing personal liability. - Perpetual Lifetime - The assets and structure of the corporation exist beyond the lifetime of any of its members or agents. This allows for stability and accumulation of capital, which thus becomes available for investment in projects of a larger size and over a longer term than if the corporate assets remained subject to dissolution and distribution. This feature also had great importance in the medieval period, when land donated to the Church (a corporation) would not generate the feudal fees that a lord could claim upon a landholder's death. In this regard, see Statute of Mortmain. It is important to note that the "perpetual lifetime" feature is an indication of the unbounded potential duration of the corporation's existence, and its accumulation of wealth and thus power. (In theory, a corporation can have its charter revoked at any time, putting an end to its existence as a legal entity. However, in practice, dissolution only occurs for corporations that request it or fail to meet annual filing requirements.) Ownership and control Humans and other legal entities composed of humans (such as trusts and other corporations) can be members of corporations. In the case of for-profit corporations, these members hold shares and are thus called shareholders. When no members or shareholders exist, a corporation may exist as a "memberless corporation" or similar — this second type of corporation counts as a not-for-profit corporation. In either category, the corporation comprises a collective of individuals with a distinct legal status and with special privileges not provided to ordinary unincorporated businesses, to voluntary associations, or to groups of individuals. Typically, a board of directors governs a corporation on the behalf of the members. The corporate members elect the directors, and the board has a fiduciary duty to look after the interests of the corporation. The corporate officers such as the CEO, president, treasurer, and other titled officers are usually chosen by the board to manage the affairs of the corporation. Corporations can also be controlled (in part) by creditors such as banks. In return for lending money to the corporation, creditors can demand a control interest analogous to that of a shareholder, including one or more seats on the board of directors. Creditors are not said to "own" the corporation as shareholders do, but can outweigh the shareholders in practice, especially if the corporation is experiencing financial difficulties and cannot survive without credit. Members of a corporation are said to have a "residual interest." Should the corporation end its existence, the members are the last to receive its assets, following creditors and others with interests in the corporation. This can make investment in a corporation risky; however, the risk is outweighed by the corporation's limited liability, which ensures that the member will only be liable for the amount they contributed. Historically, corporations were created by special charter of governments. Today, corporations are usually registered with the state, province, or federal government and become regulated by the laws enacted by that government. Registration is the main prerequisite to the corporation's assumption of limited liability. As part of this registration, it must designate the principal address of the corporation (where to contact it in the event of legal process), and often an agent or other legal representative of the corporation. Generally, a corporation files articles of incorporation with the government, laying out the general nature of the corporation, the amount of stock it is authorized to issue, and the names and addresses of directors. Once the articles are approved, the corporation's directors meet to create bylaws that govern the internal functions of the corporation, such as meeting procedures and officer positions. The law of the jurisdiction in which a corporation operates will regulate most of its internal activities, as well as its finances. If a corporation operates outside its home state, it is often required to register with other governments as a foreign corporation, and is almost always subject to laws of its host state pertaining to employment, crimes, contracts, civil actions, and the like. Corporations generally have a distinct name. Historically, corporations were named after their membership: for instance, "The President and Fellows of Harvard College." Nowadays, corporations in most jurisdictions have a distinct name that does not need to make reference to their membership. In Canada, this possibility is taken to its logical extreme: many smaller Canadian corporations have no names at all, merely numbers (e.g., "1234567 Ontario Limited"). (See the section Pre-modern corporations below for more examples of historical names.) In most countries, corporate names include the term "Corporation", or an abbreviation that denotes the corporate status of the entity. See Types of corporations for a full list. These terms, known as words of limitation, obviously vary by jurisdiction and language. Their use puts all persons on constructive notice that they have to deal with an entity whose liability remains limited, in the sense that it does not reach back to the persons who constitute the entity; one can only collect from whatever assets the entity still controls at the time one obtains a judgment against it. Certain jurisdictions do not allow the use of the word "company" alone to denote corporate status, since the word "company" may refer to a partnership or to a sole proprietorship, or even, archaically, to a group of not necessarily related people (for example, those staying in a tavern). Unresolved issues The nature of the corporation continues to evolve, both through existing corporations pushing new ideas and structures, courts responding, and governments regulating in response to new situations. A question of long standing is that of diffused responsibility: for example, if the corporation is found liable for a death, then how should the blame and punishment for this be allocated across the shareholders, directors, management and staff of the corporation, and the corporation itself? See corporate manslaughter specifically, and corporate liability generally. The present law differs among jurisdictions, and is in a state of flux. Some argue that the owners of the business - the shareholders - should be ultimately responsible for such circumstances, forcing them to consider issues other than profit when investing, but the modern corporation may have many millions of small shareholders who know nothing about its business activities. In addition, traders — especially hedge funds — may rapidly turn over their partial ownership of a corporation many times a day. One position is that the directors should be passed the burden of moral and legal responsibility as part of their job of representing the shareholders. Another position is that the artificial entity of the corporation itself should be held liable, in accordance with the model of a corporation as a natural person. In some jurisdictions, both directors and the corporation are liable for certain offences (see, for example, the Canadian province of Ontario's Environmental Protection Act). The issue of corporate repeat offenders (see H.Glasbeak, "Wealth by Stealth: Corporate Crime, Corporate Law, and the Perversion of Democracy" (Between the lines press: Toronto 2002) raises the question of the so-called "death penalty for corporations." The word "corporation" derives from the Latin Corpus (body), representing a "body of people"; that is, a group of people authorized to act as an individual (Oxford English Dictionary). The word universitas also used to refer to a group of people but now refers specifically to a group of scholars (see University). In the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland, the term corporation was also used for the local government body in charge of a borough. This style was replaced in most cases with the term council in the United Kingdom in 1973, and in the Republic of Ireland in 2001. The sole exception is the Corporation of London which retains the title. Pre-modern corporations Corporations have been present in some forms as far back as Ancient Rome. Although devoid of some of the core characteristics by which corporations are known today, they nonetheless were enterprises, sanctioned by the state, with a form of shareholders who invested money for a specific purpose. With the collapse of the Roman Empire, the rise of Christianity and the influx of Germanic tribes, the Roman conception of the corporation merged with other views. Germanic tribes, for example, maintained that a group entity in and of itself could have a separate identity from that of its members. These influences came together in the body of canon law built around the conception of the church as corporate structure in the Middle Ages. Different theories of the church as corporate body were favored by different individuals but all agreed on one key component: that the church was more than just its members and could maintain an existence perpetually, regardless of the death of any individual member. This, together with discussion as to the relationship between the head of a corporation (such as the Pope) and its members, contributed not only to the development of modern corporations and corporate theory but also set the stage for many ideas that would come to fruition during the enlightenment. Kenneth Pomeranz, an economic historian, argues that the need to perform pseudo-governmental operations (such as the waging of war) accounts for the development of this economic structure in Europe but not in China or in the Middle East. Older corporate entities gained incorporation as "the person/people of xx". This reflected the people who made up the "body" and also emphasized their legal identity. The law classifies a corporation either as a corporation sole (one person) or as a corporation aggregate (any other number). Examples include (the link gives the legal name; the nickname appears in brackets with the nature of the corporation) - The Governor and Company of the Bank of England (Bank of England — corporation aggregate) - The Chancellor Masters and Scholars of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge University — corporation aggregate) - The President and Fellows of Harvard College (Harvard College — corporation aggregate) - Her Majesty the Queen in Right of New Zealand (New Zealand Government — corporation sole) - The Archbishop of Canterbury (corporation sole) - The Dean, Chapter and Students of the Cathedral Church of Christ in Oxford of the Foundation of King Henry VIII (Christ Church, Oxford — corporation aggregate) Using strict definitions, universities and colleges count as corporations since they merely comprise groups of people. Development of modern commercial corporations Early corporations of the commercial sort were formed under frameworks set up by governments of states to undertake tasks which appeared too risky or too expensive for individuals or governments to embark upon. The alleged oldest commercial corporation in the world, the Stora Kopparberg mining community in Falun, Sweden, obtained a charter from King Magnus Eriksson in 1347. Many European nations chartered corporations to lead colonial ventures, such as the Dutch East India Company, and these corporations came to play a large part in the history of corporate colonialism. In the United States, government chartering began to fall out of vogue in the mid-1800s. Corporate law at the time was focused on protection of the public interest, and not on the interests of corporate shareholders. Corporate charters were closely regulated by the states. Forming a corporation usually required an act of legislature. Investors generally had to be given an equal say in corporate governance, and corporations were required to comply with the purposes expressed in their charters. Many private firms in the 19th century avoided the corporate model for these reasons (Andrew Carnegie formed his steel operation as a limited partnership, and John D. Rockefeller set up Standard Oil as a trust). Eventually, state governments began to realize the greater corporate registration revenues available by providing more permissive corporate laws. New Jersey was the first state to adopt an "enabling" corporate law, with the goal of attracting more business to the state. Delaware followed, and soon became known as the most corporation-friendly state in the country; even today, most major public corporations are set up under Delaware law. The 20th century saw a proliferation of enabling law across the world, which some argue helped to drive economic booms in many countries before and after World War I (the advantage to the overall economy of enabling laws must, however, be viewed in light of the success of Carnegie Steel and Standard Oil, the economic stimulus of the war, the flourishing of the automotive sector, and other major economic drivers). Starting in the 1980s, many countries with large state-owned corporations moved toward privatization, the selling of publicly-owned services and enterprises to private, normally corporate, ownership. Deregulation - reducing the public-interest regulation of corporate activity - often accompanied privatization as part of an ideologically laissez-faire policy. Another major postwar shift was toward development of conglomerates, in which large corporations purchased smaller corporations to expand their industrial base. Japanese firms developed a horizontal conglomeration model, the keiretsu, which was later duplicated in other countries as well. While corporate efficiency (and profitability) skyrocketed, small shareholder control was diminished and directors of corporations assumed greater control over business, contributing in part to the hostile takeover movement of the 1980s and the accounting scandals that brought down Enron and WorldCom following the turn of the century. More recent corporate developments include downsizing, contracting-out or out-sourcing, off-shoring and scoping down activities to core business, as information technology, global trade regimes, and cheap fossil fuels enable corporations to reduce and externalize labour costs, transportation costs and transaction costs, and thereby maximize profits. For a history of corporations that is “pro-corporate”, see John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Company: a Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (New York: Modern Library, 2003). For a history of corporations that is “critical”, see Joel Bakan, The Corporation. The pathological pursuit of profit and power (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2004). Types of corporations For-profit and non-profit Main article: non-profit organization In modern economic systems, the corporate conventions of governance commonly appear in a wide variety of business and non-profit activities. Though the laws governing these creatures of statute often differ, the courts often interpret provisions of the law that apply to profit-making enterprises in the same manner (or in a similar manner) when applying principles to non-profit organizations — as the underlying structures of these two types of entity often resemble each other. Closely-held and public The institution most often referenced when the word "corporation" is used, as in the title of the movie The Corporation, is a public or publicly traded corporation, the shares of which are traded on a public market (e.g., the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq) designed specifically for the buying and selling of shares of stock of corporations by and to the general public. Most of the largest businesses in the world are publicly traded corporations. However, the majority of corporations are said to be closely held, privately held or close corporations, meaning that no ready market exists for the trading of ownership interests. Many such corporations are owned and managed by a small group of businesspeople or companies, although the size of such a corporation can be as vast as the largest public corporations. The affairs of publicly traded and closely held corporations are similar in many respects. The main difference in most countries is that publicly traded corporations have an additional burden of complying with securities laws, which (especially in the U.S.) grant further rights to stockholders to protect them from fraud or unfairness in connection with the sale and purchase of stock. The publicly traded corporation must usually follow much more stringent disclosure requirements, and sometimes additional procedural obligations in connection with major transactions (e.g. mergers) or events (e.g. elections of directors). Multinational corporations Following on the success of the corporate model at a national level, many corporations have become transnational or multinational corporations: growing beyond national boundaries to attain sometimes remarkable positions of power and influence in the process of globalising. The typical "transnational" or "multinational" may fit into a web of overlapping ownerships and directorships, with multiple branches and lines in different regions, many such sub-groupings comprising corporations in their own right. Growth by expansion may favour national or regional branches; growth by acquisition or merger can result in a plethora of groupings scattered around and/or spanning the globe, with structures and names which do not always make clear the structures of ownership and interaction. In the spread of corporations across multiple continents, the importance of corporate culture has grown as a unifying factor and a counterweight to local national sensibilities and cultural awareness. National features There are various types of corporations throughout the world. United States In the United States, several corporate forms exist; the name of "corporation" generally applies to a business run for profit. Corporate formation is generally within the purview of state governments. The federal government usually does not grant corporate charters, except for some special instances such as Amtrak and Freddie Mac and banks and credit unions which opt not to receive charters from their home states. Because corporate law differs from state to state, many American corporations are incorporated in a different state than their primary base of operations. Many large corporations are chartered as "Delaware corporations" under the laws of Delaware, which charges no tax on activities outside the state and has courts experienced in corporate law. Corporations set up for privacy or asset protection often charter in Nevada, which does not require disclosure of share ownership. Many other states, particularly smaller states, have harmonized their corporate law around the Model Business Corporation Act, a "guideline" statute drafted by the American Bar Association. Legally, corporations are accorded some corporate personhood, i.e. Constitutional rights similar to those held by persons. Contrary to accepted legal precedent the U.S. Supreme Court did not rule on this question in the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886), Justice Harlan delivering the opinion of the court said the question regarding whether a corporation is a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment is an issue upon which the Court “did not deem it necessary to pass.” In the head notes of the case prepared by Supreme Court reporter J. C. Bancroft Davis, there is the sentence: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution … .” Because of illness, Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite never reviewed the head notes. Thus, without any deliberation, decision or ruling by the United States Supreme Court, the law of our nation has proceeded since 1886 with an accepted legal precedent based on the mistake of a clerk who reported something that never occurred. Historically, most U.S. states issued charters for fixed lengths of time (for example, a manufacturing corporation might receive a charter good for 40 years), and only by an act of the legislature. Some individuals believed corporations should remain accountable to the government and used these limited charters as a means of forcing companies to do so. Investors, however, noted that it led to unhealthy amounts of political payoffs and graft. Most states now charter unlimited-term corporations for a small fee, and possibly for a yearly tax. In Canada both the federal government and the provinces have corporate statutes, and thus a corporation may have a provincial or a federal charter. Many older corporations in Canada stem from Acts of Parliament passed before the introduction of general corporation law. The oldest corporation in Canada is the Hudson's Bay Company, chartered in 1670. Federally recognized corporations are regulated by the Canada Business Corporations Act. In Australia corporations are registered and regulated by the Commonwealth Government through the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. Corporations law has been largely codified in the Corporations Act 2001. German-speaking countries Germany, Austria and Switzerland recognize two forms of corporation: the Aktiengesellschaft (AG), analogous to public corporations in the English-speaking world, and the Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung (GmbH), similar to (and an inspiration for) the modern limited liability company. Corporate taxation In many countries, including the United States and United Kingdom, corporate profits are taxed at a corporate tax rate, and dividends paid to shareholders are taxed at a separate rate. Such a system is sometimes referred to as "double taxation," because any profits distributed to shareholders will eventually be taxed twice. One solution to this (as in the case of Australia and UK tax systems) is for the recipient of the dividend to be entitled to a tax credit which addresses the fact that the profits represented by the dividend have already been taxed. The company profit being passed on is therefore effectively only taxed at the rate of tax paid by the eventual recipient of the dividend. Where a double taxation system exists, the additional tax burden is often an incentive for smaller businesses to organize in the form of a partnership, limited liability company, or other type of entity that is not separately taxed. Such entities are often called "pass-through entities." In the United States, business corporations owe taxes according to two basic categories. A "C corporation" must pay corporate taxes, while "S corporations" pay no corporate taxes but instead pass profits and losses directly to their owners (the stockholders) who declare such profits and losses as part of their personal taxable income. An S corporation must generally have no more than 100 stockholders, who must be natural persons (not other corporations or entities), must reside in the United States, and must consent to the classification; moreover, the S corporation can only issue a single class of stock. As a result of these restrictions, all publicly traded corporations and many larger close corporations have C corporation status. Certain kinds of investment companies are also exempt from corporate income taxes, provided they distribute almost all of their income to shareholders in the form of dividends or capital gains distributions. The directors of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company. A corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level — there's a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward.... I'd love to see centralized power eliminated, whether it's the state or the economy, and have it diffused and ultimately under direct control of the participants. Chomsky has also criticized the legal decisions that led to the creation of the modern corporation: Corporations, which previously had been considered artificial entities with no rights, were accorded all the rights of persons, and far more, since they are "immortal persons," and "persons" of extraordinary wealth and power. Furthermore, they were no longer bound to the specific purposes designated by State charter, but could act as they chose, with few constraints. Other business entities Almost every recognized type of organization carries out some economic activities (e.g. the family). Other organizations that may carry out activities that are generally considered to be business exist under the laws of various countries. These include: - Limited partnership (LP) - Limited liability partnership (LLP) - Limited liability company (LLC) - Limited company (Ltd.) - Not-for-profit corporation - Sole proprietorship - Trust company, Trust (law) USA, Trust (law) non-USA - Sobel, Robert The Age of Giant Corporations: a Microeconomic History of American Business, 1914-1984 (1984) - Klein and Coffee. Business Organization and Finance: Legal and Economic Principles (Foundation, 2002), ISBN 158778713X - Hessen, Robert. In Defense of the Corporation. (Hoover Institute 1979), ISBN 081797072X - Kirzner, Israel M. Competition and Entrepreneurship (University of Chicago Press, 1973), ISBN 0226437760 - Bromberg, Alan R. Crane and Bromberg on Partnership. 1968. - Conard, Alfred F. Corporations in Perspective. 1976. - John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Company: a Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (New York: Modern Library, 2003). - Joel Bakan, The Corporation. The pathological pursuit of profit and power (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2004). - Alfred Sohn-Rethel Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism,London, CSE Bks, 1978 ISBN 0906336007 See also - Commercial law - Community interest company - Conglomerate (company) - Corporate governance - Corporate haven - Corporate personhood - Delaware corporation - Incorporation (business) - Limited liability company (LLC) - Organizational culture - Preferred stock - Public Limited Company (PLC) - Shelf Corporation - Stock certificates External links et:Ettevõte es:Corporación eo:Entrepreno fr:Entreprise ko:주식회사 id:Perusahaan he:תאגיד lb:Entreprise hu:Vállalat nl:Bedrijf ja:株式会社 no:Aksjeselskap nn:Aksjeselskap pl:Korporacja ru:Коммерческая организация simple:Company sl:Podjetje sr:Корпорација sv:Aktiebolag tr:Şirket zh:公司

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John Wesley's Place in History President of the United States THE ABINGDON PRESS NEW YORK CINCINNATI DELIVERED AT WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY ON THE OCCASION OF THE JOHN WESLEY'S PLACE IN HISTORY JOHN WESLEY lived and wrought while the Georges reigned. He was born but a year after Anne became queen, a year before the battle of Blenheim was fought; while England was still caught in the toils of the wars into which her great constitutional revolution had drawn her; when Marlborough was in the field, and the armies afoot which were to make the ancient realm free to go her own way without dictation from any prince in Europe. But when he came to manhood, and to the days in which his work was to begin, all things had fallen quiet again, Wars were over and the pipes of peace breathed soothing strains. The day of change had passed and gone, and bluff Sir Robert Walpole ruled the land, holding it quiet, aloof from excitement, to the steady humdrum course of business, in which questions of the treasury and of the routine of administration were talked about, not questions of constitutional right or any matter of deep conviction. The first of the dull Georges had come suitably into the play at the center of the slow plot, bringing with him the vulgar airs of the provincial court of obscure Hanover, and views that put statesmanship out of the question. The real eighteenth century had set in, whose annals even its own historians have pronounced to be tedious, unheroic, without noble or moving plot, though they would fain make what they can of the story. They have found it dull because it lacked dramatic unity. Its wars were fought for mere political advantage--because politicians had intrigued and thrones fallen vacant; for the adjustment of the balance of power or the aggrandizement of dynasties; and represented neither the growth of empires nor the progress of political ideals. All religion, they say, had cooled and philanthropy had not been born. The thinkers of the day had as little elevation of thought as the statesmen, the preachers as little ardor as the atheistical wits, whose unbelief they scarcely troubled themselves to challenge. The poor were unspeakably degraded and the rich had flung morals to the winds. There was no adventure of mind or conscience that seemed worth risking a fall for. But the historians who paint this somber picture look too little upon individuals, upon details, upon the life that plays outside the field of politics and of philosophical thinking. They are in search of policies, movements, great and serious combinations of men, events that alter the course of history, or letters that cry a challenge to the spirits. Forget statecraft, forego seeking the materials for systematic narrative, and look upon the eighteenth century as you would look upon your own day, as a period of human life whose details are its real substance, and you will find enough and to spare of human interest. The literary annals of a time, when Swift and Addison and Berkeley and Butler and Pope and Gray and Defoe and Richardson and Fielding and Smollett and Sterne and Samuel Johnson and Goldsmith and Burke and Hume and Gibbon and Cowper and Burns wrote, and in which Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats were born, cannot be called barren or without spiritual significance. No doubt the wits of Queen Anne's time courted a muse too prim, too precise, too much without passion to seem to us worthy to stand with the great spirit of letters that speaks in the noble poetry with which the next century was ushered in; but there was here a very sweet relief from the ungoverned passions of the Restoration, the licentious force of men who knew the restraints neither of purity nor of taste; and he must need strong spices in his food who finds Swift insipid. No doubt Fielding is coarse, and Richardson prolix and sentimental, Sterne prurient and without true tonic for the mind, but the world which these men uncovered will always stand real and vivid before our eyes. It is a crowded and lively stage with living persons upon it; the eighteenth century can never seem a time vague and distant after we have read those pages of intimate revelation. No doubt Dr. Johnson failed to speak any vital philosophy of life and uttered only common sense, and the talk at the Turk's Head Tavern ran upon preserving the English Constitution rather than upon improving it; but it is noteworthy that Mr. Goldsmith, who was of that company, was born of the same century that produced Laurence Sterne, and that "She Stoops to Conquer" and the "Vicar of Wakefield," with their sweet savor of purity and modesty and grace, no less than "Tristram Shandy" and "Tom Jones," with their pungent odor, blossomed in the unweeded garden of that careless age. Burns sang with clear throat and an unschooled rapture at the North, and the bards were born who were to bring the next age in with strains that rule our spirits still. A deep pulse beat in that uneventful century. All things were making ready for a great change. When the century began it was the morrow of a great struggle, from whose passionate endeavors men rested with a certain lassitude, with a great weariness and longing for peace. The travail of the civil wars had not ended with the mastery of Cromwell, the Restoration of Charles, and the ousting of James; it had ended only with the constitutional revolution which followed 1688, and with the triumphs of the Prince of Orange. It had been compounded of every element that can excite or subdue the spirits of men. Questions of politics had sprung out of questions of religion, and men had found their souls staked upon the issue. The wits of the Restoration tried to laugh the ardor off, but it burned persistent until its work was done and the liberties of England spread to every field of thought or action. No wonder the days of Queen Anne seemed dull and thoughtless after such an age; and yet no wonder there was a sharp reaction. No wonder questions of religion were avoided, minor questions of reform postponed. No wonder Sir Robert sought to cool the body politic and calm men's minds for business. But other forces were gathering head as hot as those which had but just subsided. This long age of apparent reaction was in fact an age of preparation also; was not merely the morrow of one revolution, but was also the eve of another, more tremendous still, which was to shake the whole fabric of society. England had no direct part in bringing the French Revolution on, but she drank with the rest of the wine of the age which produced it, and before it came had had her own rude awakening in the revolt of her American colonies. Great industrial changes were in progress, too. This century, so dull to the political historian, was the century in which the world of our own day was born, the century of that industrial revolution which made political ambition thenceforth an instrument of material achievement, of commerce and manufacture. These were the days in which canals began to be built in England, to open her inland markets to the world and shorten and multiply her routes of trade; when the spinning jenny was invented and the steam engine and the spinning machine and the weaver's mule; when cities which had slept since the middle ages waked of a sudden to new life and new cities sprang up where only hamlets had been. Peasants crowded into the towns for work; the countrysides saw their life upset, unsettled; idlers thronged the highways and the marts, their old life at the plow or in the village given up, no settled new life found; there were not police enough to check or hinder vagrancy, and sturdy beggars were all too ready to turn their hands to crime and riot. The old order was breaking up, and men did not readily find their places in the new. The new age found its philosophy in Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," the philosophy of self-interest, and men thought too constantly upon these things to think deeply on any others. An industrial age, an age of industrial beginnings, offers new adventures to the mind, and men turn their energies into the channels of material power. It is no time for speculations concerning another world; the immediate task is to fill this world with wealth and fortune and all the enginery of material success. It is no time to regard men as living souls; they must be thought of rather as tools, as workmen, as producers of wealth, the builders of industry, and the captains of soldiers of fortune. Men must talk of fiscal problems, of the laws of commerce, of the raw materials and the processes of manufacture, of the facilitation of exchange. Politics centers in the budget, and the freedom men think of is rather the freedom of the market than the freedom of the hustings or of the voting booth. And yet there are here great energies let loose which have not wrought their full effect upon the minds of men in the mere doing of their daily tasks or the mere planning of their fortunes. Men must think and long as well as toil; the wider the world upon which they spend themselves the wider the sweep of their thoughts, the restless, unceasing excursions of their hope. The mind of England did not lie quiet through those unquiet days. All things were making and to be made, new thoughts of life as well as new ways of living. Masters and laborers alike were sharing in the new birth of society. And in the midst of these scenes, this shifting of the forces of the world, this passing of old things and birth of new, stood John Wesley, the child, the contemporary, the spiritual protagonist of the eighteenth century. Born before Blenheim had been fought, he lived until the fires of the French Revolution were ablaze. He was as much the child of his age as Bolingbroke was, or Robert Burns. We ought long ago to have perceived that no century yields a single type. There are countrysides the land over which know nothing of London town. The Vicar of Wakefield rules his parish as no rollicking, free-thinking fellow can who sups with Laurence Sterne. Sir Roger de Coverley is as truly a gentleman of his age as Squire Western. Quiet homes breed their own sons. The Scots country at the North has its own free race of poets and thinkers, men, some of them, as stern as puritans in the midst of the loose age. Many a quiet village church in England hears preaching which has no likeness at all to the cool rationalistic discourse of vicars and curates whom the spiritual blight of the age has touched, and witnesses in its vicarage a life as simple, as grave, as elevated above the vain pursuits of the world as any household of puritan days had seen. England was steadied in that day, as always, by her great pervasive middle class, whose affections did not veer amidst the heady gusts even of that time of change, when the world was in transformation; whose life held to the same standards, whose thoughts traveled old accustomed ways. The indifference of the church did not destroy their religion. They did not lose their prepossessions for the orderly manners and morals that kept life pure. It was no anomaly, therefore, that the son of Samuel and Susanna Wesley should come from the Epworth rectory to preach forth righteousness and judgment to come to the men of the eighteenth century. Epworth, in quiet Lincolnshire, was typical English land and lay remote from the follies and fashions of the age. There was sober thinking and plain living--there where low monotonous levels ran flat to the spreading Humber and the coasts of the sea. The children of that vicarage, swarming a little host about its hearth, were bred in love and fear, love of rectitude and fear of sin, their imagination filled with the ancient sanctions of the religion of the prophets and the martyrs, their lives drilled to right action and the studious service of God. Some things in the intercourse and discipline of that household strike us with a sort of awe, some with repulsion. Those children lived too much in the presence of things unseen; the inflexible consciences of the parents who ruled them brought them under a rigid discipline which disturbed their spirits as much as it enlightened them. But, though gaiety and lightness of heart were there shut out, love was not, nor sweetness. No one can read Susanna Wesley's rules for the instruction and development of her children without seeing the tender heart of the true woman, whose children were the light of her eyes. This mother was a true counsellor and her children resorted to her as to a sort of providence, feeling safe when she approved. For the stronger spirits among them the regime of that household was a keen and wholesome tonic. And John Wesley was certainly one of the stronger spirits. He came out of the hands of his mother with the temper of a piece of fine steel. All that was executive and fit for mastery in the discipline of belief seemed to come to perfection in him. He dealt with the spirits of other men with the unerring capacity of a man of affairs--a sort of spiritual statesman, a politician of God, speaking the policy of a kingdom unseen, but real and destined to prevail over all kingdoms else. He did not deem himself a reformer; he deemed himself merely a minister and servant of the church and the faith in which he had been bred, and meant that no man should avoid him upon his errand though it were necessary to search the by-ways and beat the hedges to find those whom he sought. He did not spring to his mission like a man who had seen a vision and conceived the plan of his life beforehand, whole, and with its goal marked upon it as upon a map. He learned what it was to be from day to day, as other men do. He did not halt or hesitate, not because his vision went forward to the end, but because his will was sound, unfailing, sure of its immediate purpose. His "Journal" is as notable a record of common sense and sound practical judgment as Benjamin Franklin's "Autobiography" or the letters of Washington. It is his clear knowledge of his duty and mission from day to day that is remarkable, and the efficiency with which he moved from purpose to purpose. It was a very simple thing that he did, taking it in its main outlines and conceptions. Conceiving religion vitally, as it had been conceived in his own home, he preached it with a vigor, an explicitness, a directness of phrase and particularity of application which shocked the sober decorum of his fellow ministers of the church so much that he was more and more shut out from their pulpits. He got no church of his own; probably no single parish would have satisfied his ardor had a living been found for him. He would not sit still. The conviction of the truth was upon him; he was a messenger of God, and if he could not preach in the churches, where it seemed to him the duty of every man who loved the order and dignity of divine service to stand if he would deliver the word of God, he must, as God's man of affairs, stand in the fields as Mr. Whitefield did and proclaim it to all who could come within the sound of his voice. And so he made the whole kingdom his parish, took horse like a courier and carried his news along every highway. Slowly, with no premeditated plan, going now here, now there, as some call of counsel or opportunity directed him, he moved as if from stage to stage of a journey; and as he went did his errand as if instinctively. No stranger at an inn, no traveler met upon the road left him without hearing of his business. Those he could not come to a natural parley with he waylaid. The language of his "Journal" is sometimes almost that of the highwayman. "At Gerard's Cross," he says, "I plainly declared to those whom God gave into my hands the faith as it is in Jesus: as I did the next day to a young man I overtook on the road." The sober passion of the task grew upon him as it unfolded itself under his hand from month to month, from year to year. He was more and more upon the highways; his journeys lengthened, carried him into regions where preachers had never gone before, to the collieries, to the tin mines, to the fishing villages of the coast, and made him familiar with every countryside of the kingdom, his slight and sturdy figure and shrewd, kind face known everywhere. It was not long before he was in the saddle from year's end to year's end, always going forward as if upon an enterprise, but never hurried, always ready to stop and talk upon the one thing that absorbed him, making conversation and discourse his business, seizing upon a handful of listeners no less eagerly than upon a multitude. The news got carried abroad as he traveled that he was coming, and he was expected with a sort of excitement. Some feared him. His kind had never been known in England since the wandering friars of the middle ages fell quiet and were gone. And no friar had ever spoken as this man spoke. He was not like Mr. Whitefield; his errand seemed hardly the same. Mr. Whitefield swayed men with a power known time out of mind, the power of the consummate orator whose words possess the mind and rule the spirit while he speaks. There was no magic of oratory in Mr. Wesley's tone or presence. There was something more singular, more intimate, more searching. He commanded so quietly, wore so subtle an air of gentle majesty, attached men to himself so like a party leader, whose coming draws together a company of partisans, and whose going leaves an organized band of adherents, that cautious men were uneasy and suspicious concerning him. He seemed a sort of revolutionist, left no community as he found it, set men by the ears. It was hard to believe that he had no covert errand, that he meant nothing more than to preach the peaceable riches of Christ. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted; to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind; to set at liberty them that are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord" --this had been the text from which he preached his first sermon by the highway, standing upon a little eminence just outside the town of Bristol. It described his mission--but not to his enemies. The churches had been shut against him, not because he preached, but because he preached with so disturbing a force and directness, as if he had come to take the peace of the church away and stir men to a great spiritual revolution; and uneasy questionings arose about him. Why was he so busy? Why did he confer so often with an intimate group of friends, as if upon some deep plan, appoint rendezvous with them, and seem to know always which way he must turn next, and when? Why was he so restless, so indomitably eager to make the next move in his mysterious journey? Why did he push on through any weather and look to his mount like a trooper on campaign? Did he mean to upset the country? Men had seen the government of England disturbed before that by fanatics who talked only of religion and of judgment to come. The Puritan and the Roundhead had been men of this kind, and the Scottish Covenanters. Was it not possible that John Wesley was the emissary of a party or of some pretender, or even of the sinister Church of Rome? He lived such calumnies down. No mobs dogged his steps after men had once come to know him and perceived the real quality he was of. Indeed, from the very first men had surrendered their suspicions upon sight of him. It was impossible, it would seem, not to trust him when once you had looked into his calm gray eyes. He was so friendly, so simple, so open, so ready to meet your challenge with temperate and reasonable reply, that it was impossible to deem him subtle, politic, covert, a man to preach one thing and plan another. There was something, too, in his speech and in the way he bore himself which discovered the heart of every man he dealt with. Men would raise their hands to strike him in the mob and, having caught the look in his still eye, bring them down to stroke his hair. Something issued forth from him which penetrated and subdued them--some suggestion of purity, some intimation of love, some sign of innocence and nobility--some power at once of rebuke and attraction which he must have caught from his Master. And so there came a day when prejudice stood abashed before him, and men everywhere hailed his coming as the coming of a friend and pastor. He became not only the best known man in the kingdom--that of course, because he went everywhere--but also the best loved and the most welcome. And yet the first judgment of him had not been wholly wrong. A sort of revolution followed him, after all. It was not merely that he came and went so constantly and moved every countryside with his preaching. Something remained after he was gone: the touch of the statesman men had at first taken him to be. He was a minister of the Church of England. He loved her practices and had not willingly broken with them. It had been with the keenest reluctance that he consented to preach in the fields, outside the sacred precincts of a church, "having been all my life," as he said, "so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church." He never broke with the communion he loved. But his work in the wide parish of a whole kingdom could not be done alone, and not many men bred to the orders of the church could be found to assist him; he was forced by sheer drift of circumstances to establish a sort of lay society, a sort of salvation army, to till the fields he had plowed. He was a born leader of men. The conferences he held with the friends he loved and trusted were councils of campaign, and did hold long plans in view, as his enemies suspected. They have a high and honorable place in the history of the statesmanship of salvation. It was a chief part of Wesley's singular power that everything he touched took shape as if with a sort of institutional life. He was not so great a preacher as Whitefield or so moving a poet as his brother Charles; men counseled him who were more expert and profound theologians than he and more subtle reasoners upon the processes of salvation. But in him all things seemed combined; no one power seemed more excellent than another, and every power expressed itself in action under the certain operation of his planning will. He almost unwittingly left a church behind him. It is this statesmanship in the man that gives him precedence in the annals of his day. Men's spirits were not dead; they are never dead; but they sometimes stand confused, daunted, or amazed as they did amidst the shifting scenes of the eighteenth century, and wait to be commanded. This man commanded them, and kept his command over them, not only by the way he held the eye of the whole nation in his incessant tireless journeys, his presence everywhere, his winning power of address, but also by setting up deputies, classes, societies, where he himself could not be, with their places of meeting, their organizations and efficient way of action. He was as practical and attentive to details as a master of industry, and as keen to keep hold of the business he had set afoot. It was a happy gibe that dubbed the men of his way Methodists. It was the method of his evangelization that gave it permanence and historical significance. He would in any case have been a notable figure, a moving force in the history of his age. His mere preaching, his striking personality, his mere presence everywhere in the story of the time, his mere vagrancy and indomitable charm, would have drawn every historian to speak of him and make much of his picturesque part in the motley drama of the century; but as it is they have been constrained to put him among statesmen as well as in their catalogues of saints and missionaries. History is inexorable with men who isolate themselves. They are suffered oftentimes to find a place in literature, but never in the story of events or in any serious reckoning of cause and effect. They may be interesting, but they are not important. The mere revolutionist looks small enough when his day is passed; the mere agitator struts but a little while and without applause amidst the scenes and events which men remember. It is the men who make as well as destroy who really serve their race, and it is noteworthy how action predominated in Wesley from the first. The little coterie at Oxford, to which we look back as to the first associates in the movement which John Wesley dominated, were as fervent in their prayers, in their musings upon the Scripture, in their visits to the poor and outcast, before John Wesley joined them as afterward. Their zeal had its roots in the divine pity which must lie at the heart of every evangelistic movement --pity for those to whom the gospel is not preached, whom no light of Christian guidance had reached, the men in the jails and in the purlieus of the towns whom the church does not seek or touch; but he gave them leadership and the spirit of achievement. His genius for action touched everything he was associated with; every enterprise took from him an impulse of efficiency. Unquestionably this man altered and in his day governed the spiritual history of England and the English-speaking race on both sides of the sea; and we ask what was ready at his hand, what did he bring into being of the things he seemed to create? The originative power of the individual in affairs must always remain a mystery, a theme more full of questions than of answers. What would the eighteenth century in England have produced of spiritual betterment without John Wesley? What did he give it which it could not have got without him? These are questions which no man can answer. But one thing is plain: Wesley did not create life, he only summoned it to consciousness. The eighteenth century was not dead; it was not even asleep; it was only confused, unorganized, without authoritative leadership in matters of faith and doctrine, uncertain of its direction. Wesley's own Journal affords us an authentic picture of the time, mixed, as always, of good and bad. He fared well or ill upon his journeys as England was itself made up. The self-government of England in that day was a thing uncentered and unsystematic in a degree it is nowadays difficult for us to imagine. The country gentlemen, who were magistrates, ruled as they pleased in the countrysides, whether in matters of justice or administration, without dictation or suggestion from London; and yet ruled rather as representatives than as masters. They were neighbors the year around to the people they ruled; their interests were not divorced from the interests of the rest. Local pride and a public spirit traditional amongst them held them generally to a just and upright course. But the process of justice with them was a process of opinion as much as of law. It was an inquest of the neighborhood, and each neighborhood dealt with visitors and vagrants as it would. There was everywhere the free touch of individuality. The roads were not policed; the towns were not patrolled--good men and bad had almost equal leave to live as they pleased. If things went wrong the nearest magistrate must be looked up at his home or stopped in his carriage as he passed along the highway and asked to pass judgment as chief neighbor and arbiter of the place. And so Mr. Wesley dealt with individuals --it was the English way. His safety lay in the love and admiration he won or in the sense of fair play to which his frank and open methods appealed; his peril, in the passions of the crowds or of the individuals who pressed about him full of hatred and evil thoughts. The noteworthy thing was how many good men he found along these highways where Tom Jones had traveled, how many were glad to listen to him and rejoiced at the message he brought, how many were just and thoughtful and compassionate, and waited for the gospel with an open heart. This man, as I have said, was no engaging orator, whom it would have been a pleasure to hear upon any theme. He spoke very searching words, sharper than any two-edged sword, cutting the conscience to the quick. It was no pastime to hear him. It was the more singular, therefore, the more significant, the more pitiful, how eagerly he was sought out, as if by men who knew their sore need and would fain hear some word of help, though it were a word also of stern rebuke and of fearful portent to those who went astray. The spiritual hunger of men was manifest, their need of the church, their instinct to be saved. The time was ready and cried out for a spiritual revival. The church was dead and Wesley awakened it; the poor were neglected and Wesley sought them out; the gospel was shrunken into formulas and Wesley flung it fresh upon the air once more in the speech of common men; the air was stagnant and fetid; he cleared and purified it by speaking always and everywhere the word of God; and men's spirits responded, leaped at the message, and were made wholesome as they comprehended it. It was a voice for which they had waited, though they knew it not. It would not have been heard had it come untimely. It was the voice of the century's longing heard in the mouth of this one man more perfectly, more potently, than in the mouth of any other--and this man a master of other men, a leader who left his hearers wiser than he found them in the practical means of salvation. And so everything that made for the regeneration of the times seemed to link itself with Methodism. The great impulse of humane feeling which marked the closing years of the century seemed in no small measure to spring from it: the reform of prisons, the agitation for the abolition of slavery, the establishment of missionary societies and Bible societies, the introduction into life, and even into law, of pity for the poor, compassion for those who must suffer. The noble philanthropies and reforms which brighten the annals of the nineteenth century had their spiritual birth in the eighteenth. Wesley had carried Christianity to the masses of the people, had renewed the mission of Christ himself, and all things began to take color from what he had done. Men to whom Methodism meant nothing, yet, in fact, followed this man to whom Methodism owed its establishment. No doubt he played no small part in saving England from the madness which fell upon France ere the century ended. The English poor bore no such intolerable burdens as the poor of France had to endure. There was no such insensate preservation of old abuses in England as maddened the unhappy country across the Channel. But society was in sharp transition in England; one industrial age was giving place to another, and the poor particularly were sadly at a loss to find their places in the new. Work was hard to get, and the new work of pent-up towns was harder to understand and to do than the old familiar work in the field or in the village shops. There were sharper contrasts now than before between rich and poor, and the rich were no longer always settled neighbors in some countryside, but often upstart merchants in the towns, innovating manufacturers who seemed bent upon making society over to suit their own interests. It might have gone hard with order and government in a nation so upset, transformed, distracted, had not the hopeful lessons of religion been taught broadcast and the people made to feel that once more pity and salvation had sought them out. There is a deep fascination in this mystery of what one man may do to change the face of his age. John Wesley, we have had reason to say, planned no reform, premeditated no revivification of society; his was simply the work of an efficient conviction. How far he was himself a product of the century which he revived it were a futile piece of metaphysic to inquire. That even his convictions were born of his age may go without saying: they are born in us also by a study of his age, and no century listens to a voice out of another--least of all out of a century yet to come. What is important for us is the method and cause of John Wesley's success. His method was as simple as the object he had in view. He wanted to get at men, and he went directly to them, not so much like a priest as like a fellow man standing in a like need with themselves. And the cause of his success? Genius, no doubt, and the gifts of a leader of men, but also something less singular, though perhaps not less individual--a clear conviction of revealed truth and of its power to save. Neither men nor society can be saved by opinions; nothing has power to prevail but the conviction which commands, not the mind merely, but the will and the whole spirit as well. It is this, and this only, that makes one spirit the master of others, and no man need fear to use his conviction in any age. It will not fail of its power. Its magic has no sorcery of words, no trick of personal magnetism. It concentrates personality as if into a single element of sheer force, and transforms conduct into a life. John Wesley's place in history is the place of the evangelist who is also a master of affairs. The evangelization of the world will always be the road to fame and power, but only to those who take it seeking, not these things, but the kingdom of God; and if the evangelist be what John Wesley was, a man poised in spirit, deeply conversant with the natures of his fellow-men, studious of the truth, sober to think, prompt and yet not rash to act, apt to speak without excitement and yet with a keen power of conviction, he can do for another age what John Wesley did for the eighteenth century. His age was singular in its need, as he was singular in his gifts and power. The eighteenth century cried out for deliverance and light, and God had prepared this man to show again the might and the blessing of his salvation.

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Philosophy of evolution - 1 Evolution of Human Societies - 2 Thermodynamic Philosophy of Evolution - 3 Consciousness – a Buddhist view - 4 The Central Enigma of Consciousness - 5 PANPSYCHISM and THERMODYNAMICS, EXPLORED - 6 Cranio-caudal shift of locomotor mechanisms during evolution - 7 What Makes Us Human? A Neuroscience Prolegomenon for the Philosophy of Evolution and Consciousness - 8 Complex Systems and Consciousness - 9 Unified Evolution Theory - 10 Evolution: An alternate view - 11 Pineal body as multipotent system - 12 Human migration and formation of social groups of India Evolution of Human Societies The basic properties of DNA molecules viz self repairing and replication are analogous to the primary instincts self preservation and procreation of living organism also that these properties are possibly expressed as behavioral traits selfishness and altruism. While selfishness is for the survival of the individual, altruism is for the survival of the group and thus selfishness and altruism are two faces of the same coin. No person can neither be cent per cent selfish nor be cent per cent altuistic. Further selfishness is entropic while altruism is genopsychic. Apparently at the level of the society selfishness is competition and altruism is cooperation. The fact that the living organisms show the tendency to live in groups [see for example colonies of bacteria, flocks of birds, herds of cattle and human societies] suggests that the tilt is towards altruism/ cooperation. Altruism understandably is the direction of evolution of human societies. While self programmability is the driving force of the evolution of the species the same operates as “self development” at the level of the human society. The environment itself is evolving allowing the concurrent evolution of the species. Thus a perturbation of the environment due to human activity is a perturbation of the evolution of the species including the human societies. It is important to note that the human traits, selfishness and altruism are independent of the economic, social or the political systems a human society follows. Capitalist, socialist, cooperative/ network economies or their hybrids are the variant economic types the human society has produced and the fittest among them will survive. It is also important to note that each society may follow a different types and paths of economy, not predetermined [may be pertubed by human intervention] but in the direction of altruism. The abundant “free will” of the human beings empowers them to intervene into natural processes of the evolution of the society either to enhance the process or to reverse the directionality by increasing the selfishness. Increased selfishness perturbs the directionality of evolution. Uncontrolled energy hunger of the humans and unbridled exploitation of non renewable natural resources do perturb not only the natural processes of the evolution of human societies but also the environment and ecology. A democratic society allows engineering the socio political consciousness required to over come the effects of the perturbation of the natural processes by human beings. 184.108.40.206 11:20, 24 September 2009 (UTC) May see this link: http://transciencetransaction.wetpaint.com/page/Evolution+of+Human+Societies Thermodynamic Philosophy of Evolution A semblance of a foundation towards the development of a philosophy based on a thermodynamic understanding of evolution is presented. Central to this presentation are firstly the acknowledgement that everything in the biosphere is a dynamic system of atoms, molecules, or structures of molecules attached to a substrate known as the surface of the earth; second that chemical thermodynamics is the branch of science that determines the direction of natural processes according to what are called the two laws of thermodynamics; third that in the case of the synthesis of the person over the last 13.7-billion years of the development of the known universe, the new view has emerged that the human being is 26-element molecule; fourth that, on the three previous points, any modern legitimate philosophy would need to be well-grounded in the molecular perspective or system of molecules point-of-view, a perspective in which behaviors, reactions, and evolutions of molecules or systems of molecules are dictated by the laws of energy and entropy. DMR Sekhar 17:40, 23 September 2009 (UTC) Consciousness – a Buddhist view Sreenivasa Rao, S There is a renewed interest now among scientists in the subject of consciousness. Yet a single definition of consciousness could not be arrived at by the scientific community so far. Each scientist has his own definition. The earliest Buddhist texts viewed consciousness as an important factor in determining the course of human happiness, suffering, liberation and bondage. Yet Buddhism did not define consciousness perhaps because it is nebulous and is there fore difficult to pin point. But in principle Buddhism asserts that it is possible to recognize experientially what consciousness is and identify it. Buddhists pointed out that the central reality of all existence is change. DMR Sekhar 17:40, 23 September 2009 (UTC) The Central Enigma of Consciousness The nature and physical basis of consciousness remains the central enigma of the scientific description of reality in the third millennium. This paper seeks to examine the phenomenal nature of subjective consciousness and elucidate a possible biophysical basis for its existence, in terms of a form of quantum anticipation based on entangled states driven by chaotic sensitivity of global brain dynamics during decision-making processes. Evidence is presented for the evolutionary emergence of chaotic excitation as a universal sense organ in the founding eucaryotes, which then became used in a context-sensitive manner by complex central nervous systems, leading to the dynamical brain. DMR Sekhar 17:40, 23 September 2009 (UTC) PANPSYCHISM and THERMODYNAMICS, EXPLORED Roger Penrose’s “Road to Reality” has a last line, “….perhaps, something that we all have missed?”. This is motivation for revisiting panpsychism, an ancient theory that suggests all things have awareness and/or consciousness. With a recent paper reporting increased attention to this subject, can a physicalist approach be fruitful? . Given that light requires mass to validate its existence and mass requires time to prove likewise, might these requirements suggest a basic “need” for all creatures? With life defined as a simple “awareness”, that is, between self and otherness, observed and observer, etc. it seems to imply the concept(s) of the Heisenberg principle. Extending this idea, “mass” or “energy” at any level may be “aware” of it’s surroundings, so that any action(s) can result in reaction(s) that may be counted and measured using dimensional analysis as a guide or harmonized to the rhythms of life. In short, this article explores concepts between light, mass and gravity…. DMR Sekhar 17:40, 23 September 2009 (UTC) Cranio-caudal shift of locomotor mechanisms during evolution Evolution is characterized by two attributes: one is to find sustenance for life and the other, the need to multiply. Any or all changes in shape, size, cerebration and adaptations are engendered by need to meet these primary requirements and the need to acquire higher efficiency in finding mate or manna. Towards achieving these ends, locomotion as an adjunct aid has evolved as a powerful tool. One of more peculiar observations I have made in the process of evolution vis a vis propulsive mechanisms is the progressive and gradual caudal shift of appendages that engineer locomotion. The more primitive the form of life, the more cranial is the appendage that initiates movement. Invertebrates kick-start mobility using their mouth parts as anchoring mechanisms that help drag themselves forwards. Classically, the earthworm and leech are examples where moth plays a very crucial role in movement. Fish use branchial apparatuses like gills or fins – early reptiles use rudimentary pectoral accruements. Observe the metamorphosis of the aquatic tadpole into a quadruped amphibian to confirm this hypothesis. The cranio-caudal displacement of primary mechanisms that help mobility during the various stages of tadpole to frog development will show that when an early tadpole the amphibian uses its mouth to anchor itself to a blade or stalk to anchor itself against a flowing current (a paradoxical propulsion) – it graduates to using pectoral fin like appendages – thence to forelimbs, then it develops hind limbs as additions. The adult frog primarily depends on catapulting itself onwards relying mainly on the strength and power of its hind limbs. Aves depend heavily on the fore limb power to move fly), the hind limbs are merely adjuncts that aid the forelimb (modified into wings) to augment and refine aerial movement. Almost all mammals use all four limbs so frequently and effectively that most are classed as quadrupeds. Among the mammalians, man alone, has developed into dependence on highly evolved hind limbs (legs) for movement. Even in man, the most extreme end of his foot, the great toe is the primary generator of bipedal gait. What is seen from the examples cited is that from the lowest forms of life, as one goes up the evolutionary tree – the apparatuses and appendages that help it move – show a distinct tendency to shift from head to tail end, a cranio-caudal displacement of primary and principal locomotor mechanisms. It is a scientific curio worth dwelling further on. That one can even place a life form into its slot in the evolutionary scale tree merely by noting the position of its propulsive mechanical apparatuses: The more head-ward propulsive appendages are, the more primitive the life form is, and vice versa. DMR Sekhar 17:40, 23 September 2009 (UTC) What Makes Us Human? A Neuroscience Prolegomenon for the Philosophy of Evolution and Consciousness EL Rossi & KL Rossi A prolegomenon to the philosophy of evolution and consciousness must include the perspectives of all peoples from the mythological and ethical doctrines of ancient cultures to our modern sciences around the globe. This chapter presents a neuroscience integration of ancient perspectives and practices with modern research on facilitating the co-evolution of human consciousness and the brain. We review selective aspects of the theory, research, and experience of consciousness as a novelty and activity-dependent process that drives the co-evolutionary spiral of mind and brain. We seek to answer questions such as these. · What makes us human? What is the major distinction between humans and other primates? · What are the modern scientific techniques of DNA microarrays and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that now can measure what makes us human? · Do ancient and modern self-directed activities of consciousness contribute to the co-creation of the mind and brain over a lifetime as well as their Darwinian co-evolution over millions of years? · What is the scientific evidence that consciousness, dreaming, meditation, and therapeutic hypnosis can contribute to the daily and hourly re-construction of our mind and physical brain for positive adaption? · What are the salient psychological and spiritual functions of consciousness that evoke activity-dependent gene expression and brain plasticity for building a better brain in daily life? · Could a non-dualistic approach to the philosophy of meditation and creative psychotherapy facilitate activity-dependent gene expression and brain plasticity to optimize adaptive consciousness, behavior, health and well being? DMR Sekhar 17:40, 23 September 2009 (UTC) Complex Systems and Consciousness The declared aim of this paper is to understand how the physical neural processes going on in the brain give rise to the sum of feelings that we call Mind. This in the framework of an evolutive process begun with inorganic chemical compounds and proceeding in steps of ever increasing complexity leading to the emergence of organic compounds, life, thought, consciousness….. Consciousness will be explained as the end result of a chain wherein computational skills form the basis of some sort of ‘unconscious computation’ where they apply the rules of the game (the syntax=the programme) without knowing what they are doing (semantics). What of the brain? The brain is itself a complex physical system and as such can perform ‘computations’ with two important differences: the brain is aware of being computing and somehow knows the meaning of what it is doing thanks to its representational skills or qualia. This paper will give an innovative definition of qualia and their function in the emergence of consciousness: we will need to complete the picture by including the psychological dimension best represented in the western tradition by Jung and by Buddhist practices in the East, where the brain is considered a sensory organ on a par with the other five ones. The mind is the brain’s quale in the act of knowing. DMR Sekhar 17:46, 23 September 2009 (UTC) Unified Evolution Theory John H. Patrick The origin and evolution of life is necessitated by natural law. Energy throughput is maximized and entropy increases overall in nature, which inevitably results in life forms that increase in complexity and intelligence over time. The origin of life is not a random occurrence in the universe. It is not an “accident of nature” as many suggest. On the contrary, the origin and evolution of life is mandated by the same natural laws that account for the evolutionary development of the universe itself. In order to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics to an even greater measure, highly ordered products of nature (“exceptions” to the second law…) become favored because their end products are living systems which accelerate the rate of occurrence of the second law overall. Examples include the endergonic coupled-pair reactions that convert energy to the useable chemical form in order to produce the molecules needed for the cell structure of organisms, which ultimately lead to living systems such as animals and humans, who release entropic bi-products into the universe at a higher rate than non-living substances. The transition from “highly ordered” to “self ordered” and further to “self programming” is a continuation of the same process; driven by the second law (in the net—overall construct); but also driven by another concept; one that predicts that complex systems will behave in such a fashion as to facilitate an ever-increasing throughput of energy. Nature utilizes the “coupling” of these two processes; 1) Increased net—overall entropy AND 2) Increased net—overall energy throughput. The self-programming (negentropic) properties produce a net—overall increase in entropy; which “couples” with the property of increased net—overall energy throughput, resulting in self-programming living systems, which accelerate the two coupled processes even further. The findings of particle physics tend to support the notion of increasing energy—throughput as a property of nature. Authors such as Richard Feynman, Brian Greene, and Lisa Randall, who are leading theoretical physicists, have written extensive books (in layman’s language) on numerous topics of modern physics, including several on particle physics. The principles and examples explained in these manuscripts are interpreted by the author of this writing, to support these conclusions. Evolution: An alternate view Evolution of Life is a unique problem for science. The distinction between observer and observed blurs into a minefield of ambiguities as life studies its own past. Evolution has created minds that are capable of looking at themselves. Natural history of minds and ‘knowing’ should be an integral part of evolution studies. Fossil records, genetic variation and natural selection are important, but a closer look at the mechanism of knowing is even more important. The right way to study objective knowledge is to look at our own evolutionary history. Life existed on earth for 3.5 billion years without the division of observer from observed. Emergence of self-aware humans challenged this primitive unity. Knowledge became objective or independent of knower. A new way of comprehending reality came into existence. The success of objective knowledge has created an illusion that it is the only valid way of comprehension. This is a grave mistake. A truly scientific worldview based on evolution must recognize pre-rational modes of comprehension. A series of ‘tools of comprehension’ must have evolved in nature; rational minds being the latest addition to this collection. Nature is inherently creative and biological evolution is driven by nature’s creativity. Creativity (or universal Mind) manifests as individual rational mind in human beings. Universe is comprehensible to man because creativity is its building block and the knower is measuring up the universe with his own creativity in the act of objective knowing. Relationship between rational mind and its substrate is the key to understand human condition.. Pineal body as multipotent system OP jangir et al The pineal gland was called the “third eye” by ancient people. It was thought to have mystical powers. During the course of phylogenetic development, the function of pineal complex under goes a transition from that of a photoreceptive organ to an endocrine organ. It is now considered as unique multipotent organ. It has the capability of transformation into different organs like retina, lens and muscle fibers in culture medium .In our previous study (jangir et al, 2005) complete “median third eye” was found to develop from pineal gland of external gill stage tadpoles of toad, Bufo melanostictus. There have been several reports of muscle differentiation of cells derived from pineal body .Oculopotency of pineal cells may be relevant to the fact that the pineal body is an eye like organ in lower vertebrates before its conversion to an endocrine organ in higher vertebrates like mammals . In the present experiment we have studied the multipotentiality of pineal cells in culture medium under the influence of Vitamin A and Ascorbic acid .The results showed that Vitamin A accelerates the ‘oculopotency’ (transdifferentiation of pineal cells of late state tadpoles into lens –lentogenic ability) whereas, Ascorbic acid was found to increase the percentage of muscle fiber formation and nerve cells in culture medium .Thus the pineal gland of young tadpoles is considered to be a typical multipotent system. The basic question that comes in our brain is where do we come from and how did we get where we are today? Geneticists and researcher have now discovered the human lineages of the world descended from 10 sons of a genetic Adam and 18 daughters of Eve. DNA studies point out that all modern humans share a common female ancestor who resided in Africa about 140,000 years ago, and all men share a common male ancestor who lived in Africa about 60,000 years ago. The mtDNA based studies suggest that all modern era humans descend from a group of African ancestors who near about 60,000 to 65,000 years ago initiated their astonishing journey (1) . Cavalli-Sforza group by analysis of chromosome 21 markers and Y- chromosome also support the African dispersal theory (2) , and in particular, other nuclear and mtDNA markers indicate eastern Africa as the origin of both African and Eurasian expansions (3) . Indian Social Groups The story of ancestry of Indians is fascinating. The caste system in India is very old and its emergence is generally correlated with the appearance of the Aryans. Rigveda the Aryan religious book mentions of four varnas, viz Brahman, Rajanya, Vaisya and Sudra. This division was based on individual’s profession and duties, Brahmins, the priests or spiritual class, Rajanya (later mentioned as Kshatriya), the ruling class, Vaishya, the merchants and farmers; and Shudras, the servants. India, the mother of a billion people consists of 4693 communities with numerous of endogamous groups, 325 functioning languages among that fifteen are present on its paper bill and 25 scripts. We know it very well that India has served as a major corridor for the dispersal of human beings that started from Africa (4) . In India the first systematic survey of human variation was conducted by professor DN Majumdar of Lucknow University in united province present day Uttar Pradesh and later in Bengal (5) . Santachiara and his team from Italy by using RFLP of mtDNA showed that people of Punjab are more closer to caucasoid than south or Andhra Pradesh people (6) . Recently Bamshad’s group used five different set of data i.e. mtDNA HVR1 (hyper variable region 1) sequence, mtDNA RSPs, Y-chromosome STRs (Short-Tandem Repeats), Y-chromosome biallelic polymorphisms, and autosomal Alu polymorphisms to support that how Indian castes are related to European populations as one moves from lower to middle to upper caste populations. They showed that Y-chromosome STR data do not exhibit a closer affinity to Asians for each caste group. Upper castes are pretty close to Europeans than to Asians, middle castes are evenly far from the European and Asian while lower castes are closer to Asians. Y-chromosome biallelic polymorphism data suggest that upper castes are more close to European than lower caste (7) . Bamshad’s group concluded that contemporary Hindu Indians are of proto-Asian origin with West Eurasian admixture. The main limitation of Bamshad’s study is that the study area was restricted to one geographical region namely Vizag in Andhra Pradesh. More recently Reich and Lalji group have examined 560,132 autosomal SNPs in 132 Indian samples from 25 groups. These groups reside in fourteen states and one union territory (Andaman and Nicobar) of India from Kashmir to Kerala. Among 25 groups five belong to upper caste, six groups belong to lower castes, one group belongs to middle caste, ten groups belong to tribal and remaining two belong to hunter gatherer. Most of the groups fall to Indo-European or Dravidian language family. The research shows that most Indian populations are genetic admixtures of two ancient but genetically divergent groups, which each contributing around 39-71% of the DNA to most present day Indians (8) . By principal component analysis (PCA) David and his team showed that siddi are an outlying group which is closely related with west Africans (YRI). Nyshi and Ao Naga who generally speak a tibeto-burman language are closely related to East Asians while Andamani did not show any closeness with Asian or Europeans. With the help of f3 and f4 ancestry estimation they developed a model which correlates the history of Indian and non Indian groups. In this model pathan, vaishya, meghawal and bhil are modeled as mixture of hypothetical Ancestral North Indian (ANI) and Ancestral South Indian (ASI). They also showed that ANI form a clade with Europeans (CEU) while Onge form a calde with ASI. Lalji singh group has already shown that Onge tribe doesn’t show any ancestry with population outside India within last 50,000 year but it shares some ancestry with Indian tribal population. They also suggested that founder effects are responsible for an even burden of recessive diseases in Indian population than consanguinity. That’s why recessive hereditary disease like The Madras pattern of Motor Neuron Disease (MMND), which is prevalent in the Chittor-Tirupati area and MYBPC3 mutation is only present in Indian population (9) . In concise way we can say that modern day India is mixture of two group whom Reich et al term as “Ancestral North Indian” (ANI) population that is genetically close to Central Asians, Europeans, and Middle Easterners, and an “Ancestral South Indian” (ASI) population that is not close to any large contemporary group outside the Indian subcontinent. The present day genetic diversity of India is maintained by caste system that follows endogamy (marriage within the group) which is common among Indians. Perhaps endogamy is one of the reason why recessive diseases are prevalent in Indian social group. Autosomal recessive disease means that the both the recessive gene is located on one of the autosomes. This means that males and females have equal probability to affect from this disease. Recessive hereditary diseases are seen among Indians who have descended from a small group of founder individuals. Promotion of inter caste marriages could helps us to abolish these diseases. The future study may also require more data set from a much wider array of populations, including a large sampling of tribal populations and Tibeto-Burman speakers to understand their specific contributions who are more closer to Han Chinese group (CHB) of China. We can also predict, there will be a lot of recessive diseases in India that will be different in each social group further future research also require to identify these diseases and its genetic mapping. 1. Doron M. Behar, Saharon Rosset, Jason Blue-Smith, Oleg Balanovsky, Shay Tzur, David Comas, R. John Mitchell, Lluis Quintana-Murci, Chris Tyler-Smith, R. Spencer Wells (2007) The Genographic Project public participation mitochondrial DNA database.PLoS Genet 3:e104 2. Jin L., Underhill P.A., Doctor V., Davis R.W., Shen P., Cavalli-Sforza L.L. and. Oefner P.J (1999) Distribution of haplotypes from a chromosome 21 region distinguishes multiple prehistoric human migrations, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 96 pp. 3796–3800. 3. Watson E., Forster P., Richards M. and Bandelt H.-J., (1997) Mitochondrial footprints of human expansions in Africa, American Journal of Human Genetics 61 pp. 691–704 4. Cann RL (2001) Genetic clues to dispersal in human populations: retracing the past from the present. Science 291:1742–1748. 5. Majumdar, D. N. & Rao, C. R. (1960) Race Elements in Bengal: a Quantitative Study (Asia Publishing House). 6. Passarino G, Semino O, Bernini LF, Santachiara Benerecetti AS Pre-Caucasoid and (1996) Caucasoid genetic features of the Indian population, revealed by mtDNA polymorphisms. Am J Hum Genet 59:927–934 7. Bamshad M., Kivisild T., Watkins W.S., Dixon M.E., Ricker C.E., Rao B.B., Naidu J.M., Prasad B.V.R., Reddy P.G., Rasanayagam A., Papiha S.S., Villems R., Redd AJ, Hammer M.F., Nguyen S.V., Carroll M.L., Batzer M.A. and Jorde L.B., (2001) Genetic evidence on the origins of indian caste populations, Genome Res 11 pp. 994–1004. 8. Reich D., Thangaraj K., Patterson N., Price A. L. and Singh L. (2009)Reconstructing Indian population history Nature p489-494 9. Dhandapany, P. S., Sadayappan, S., Xue, Y., Powell, G. T., Rani, D. S., Nallari, P., Rai, T. S., Khullar, M., Soares, P., Bahl, A., Tharkan, J. M., Vaideeswar, P., Rathinavel, A., Narasimhan, C., Ayapati, D. R., Ayub, Q., Mehdi, S. Q., Oppenheimer, S., Richards, M. B., Price, A. L., Patterson, N., Reich, D., Singh, L., Tyler-Smith, C., and Thangaraj, K. (2009) A common Cardiac Myosin Binding Protein C variant associated with cardiomyopathies in South Asia. Nature Genet. 41, 187–191

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Ancient Baalbek, lying in the shadows of the Cedars of Lebanon near the headwaters of the Leontes and Orontes rivers, bears a distinction few cities would dispute and none would envy: it has probably endured more devastation than any other city in the Middle East. It has been repeatedly assaulted by fire, flood, earthquake, drought, pestilence, hunger, treason, the pillage of a long procession of savage hordes, and time's erosion through 2,000 years. Yet, like the mythical Egyptian bird said to live for 500 years, then to immolate itself on a pyre of aromatic woods, its hot ashes giving birth to a young phoenix, Baalbek, century after tragic century, regenerated itself on its own smoking ruins, and stoically awaited the next hammer blow of fate. It was never far away. A fair sample of the misfortunes of this Lebanese city, for example, might include the outrage of Tughtakin, Emir of Damascus, on hearing the rumor that Baalbek was trading with his enemies, the Crusaders. He promptly set out at the head of his horsemen and in 1110 ground the walled city into submission. In 1136 his co-religionist Prince Zengi of Aleppo invested the city with a large army, brought up 14 powerful siege catapults, and bombarded the defenders day and night for three months with huge stone projectiles. The dazed survivors at last unlocked the city gates, yielded up their governor to be flayed alive for his obstinacy, and braced themselves for the orgy of rapine that was the price of surrender in those days of casual cruelty. Still numb from the onslaught, Baalbek suffered a series of disastrous earthquakes in 1139, 1157 and 1170, in which thousands were entombed in their stone-and-mud dwellings. Exactly a decade before the third quake struck, Genghis Khan's grandson Hulagu swept in off the hot Syrian desert with his Mongol cavalry, battered down Baalbek's fortifications, and slew everything that breathed. Restored and repopulated two decades later by the Mamlukc ruler Qalun, it was flooded and almost washed away around 1320. Rounding out a century of misery, Baalbek was wiped out yet again in the year 1400 by Tamerlane the Conqueror, en route to burn Damascus and to construct a pyramid of 90,000 severed heads on the leveled site of Baghdad. After such depredations of nature and man—and Baalbek was successively plundered or ruled by the Macedonians, Romans, Byzantine Greeks, Omayyads, Abbasids, Egyptian Toulounids, the Abbasids again, Fatamids, Crusaders, Mamelukes, the Mongols twice, Turks, Maanides, French, and finally the Lebanese themselves—a natural surmise would be that Baalbek today must be little more than a heap of dust and rubble. Far from it. In fact, only a century after Tamerlane had done his worst, an Arab writer was able to describe Baalbek as a "city possessing a strong fortress with columns erected by Solomon, mosques, schools, fine streets, baths, gardens, rivers, all of which it would take too long to describe"—which he then proceeded to do. And today, Baalbek still possesses the most magnificent structures surviving the Roman Empire, unexcelled in size and elegance even by the remaining monuments in Rome itself. Ironically, the massive grandeur of the ruins at Baalbek have all but obliterated their raison d'etre, the greater glory of the pagan gods which had been worshipped on that spot beyond the memory of man. So little is known of the pre-Roman temple area on which the mighty Roman edifices stand that even the origin of the name "Baalbek" is a matter of lively footnote-war. Some scholars contend that Baalbek comes from the Phoenician words baal—Sun God or Lord (as in the name of the Carthaginian general Hannibal, "The Favor of the Lord") and Beka'a, the name of the high, fertile plateau between the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountain ranges where it lies. Others maintain that baal has been united with bek, the Phoenician word for "city," which is precisely the translation the Greeks gave to the name Baalbek centuries later—Heliopolis. Whether the ancients called it the "Lord of the Beka'a" or the "City of the Sun," Baalbek was doubtless the center of a cult built around the veneration of the Syrian god Baal-Hadad, whom the French antiquarian Dussand described as the "God of Thunder, Tempest, Torrential Rains ... who assures good crops and the perpetuity of springs." Baal-Hadad's consort was Atargatis, and according to the animistic beliefs of the people, who worshipped trees, hewn posts, animals and stone cairns as the "abode of the gods," the association of these male and female divinities was the source of all fecundity and life. The details of the pagan rituals are obscure, but there are indications that in early times human sacrifice was practiced, and ritual prostitution was certainly a feature of the pre-Christian cults. In the absence of any basis of solid fact on which to reconstruct Baalbek's pre-Roman past, a mass of plausible conjecture and outright guesswork have had to substitute for history. Yet repetition and their very longevity have given such speculations a certain specious authority, and until archeologists have burrowed deeper among the ruins, an aura of romantic inaccuracy will inevitably surround Baalbek's beginnings. According to one Arab legend, for instance, Baalbek was one of the world's earliest cities; the late Maronite Patriarch Istfan Doweihi likewise noted that "tradition states that the fortress of Baalbek is the most ancient building in the world. Cain, the son of Adam, built it in the year 133 of the creation, during a fit of raving madness. He gave it the name of his son Enoch and peopled it with giants who were punished for their iniquities by the Flood," This engaging story possibly influenced the Arab historian Zakaria El-Qazwini, who asserted that at Baalbek "one can find the castle of Solomon, a building dedicated to Abraham, and a convent of Saint Elijah." If nothing else, such legends suggest Baalbek's great antiquity, but its history properly begins with its capture by Alexander the Great, on his way from Egypt to defeat King Darius of Persia on the plains of Gaugamela. lieliopolis, as the town was forthwith named, became after Alexander's death a provincial administrative center ruled in turn by the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, before being conquered by Pompey at the head of Roman legions in 63 B.C. The Romans restored the name Baalbek, and cannily traded on the pagan superstitions of the Syrians by recognizing and supporting the local dieties in return for peaceful submission to Roman rule. The names of the gods themselves, however, were subtly transformed by the Romans to correspond with those in the state religion of Rome: Baal-Hadad became Jupiter, the nature goddess Atargatis became Venus, and Mercury, who seems to have no local Semitic counterpart, was added to the Roman pantheon to complete what scholars have come to call the "Heliopolitan Triad." The Baalbek of Roman times must have been a welcome haven to the battle-stained troops of Pompey. Sheltered fropn Mediterranean sea marauders by precipitous Mount Lebanon, from the chariot-mounted Persian hordes by the Anti-Lebanon mountains on the East, Baalbek under Roman administration was an island of peace and commerce at the northern tip of the Beka'a plateau. Being midway between the Mediterranean port of Beirut and the desert capital of Damascus, it dominated that vital east-west lifeline of commerce; in like manner did it straddle the north-south caravan routes, which swung up from the frankincense country of Saba (Biblical Sheba) through central Arabia, to Nabataean Petra in what is now Jordan, thence through Baalbek to Palmyra, Asia Minor and Europe. More than half a mile above sea level, the air in Baalbek was clean and crisp, mercifully free of that miasma which the ancients believed causes the dreaded malaria which decimated the selfsame legions in Egypt, Cyprus and Rome itself. At Baalbek was a perpetual spring, the Ras El-Ain, which could sustain the city through a siege, however protracted, and the valley—75 miles long and four to six miles wide—grew an abundance of fruit and grain for the city's large garrison. Only rarely did the Romans find a site more naturally adapted to their military, commercial and political designs, and they determined to make their conquest permanent by constructing there a religious center of such strength and majesty that it would be immune from the assaults of armed multitudes and infidels alike. They very nearly succeeded, and parts of the buildings they erected have outlived all their many conquerors. Started at the beginning of the Christian era, when paganism was actually on the wane, the temples of Baalbek took more than three centuries to complete. The Emperors Hadrian, Trajan, Antoninus Pious, Septimus Severus, Gordianus, Caracalla—all these and others involved themselves in the construction of the temples, whose proportions were rivaled in ancient times only by the uninspiring, unimaginative bulk of the pyramids. Most of the building stone came from the environs of Baalbek itself, but some of the columns were apparently quarried on the Egyptian shores of the Red Sea, hauled by sledges to the Nile, transhipped from Alexandria to Lebanon, and dragged over the mountains to Baalbek. Such logistical marvels are entirely consistent with the heroic dimensions of Baalbek. The Temple of Jupiter was under construction from A.D. 10 until 249, a period easily exceeding that of the United States' nationhood. The temple's main court stands some 70 feet above the surrounding plain, and is more than 380 feet on each side. The staircase to the temple itself is 175 feet wide and is built in three separate stages. Its Corinthian columns, which originally numbered 54, are made of three limestone drums which were held together by cores of iron or bronze set in lead; each is 7½ feet in diameter and 65 feet high from base to capital (by contrast, those of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. are but 44 feet high). On three sides of the temple is a terrace built of gigantic blocks of stone, three of which, called the "Trilithon" by awestruck provincials, comprise a single course of the west wall. Each measures 63 by 14 by 11 feet and weighs some 800 tons. The buildings at Baalbek have moved Sir Mortimer Wheeler, one of the world's foremost archeologists, to comment that: "The crowning gift of the Roman Empire to architecture was magnitude. The 'little' temple of the so-called acropolis of Roman Baalbek is bigger than the Pantheon in Rome. The temples of Baalbek owe nothing of their quality to such new-fangled aids as concrete. They stand passively upon the largest hewn stones in the world, and some of their columns are the tallest from antiquity." Sir Mortimer also praises the temple's "slender Corinthian columns carried up to an encrusted architrave, through two stages of niches with semi-circular and pedimental heads, frames for vanished statuary; its dramatic dais on which stood the figure of the deity beneath a baldachin that was certainly of equal splendor. Look too at the quality of all this finery, its superb carving, and the sensibility with which it is gently disciplined by the rigid frames and flutings. Mere is a masterpiece. Baalbek remains one of the very great monuments in the history of European architecture." The Temple of Jupiter, being the largest of Baalbek's buildings, has been the favored target of vandals down through the years. Some columns were pulled down by plunderers merely for the sake of the iron-and-bronze cores which held them together. Others were felled by earthquakes. But since an earthquake bowled over three of the columns in 1759 nothing—not even the heavy tremor of 1956 which wrecked scores of Lebanese homes—has been powerful enough to disturb the remaining six, which are so familiar a national institution that they even appear on the country's one-lira banknotes. Luckier still has been the edifice usually called the "Temple of Bacchus," which archeologists believe was actually consecrated to Venus. Small only by comparison to the nearby Temple of Jupiter, the Temple of Bacchus measures 225 by 110 feet, has a portico bordered by 15 62-foot columns on the long sides and eight on the ends, and a monumental staircase of 33 steps which leads to one of the most gigantic portals ever built. Forty-two and a half feet high, the gate to the temple is carved on jamb and lintel with egg-and-dart designs, flowing patterns of geometrical figures, garlands, vines, and crowds of nymphs, pans, cupids, fawns and sprites in riotous bacchanal. On the high ceiling of the adjacent porticos are incised scenes from classical mythology: Vulcan with his hammer, Diana and her sheaf of arrows, Tyche with a cornucopia, Ceres with ears of corn, and Bacchus with a wreath of grapes. The figure of Bacchus also appears within the temple in the holy of holies, in two separate sculptured representations flanking the now-empty niche where the figure of the temple's god reposed. The presence of Bacchus' statues, together with the presumed removal of the divinity Venus, accounts for the temple being wrongly ascribed to Bacchus. Further confusing the question of identification, there is another building called the Temple of Venus, quite different in character from Baalbek's other monuments, which stands near the entrance of the acropolis. It too has a monumental staircase, but the plan of the temple is round instead of rectangular, and unlike the rest, faces north instead of east. What remains is of modest dimensions, its curvilineal form certainly suggestive of a structure dedicated to a goddess rather than a god. Yet the argument for calling it the Temple of Venus is somewhat thin. As British archeologist G. Lankester Harding points out, the effaced figures have "been interpreted as being the dove of Venus, Venus rising from a shell and so on," but their damaged condition makes this interpretation doubtful, and in any case "the 'dove' really does look rather more like an eagle." Considerably more puzzling than the identity of the structures that remain is the silence of history on Baalbek itself. Coins of the reign of Philip the Arab bear a representation of the Temple of Jupiter, and both John Malala of Antioch in the 6th century and Paschal the Chronicler in the 7th describe the city, but most other contemporary historians fail even to mention its name. Even Gibbon, in his 3,000-page masterpiece on the Roman decline and fall, which covers the period and area with unparalleled thoroughness, makes but one passing reference to Baalbek, in describing the progress of Tamerlane through Syria. Aside from medieval war reportage, Baalbek was little noted nor long remembered until recent times. Church history informs us that the Temple of Venus (that of the "doves") was transformed into a church dedicated to St. Barbara by the first Christian Emperor of Rome, Constantine the Great. Somewhat later, the Emperor Theodosius ordered the systematic destruction of Baalbek and other pagan temples throughout the Roman Empire, but to what extent the present damage may be attributed to this edict, to earthquakes, and to later man-made havoc, no one can say. The Christian hegemony over Baalbek was, in any case, historically fleeting, lasting from 330 until Islam conquered the whole of Syria in 637. Churches at Baalbek were promptly converted to mosques, and even the red marble columns removed from Baalbek to adorn the Hagia Sophia by order of the Emperor Justinian, became Moslem property with the capture of Constantinople in 1453. The Moslem conquest deprived Baalbek of its significance as a religious center, for Islam's holy cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem completely overshadowed it. Perhaps with a small sigh of relief, Baalbek settled down to the relative peace of a comfortable obscurity during the long (almost 500 years) reign of the Ottoman Turks. It might still be all but forgotten had not an energetic group of Lebanese, determined to remind the world of its ancient glories, created an annual festival of music and drama among the ruins. Modest at first but increasingly ambitious, the Baalbek International Festival now attracts tourists as well as artists from five continents every summer. The program of 1964, which included in the same three-month season, the Comedie Francaise, the Royal Ballet—with Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev—and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra is indicative of the variety of programming which is the Festival's special pride. On festival evenings under the stars (it never rains in Baalbek during the summer), the road across the mountains from Beirut 53 miles away, is a sinuous ribbon of light as long lines of car speed to the Festival. Those who leave early enough sometimes stop briefly just before Baalbek to see the "Stone of the Pregnant Woman," so called because of its reputed power to confer fertility upon women who stand on it. The largest stone ever cut, it outweighs, at some 2,000 tons, World War II ocean-going destroyers. Because, apparently, its architects despaired of ever moving it, the stone lays forlornly where it was quarried. Plainly visible from the quarry are the six illuminated columns of the Temple of Jupiter rising out of the Beka'a plain, and the concert-goers hurry toward them through the gathering dusk of Baalbek in time to make the 8:30 curtain. Their steps take them through an eerie, dimly lit passageway 5¼ yards wide and 130 yards long, through which in pagan times sacrificial processions moved, to emerge in the temple area where the concerts and plays are presented. Baalbek's monumental setting dwarfs spectator, who cannot but reflect on the insubstantiality of his being and the brevity of his span, when confronted with the stone evidence of Baalbek's ageless endurance around him. The feeling is eerily fortified during the last scene of. Amphitryon in which Jupiter, having through impersonation enjoyed both the life and the wife of Amphitryon, General of the Thebans, prepares to ascend once more to Mount Olympus. Scene opens with a roll of thunder across the darkened Temple of Bacchus, whose stairway serves as a stage. Far away to the right, on the high wall of the Main Court, the figure of Jupiter suddenly appears in a burst of light, framed against the columns of the Temple of Jupiter in the distant background. His amplified voice booms out: "Arise from the dark sorrows that have engulfed your heart! Let calming waters quench the fires seething within you ... For I shall make you the envy of the world. So boldly flatter yourself on your future good fortune; The word of Jupiter is the decree of destiny!" Hearing such resounding sentiments, is it a wonder that the theatergoer insensibly imagines that they are addressed to indomitable Baalbek itself, or wistfully hopes that in some mysterious fashion they may possess the power of prophecy? Daniel da Cruz, a correspondent and novelist, is a frequent contributor to Aramco World.

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I’d like to begin by emphasizing that carbohydrate restriction has helped many people lose body fat and improve their metabolic health. Although it doesn’t work for everyone, there is no doubt that carbohydrate restriction causes fat loss in many, perhaps even most obese people. For a subset of people, the results can be very impressive. I consider that to be a fact at this point, but that’s not what I’ll be discussing here. What I want to discuss is a hypothesis. It’s the idea, championed by Gary Taubes, that carbohydrate (particularly refined carbohydrate) causes obesity by elevating insulin, thereby causing increased fat storage in fat cells. To demonstrate that I’m representing this hypothesis accurately, here is a quote from his book Good Calories, Bad Calories: This alternative hypothesis of obesity constitutes three distinct propositions. First, as I’ve said, is the basic proposition that obesity is caused by a regulatory defect in fat metabolism, and so a defect in the distribution of energy rather than an imbalance of energy intake and expenditure. The second is that insulin plays a primary role in this fattening process, and the compensatory behaviors of hunger and lethargy. The third is that carbohydrates, and particularly refined carbohydrates– and perhaps the fructose content as well, and thus perhaps the amount of sugars consumed– are the prime suspects in the chronic elevation of insulin; hence, they are the ultimate cause of common obesity. There are three parts to this idea. I’ll discuss them each separately. Part I: A Defect of Fat Metabolism? The first part of this hypothesis states that energy balance is not the ultimate cause of fat gain, it’s the proximal cause. That is, Taubes is not disagreeing with the first law of thermodynamics: he understands that fat accumulation depends on how much energy is entering the body vs. leaving it. However, he feels that the entire industrialized world didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to eat more calories, therefore something must be driving the increased calorie consumption. He cited the research of Drs. Jules Hirsch and Rudy Leibel, various underfeeding and overfeeding studies, lipectomy studies, and evidence from genetically obese rodents, to demonstrate that body fatness is biologically regulated rather than being the passive result of voluntary food intake and exercise behaviors. He then advances the idea that it’s an alteration in this body fat regulatory system that is behind obesity. This may sound familiar because I’ve written about it several times on this blog. So far, so good. This is where he should have mentioned leptin signaling, and the circuits in the brain that regulate body fat mass, which would have taken the book in a more compelling direction. According to literally thousands of publications spanning nearly two centuries, the brain is the only organ that is known to regulate body fat mass in humans and other animals– neither fat tissue itself, nor the insulin-secreting pancreas have the ability to regulate body fat mass as far as we currently know. Leptin is the system that Drs. Jules Hirsch and Rudy Leibel have shown in carefully controlled human studies is responsible for the metabolic defect Taubes alluded to (1). It’s also the system that is mutated in the genetically obese rodents he discusses (2, 3). Yet it receives no mention in the book. This is a fork in the road, where Taubes discards a solid hypothesis in favor of a shaky one. Part II: The Role of Insulin in Body Fatness Let me explain what the primary role of insulin is. It is to manage circulating concentrations of nutrients (principally glucose and fatty acids, the body’s two main fuels), keeping them within a fairly narrow range, and coordinating the metabolic shift from predominantly burning one fuel source to the other. Any time insulin suppresses fat oxidation, it increases carbohydrate oxidation by an equivalent amount. That is what it is designed to do. Insulin suppresses the release of fat from fat cells (via hormone-sensitive lipase), and increases the transport of fat into fat cells (via lipoprotein lipase) and this is the crux of Taubes’s basic argument in support of the idea that insulin causes fat accumulation. It’s so simple, you might think someone had already thought of it. In fact, many people have thought of it, but most of them discarded it because it doesn’t fit with a variety of basic observations, as I will explain. As we are all on the same page (I hope) that the first law of thermodynamics applies to humans, for insulin to cause fat gain, it must either increase energy intake, decrease energy expenditure, or both. Let’s see if that’s true. Let’s look at the effect of insulin on food intake. To keep it as physiological as possible, let’s compare satiety and subsequent food intake among foods that raise insulin to varying degrees. If calories and protein are kept the same, high-carbohydrate meals cause equal or greater satiety than high-fat meals, and equal or less subsequent food intake, despite a much larger insulin response (4, 5, 6, 7). Due to the insulin-stimulating effect of protein, low-carbohydrate high-protein meals can sometimes stimulate insulin to an equal or greater degree than high-carbohydrate meals, yet even in these cases higher insulin release is associated with increased satiety (8). Experiments in which investigators feed volunteers protein foods that stimulate insulin to different degrees show that the amount of satiety is positively correlated with the degree of insulin release (9), which is not consistent with the idea that insulin stimulates food intake. In the long term, low-carbohydrate diets suppress appetite in many overweight/obese people, however this is unlikely to be related to insulin. If elevated insulin leads to increased fat storage and increased food intake, then experimentally elevating insulin in animals should replicate this (since insulin acts on fat cells in the same manner in humans and non-human mammals). However, this is not observed. Insulin injections at a dose that does not cause frank hypoglycemia do not increase food intake, and in some cases they even reduce it (48). Chronically increasing circulating insulin reduces food intake and body weight in non-diabetic animals, without causing illness, contrary to what this idea would predict (49, 50). If anything, insulin constrains food intake and body fatness, and research indicates that this action occurs via the brain. Insulin infused into the brains of baboons causes a suppression of appetite and fat loss, which is consistent with the fact that insulin and leptin have overlapping functions in the brain (10, 11). Knocking out insulin receptors in the brain leads to increased fat mass in rodents, suggesting that its normal function involves constraining fat mass (12). Insulin is also co-secreted with amylin, which suppresses food intake and body weight (13). This is why insulin is viewed by many obesity researchers as an anti-obesity hormone, not an obesity hormone. Now let’s look at energy expenditure. If insulin is causing increased fat accumulation due to a decrease in energy expenditure (presumably because elevated insulin is locking fat away inside fat cells), then people with higher fasting insulin should have lower resting energy expenditure. Lucky for us, that hypothesis has been tested. At least two studies have shown that higher fasting insulin is associated with a higher resting energy expenditure, independent of body fatness, not a lower expenditure (14, 15). If anything, this is the opposite of what the hypothesis would predict. How about post-meal insulin spikes due to eating carbohydrate? A number of studies have consistently shown that under isocaloric controlled conditions, substantially different carbohydrate:fat ratios do not influence energy expenditure in any measurable way, even over long periods of time (16, 17). Therefore, if insulin doesn’t increase energy intake (if anything, the combination of insulin and amylin that the pancreas releases in response to carbohydrate decreases it), and doesn’t decrease energy expenditure, then how exactly is it supposed to cause energy accumulation in the body as fat? There is no energy fairy. Obese people are obese despite having higher fasting insulin, not because of it. The fact is, insulin spikes after meals temporarily decrease fat release from fat cells, but if you look at total 24 hour energy balance, insulin spikes, in conjunction with all the other hormones that are release in response to food ingestion, do not cause fat accumulation. This is exactly how you would expect the system to work if it were designed to constructively handle a wide variety of macronutrient ratios, which it is. Just as cholesterol did not evolve to give us heart attacks, insulin did not evolve to make us fat. This brings us to a core concept that Taubes fails to incorporate in his thinking: the idea that insulin signaling in fat tissue depends both on the concentration of insulin around, and on the sensitivity of cells to that insulin. In obesity, fat tissue is insulin resistant. How do I know? Because the fat tissue of obese people doesn’t suppress fatty acid release in response to experimentally elevated insulin or mixed meals as effectively as the fat tissue of a lean individual (18, 19). In fact, obese people release an equal or larger amount of fatty acids from their fat tissue than lean people under basal conditions as well (20, 21). If this is true, then why do they remain obese? It’s simple: the long-term rate of fat entering the fat cells is equal to the rate exiting, or higher. There is no defect in the ability of fat cells to release fat in obesity, the problem is that the fat that is released is not being oxidized (burned) at a rate that exceeds what is coming in from the diet, therefore it all ends up back in the fat tissue. While we’re on the subject, let’s address the idea of “internal starvation”. Taubes suggests that people overeat because they can’t access their fat stores due to elevated insulin. However, obese people have normal or elevated circulating free fatty acids and glucose (22, 23), so how is that possible? It’s not. The internal starvation model was interesting, if speculative, at the time it was proposed, however the evidence for it has simply failed to materialize. If anything, obesity is a condition of “internal excess”. Let’s also address the claim that obese people don’t necessarily eat more than lean people. Food records are notoriously inaccurate, however there is at least one way to measure total energy intake in a precise and unbiased manner. It is called the “doubly labeled water method” (DLW). DLW studies have shown that after controlling for confounding factors (gender, age, physical activity), obese people almost invariably expend more, and consume more calories than lean people (24, 25). Weight stable obese people have a higher energy flux out of fat cells, and a higher metabolic rate, but it is not enough to overcome the higher calorie intake that is also observed (26, 27). That has been repeatedly confirmed and it is simply a fact at this point. Therefore, the insulin hypothesis is not consistent with basic thermodynamics, and it’s not consistent with research on the biological functions of insulin. Obese people do not have a defect in the ability to release fat from fat cells and burn it, to the contrary. They release more fat from fat cells than lean people, and burn more of it. However, this is compensated for by a higher energy intake, and a higher rate of fat incorporation into fat cells that counterbalances the increased expenditure. The fat cells of obese people do not suffer from excessive insulin signaling, to the contrary, the evidence suggests that their fat cells are insulin resistant and therefore insulin signaling is reduced. This shows that insulin does not cause obesity by acting directly on fat cells to cause fat storage. To understand obesity, we have to understand what causes increased food intake, and that factor is not insulin. Part IIB: Insights From Human Genetics Genetic studies can give us important clues to the biological processes underlying common diseases. For example, common genetic variants associated with type 2 diabetes risk tend to be in genes that regulate the insulin-secreting pancreas (38). This tells us, as one would expect, that pancreatic function is important in diabetes. What does genetics tell us about the mechanisms of obesity? There are a handful of rare single-gene mutations in humans that lead to severe obesity. Every single one that has been discovered to date that does not also result in deformity (nondysmorphic monogenetic obesity) is in the leptin signaling pathway (39), and even those that do result in deformity all influence how the brain regulates body fatness, suggesting that body fatness is normally regulated by the brain, not by fat tissue. From a 2009 review paper (40): There are now at least 20 single gene disorders that clearly result in an autosomal form of human obesity. Notably, so far all these disorders affect the central [i.e., brain] sensing and control of energy balance. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) give us a different perspective– they look for common genetic variants that associate with higher or lower body mass index (BMI) in the general population. These are not mutations that make genes non-functional, they are simply common differences between genes that in some cases subtly influence their activity. Of the numerous common gene variants that have been found to associate with BMI variability, and whose function is known, the large majority are expressed in the brain, particularly the hypothalamus, and some are in the leptin signaling pathway (41, 42). That’s why these papers often make statements like this (43): …when we look at the information gleaned from the past 15 years of molecular genetic activity we cannot avoid concluding that, as much as type 2 diabetes is clearly a disease in which pancreatic beta-cell dysfunction is a critical element, obesity is a condition in which inherent genetic predisposition is dominated by the brain. And this (44): Many of our associated loci highlight genes that are highly expressed in the brain (and several particularly so in the hypothalamus), consistent with an important role for CNS [central nervous system] processes in weight regulation. If insulin action on fat cells is a dominant factor in obesity, why don’t genes linked to insulin signaling show up at the top of the list in these studies? There are enough proteins that regulate insulin secretion in the pancreas and insulin signaling in fat cells that one would expect genetic variability in these genes to turn up frequently if they were important regulators of fat mass, but instead the list is dominated by genes that relate to the brain, and leptin signaling in particular. This is consistent with a huge body of literature implicating the brain in body fat mass regulation and the development of obesity. Part III: Carbohydrate, Particularly Refined Carbohydrate and Sugar, Cause Fat Accumulation by Increasing Insulin? I’ve already demonstrated that it makes no sense to invoke insulin as a mechanism between carbohydrate consumption and body fatness. Another problem with the hypothesis is a thing called the insulinogenic index (II). The II is simply a measure of how much eating a food increases insulin, per unit calorie (28). It turns out, it doesn’t correspond with the carbohydrate content of the food very well. In particular, protein-rich foods such as beef can increase insulin secretion as much as certain starch foods such as pasta, or more. High-protein diets, as many of you know, aid with weight loss. Some have suggested that this is because of glucagon release by the pancreas in response to protein. That may well play a role, but if we are going to invoke glucagon, then aren’t we acknowledging that other signals besides insulin play an important role in this process? That’s the larger point I’m trying to make here– you can’t just look at insulin, you have to consider amylin, glucagon, GLP-1, ghrelin, leptin, stomach distension, and all of the other short- and long-term signals that are activated in response to nutrient ingestion and changes in body fat mass. These collectively regulate food intake and long-term body fatness via the brain. The other problem is that refined and unrefined carbohydrates often have a similar II. Pasta made from white and whole-grain wheat have the same II, and the same goes for white and whole-grain bread (29). Doughnuts and cookies are on par with whole grain bread. So post-meal insulin is not a compelling explanation for the potentially different effects of protein, unrefined carbohydrate, refined carbohydrate and sugar on body fatness. I think it’s likely that refined carbohydrate and sugar can contribute to obesity, but by what mechanism? Insulin is not a compelling explanation. Food reward/palatability is an alternative possibility that fits the evidence better. Another plausible hypothesis is reduced fiber and micronutrient density. But let’s forget about insulin for a minute. Without worrying about the mechanism, let’s simply consider the hypothesis that carbohydrate consumption per se causes body fat accumulation. At this point, I know some people will be insisting that Taubes is talking specifically about refined carbohydrate, not carbohydrate in general. Taubes does repeatedly suggest in GCBC that all carbohydrate is fattening, although refined carbohydrate is more fattening. Otherwise, why would he write “…carbohydrates, and particularly refined carbohydrates… are the ultimate cause of common obesity”, rather than simply stating “…refined carbohydrates… are the ultimate cause of common obesity”? This wording, used throughout CGBC, implies that all carbohydrate is fattening to some degree. There is also the example in GCBC of the Massas tribe fattening on unrefined sorghum, described below. If Taubes doesn’t think unrefined carbohydrate is fattening, then why does he recommend a low-carbohydrate diet rather that suggesting that people replace refined carbohydrate with unrefined carbohydrate? To address this hypothesis, first let’s find some cultures that have a very high carbohydrate intake and see how fat they are. Let’s start with a culture that eats more carbohydrate than any other I know: the New Guinea highland tribe at Tukisenta that was studied extensively in the 1960s and 70s. They ate 94.6% of their energy intake as carbohydrate, mostly from sweet potatoes, for a total calorie intake of 2,300 kcal/day in men and 1,770 kcal/day in women. Investigators found them to be fit, lean and muscular, with no sign of protein deficiency (Trowell and Burkitt. Western Diseases. 1981). West Nile district, Uganda, 1940s. The diet consisted of millet, cassava, corn, lentils, peanuts, bananas and vegetables (Trowell and Burkitt. Western Diseases. 1981). Despite food abundance, “in the 1940s it was quite unusual to see a stout man or woman.” “In recent years, however, a fair number of upper-class middle-aged West Nile women have begun to look rather stout, and some men have become very obese, especially those who hold lucrative posts and can purchase whatever food they like.” This corresponded with an increase in “sugar, cooking oils, milk, fish and meat” and a corresponding decrease in “home-grown starchy staple foods.” This same scenario has happened to hundreds, if not thousands of African communities whose traditional diets are very high in carbohydrate. Northern Cameroon, 1980s. The Massas tribe (also spelled Massa) is known for its overfeeding ritual called Guru Walla, which Taubes describes in GCBC: The Massa tribe of northern Cameroon fattens their males using both milk and a porridge made from sorghum, a corn-like grain that provides sweet syrup from the stalk. One man gained seventy-five pounds on a ceremonial binge. The average weight gain tends to be fifteen to twenty pounds using milk and porridge. The Massa are cattle herders and their staple diet is primarily milk. This fattening comes about by the addition of carbohydrates (sorghum) almost exclusively. Taubes states here that the typical diet is “primarily milk”, therefore by inference, low in carbohydrate. Let’s follow his reference and see what it says. It leads to a freely accessible paper by Drs. Igor de Garine and Georgius J.A. Koppert titled “Guru Fattening Sessions Among the Massa” (30). The Massas indeed herd cattle, but “their main use is not as food.” The typical diet (not during overfeeding) is described as containing 516 grams of carbohydrate per day, and only 32 grams of fat (Table VIII). The typical diet is 81% carbohydrate, and primarily based on sorghum, according to his reference. This account is consistent with other freely accessible references in respected peer-reviewed journals (31). These people are lean on their typical high-carbohydrate fare until they deliberately overconsume a mixture of sorghum and milk. Most of Asia, 20th century. Many Asian countries, including China, Japan, Taiwan and India, have a traditional diet that is very high in carbohydrate. In many cases, the dominant carbohydrate was white rice, a refined carbohydrate. Yet traditional Japanese, Chinese and Southern Indians eating mostly white rice were renowned for their leanness. Any plausible hypothesis of obesity needs to account for these observations. Kitava, 1990s. Dr. Staffan Lindeberg showed that the Kitavan diet is 69% carbohydrate, mostly from taro, breadfruit, sweet potatoes and cassava (32). Thus, their diet would have had a high glycemic load and high II. They also obtain 50 g/day of carbohydrate from fruit, most of which would presumably been sugar (unrefined). Yet there was no obesity on the island, and only a few individuals that were slightly overweight (33). Fasting serum insulin was low, consistent with other high-carbohydrate cultures. Dietary carbohydrate does not cause insulin resistance. Pima, 20th century. The Pima of New Mexico currently have one of the highest obesity rates in the world, on par with Nauru. It is rather ironic that Taubes uses them as an example in GCBC, when they are at odds with his hypothesis. The Pima were first contacted in 1539 by the Spanish, who apparently found them to be lean and healthy. At the time, they were eating a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet based on corn, beans, starchy squash, and a modest amount of gathered animal and plant foods from the forest and rivers in the area. In 1869, the Gila river went dry for the first time, and 1886 was the last year water flowed onto their land, due to upstream river diversion by settlers. They suffered famine, and were rescued by government rations consisting of white flour, sugar, lard, canned meats, salt and other canned and processed goods. They subsequently became obese and have remained that way ever since. Their diet consisted mostly of bread cooked in lard, sweetened beverages and canned goods, and they also received salt. More recently, their diet has modernized but still relies heavily on processed food (34, 35). Finally, let’s take a look at my country, the United States of America. Total energy intake has increased since the 1970s, and the excess energy came from carbohydrate (primarily refined). But what happens if we go back further, to the turn of the 20th century? Here’s our per capita macronutrient consumption in grams per day from 1909 to 2006, according to USDA data: And here it is, broken down as a percentage of total calories: If we take the long view, the only thing that has consistently increased is fat, not carbohydrate. The prevalence of obesity was very low at the turn of the century (36), yet our diet was 57% carbohydrate by calories, much of which came from white flour. These USDA figures account for food produced and consumed on farms and in home gardens, in addition to what passed through commercial sales (37). I hope you can see by now that the carbohydrate hypothesis of obesity is not only incorrect on a number of levels, but it may even be backward. The reason why obesity and metabolism researchers tend not to take this idea seriously is that it is contradicted by a large body of evidence from multiple fields. I understand that people like ideas that “challenge conventional wisdom”, but the fact is that obesity is a complex state and it will not be shoehorned into simplistic hypotheses. Carbohydrate consumption per se is not behind the obesity epidemic. However, once overweight or obesity is established, carbohydrate restriction can aid fat loss in some people. The mechanism by which this occurs is not totally clear, but there is no evidence that insulin plays a causal role in this process. Carbohydrate restriction spontaneously reduces calorie intake (as does fat restriction), suggesting the possibility that it alters body fat homeostasis, but this alteration likely occurs in the brain, not in the fat tissue itself. The brain is the primary homeostatic regulator of fat mass, just as it homeostatically regulates blood pressure, breathing rate, and body temperature. This has been suspected since the early brain lesion studies of the 1940s (47) and even before, and the discovery of leptin in 1994 cemented leptin’s role as the main player in body fat homeostasis. In some cases, the setpoint around which the body defends these variables can be changed (e.g., hypertension, fever, and obesity). Research is ongoing to understand how this process works.

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- INSTRUMENT NAVIGATION - IFR Navigation Charts - ADF, VOR, and GPS Navigation Procedures - Navigation Formula - Track Measurement IFR Navigation Charts There are three types of IFR Charts: 1) Terminal Charts, which provide radio navigation data for some of the busier airports (quite similar to VTAs; 2) Enroute Low Altitude Charts, which provide radio navigation data for the en route portion of flights, up to, but not including 18000’ ASL, and, 3) Enroute High Altitude Charts, which provide similar data for the airspace at FL180 and above. LE Charts are Lambert Conformal Conic Projection charts, and are similar to VNC Charts in that a straight line on an LE represent a great circle route. On back page of the LE are two blocks of information, the first concerning the VHF frequencies assigned to each of the major airports on the chart with control towers (including ATIS, Tower and Ground frequencies), and the second concerning the Area Control Centre and Terminal Control VHF frequencies, including peripheral station radio frequencies. On the chart itself, the name of the applicable Area Control Centre, as well as the PAL frequencies, are identified using a boxed format. The PAL box on the right shows that Vancouver Centre can be contacted on 134.0 MHz., as well 381.4 MHz. (UHF). The scale of the LE Charts vary—in the above example, for instance, the upper left and right corners of the back page show that LO 2 provides a scale of 18 NM per 1”, while LO 1is scaled at 20 NM to 1”. This variation in scale, however, is of little consequence, since all distances along airways between navigation aids and between intersections are published on the chart. In the case that a measurement is required—for example between a navigation aid and an airport—a scale bar that appears at the top and bottom of the chart can be used. Simply mark the distance on the edge of a scrap piece of paper and then position the paper next to the scale to read the distance. Note carefully the Legend that appears on LE charts. On the bottom right-hand corner of the Legend—under Miscellaneous—we are told that all green-shaded areas of the Chart indicate uncontrolled airspace below 18000’ ASL, while the white areas indicate controlled airspace below this altitude, including Low Level Airways, and Transition Areas. The Chart further delineates areas where controlled airspace exists above 12500’ ASL (Low Level Airways and Control Area Extensions)—all green areas patterned with white square (with green shade) hatching. Finally, note under this section is the description of isogonic lines (darker green and dashed). Note also the Area Minimum Altitudes (AMAs), which provides 2000’ clearance over the obstacle within the quadrantal (established by degrees longitude and latitude). MOCA and MEA Perhaps the most important information on the LE for the IFR pilot is the MOCA (Minimum Obstruction Clearance Altitudes), which is marked with an asterisk, and MEA (Minimum En Route Altitudes), which lack an asterisk (see depiction below). The MOCA provides an altitude above sea level in effect between radio fixes on low level airways or air routes that meet the IFR obstruction clearance requirement for the route segment.1 Importantly, the IFR obstruction clearance requirement varies with whether or not an airway or air route is located inside or outside a Designated Mountainous Area (DMA). Outside the DMAs, the MOCA provides 1000’ clearance over the highest obstacle within 5 NM of the aircraft; inside DMAs 2, 3, and 4, this clearance increases to 1500’, and in DMAs 1 and 5 this clearance increases to 2000’. In contrast, the MEA provides an altitude above sea level between specified fixes on airways or air routes that assures acceptable navigational coverage, and which meets the IFR obstruction clearance requirements.2 Accordingly, MEA will always be higher than MOCA. Also note that VHF/UHF airways are depicted in black ink, while LF/MF airways are in green. You will not have difficulty determining the proper odd/even altitude to fly as the even altitude direction associated with an airway is indicated by the pointed end of the airway identification box. The following show the relationship between MEA and MOCA as they are applied to airway segments: Note that each of the fixes depicted above will actually appear as an intersection on the LE chart, including the means by which the intersection is determined—i.e., DME, a radial or bearing from a neighbouring radio aid. Minimum Reception Altitude The Minimum Reception Altitude (MRA) should not get confused with the MOCA and the MEA. While the latter provides obstruction clearance data, the MRA only provides reception altitude guidance for published intersections. Specifically, the MRA is provided for specific VHF/UHF intersections and specifies the lowest altitude above sea level at which acceptable navigational signal coverage is received to determine the intersection. Two intersections are depicted below—Ronch and Kanoo Intersections. They share the same MRA (14000’ ASL). Note that the co-ordinates for the intersections are provided, as is the radial, identifier, and frequency for the VOR used to establish the positions. Radio Aids, Distance and Course Data All radio Aids—i.e., NDB, VOR, VORTAC—are orientated to magnetic north in the Southern Domestic Airspace, and true north in the Northern Domestic Airspace. While the azimuths are correctly positioned, other navigation aid symbols may be positioned for sake of clarity. The radio aid, distance and course data for the airway V112 between Calgary VORTAC and Cranbrook VOR is examined in detail below. Note that the actual distances between symbols are only approximated for the sake of clarity. Navigation and Communication Data Boxes The radio aid data boxes are virtually identical to the pattern used on VFR charts. A heavy line around the navigation aid data box indicates the facility is co-located with FSS. In the case a thin-lined box, FSS is not co-located with the facility. Remote FSS communication equipment is established at many radio aid sites, and these are indicated by the appearance of a sub-box below the navigation aid data box. Standard frequencies—126.7, 121.5, and 243 MHz—are available for contacting FSS where FSS is co-located at the radio aid facility (heavy lined data boxes), unless otherwise noted. Additional frequencies used by FSS will be published above the data box, but note that the standard frequencies will not appear here—instead, it is implied that they are usable. If any of the standard frequencies are not available, they will be shown with a line through them. Note that the standard frequencies do not apply to thin-lined data boxes showing remote FSS communication; in these cases, only the frequencies published above the data boxes can be used. Below appear three varieties. The Aerodrome and Aerodrome Data depiction on IFR charts are conventional, and do not vary substantially for VFR chart references. Importantly, however, airports with published instrument approach procedures are displayed in black ink. Normally the radio aid used for tracking an airway is changed between the anchoring facilities at the half-way mark. Where this changeover point is different, it is marked as indicated below.. En route from VOR A to VOR B, the VOR A is selected until the 102-NM mark is reached, and then VOR B is selected. ADF, VOR, and GPS Navigation Procedures Homing and Tracking To “home” to a VOR station or GPS waypoint: - tune and identify the VOR station or GPS waypoint; - centre the CDI with OBS that provides a “to” indication; - fly a heading to maintain the track—if the CDI migrates left, you are to the right of track; if the CDI migrates right, you are to the left of track. To intercept a pre-determined track using VOR or GPS waypoint: - tune and identify the VOR station or GPS waypoint; - select the track desired using the OBS; - orient the aircraft so that the desired track to or from the VOR or GPS waypoint is the same as the aircraft’s heading (paralleling the track); - note whether the VOR or GPS waypoint is ahead of the lateral axis of the aircraft (indicated by a “to” indication), or behind the lateral axis (indicated by a “from” indication); - if the CDI is on the right of centre, add the desired intercept angle to the current orientated heading and fly the intercept; if the CDI is on left, subtract the desired intercept angle; - when the CDI centres during the intercept, alter course to maintain the desired track. To “home” to a station using ADF: - tune, identify, and test the NDB;3 - note the relative bearing to the NDB and turn the aircraft so that the relative bearing is 360° (i.e., the magnetic heading of the aircraft equals the magnetic bearing to the NDB); - fly to maintain a relative bearing of 360°. To intercept a pre-determined track using ADF: - tune, identify, and test the NDB; - orient the aircraft so that the desired track to or from the NDB is the same as the aircraft’s heading (paralleling the track); - note whether the bearing indicator (the needle) is indicating right or left of the longitudinal axis of the aircraft; - if the bearing indicator points to the right of longitudinal axis, add the desired intercept angle to the current orientated heading and fly the intercept; if the bearing indicator points to the right of longitudinal axis, subtract the desired intercept angle;4 - if you are intercepting a track from the NDB, you slowly “pull the tail” of the bearing indicator to match the intercept angle—when the tail “opens” to match your intercept angle, you are “on track” and should now turn on course; if you are intercepting a track to the NDB, you slowly “push the head” of the bearing indictor to match the intercept angle—when the tail “opens” to match the intercept angle, again you are “on track” and should now turn on course.5 The intercept angles used are the same (unless otherwise prescribed): a 45° angle is used when intercepting a track from a station (radio navigation aid), and a 90° angle is used when intercepting a track to a station. Orientation—Paralleling the Track The key to intercepting a desired track is first paralleling the track. When you get comfortable with interceptions, you will start skipping this phase, but until you get proficient at it, always parallel the track before you intercept it. By paralleling the track, you are effectively orienting yourself and the aircraft to the ground transmitter or waypoint. Is it located in front of or behind the aircraft? Is it located to the left or to the right? With a VOR or GPS waypoint, once the track is paralleled, the information derived from the instrument display can be directly applied to your mental picture of your location—you are looking for the “To” or “From” indication to determine if it is ahead or behind, and you look for the needle deflection to determine if it is right or left. Consider the depiction below: Magnetic bearing, sometimes simply referred to as bearing, denotes the horizontal magnetic direction to or from any point. If the magnetic bearing (or bearing) to a station is 270°, for example, this means that we are directly east of the station; similarly, if our bearing to a station is 180°, we are directly north. Relative bearing is the position of an object relative to the longitudinal axis of the aircraft. If an object lies directly off the right wing of an aircraft, it would be considered to be at a relative bearing of 090°. If the aircraft is eastbound and an object is directly to the north of the aircraft, the object still remains at a relative bearing of 270°, even though the magnetic bearing is 360°. An aircraft is flying on a magnetic heading of 270°. An ADF indicator shows a relative bearing to a local NDB as 010°. To proceed directly to the NDB, what magnetic heading would be flown? Here is the formula to be used: Magnetic Bearing = Magnetic Heading + Relative Bearing6 or, MB = MH + RB MB = 270 + 010 MB = 280 To fly to the NDB (or beacon), the pilot would fly 280°. Now, what would happen if the magnetic heading and relative bearing, added together, equalled a value greater than 360. The solution is straightforward—simply take the sum and subtract 360. For example, an aircraft is flying a heading of 270° and the relative bearing to the station is 180°. What magnetic bearing should the pilot fly to proceed directly to the station? MB = MH + RB MB = 270 + 180 MB = 450 MB = (450 – 360) MB = 090 To fly to the NDB (or beacon), the pilot would fly 090°. A similar variation on the formula can be encountered when determining the relative bearing. To establish relative bearing by itself on one side of the equation, simply subtract MH from both sides: MB = MH + RB MB - MH = (MH + RB) - MH MB - MH = RB or, RB = MB - MH On occasion you will find that the magnetic bearing is greater than the aircraft’s magnetic heading. A negative answer will not do, of course, but the solution is quite straight forward—simply add 360° to the magnetic bearing. Here is an example: The aircraft’s magnetic heading is 270° and the magnetic bearing to an NDB is 180°. What is the relative bearing to the NDB? RB = MB - MH RB = 180 - 270 RB = (180 + 360) - 270 RB = 540 - 270 RB = 270 So, let’s see if this makes sense. The aircraft is flying westbound (i.e., from right to left across your piece of paper). The magnetic bearing to the station is 180°, so that would put the station below the aircraft at the bottom of the page (i.e., the south). What would be the relative bearing of this station with respect to the nose of the aircraft—yes, it would be directly off the left wing, or 270° measured clockwise from the aircraft’s longitudinal axis! Time and Distance to Station There are two formulas to be aware of which allow a pilot to determine the time or distance to an NDB or VOR station. To use the formula, the pilot must first be tracking directly to the station in question; then the aircraft is turned 90° from that heading to a perpendicular track. The pilot then notes the changes in the bearing to the station and the amount of time required produce the bearing change. The two equations are as follows: Time to Station (minutes) Time (seconds) required for degrees or radials change Number of degrees/radials changed Distance to Station (NM) TAS x Time to station in (minutes) Applying these formulas to VORs, for example, let us assume that an aircraft is tracking inbound on the 270° Radial of a VOR. The pilot wishes to know the aircraft’s distance from the VOR station. To do this, the pilot then turns the aircraft to a heading of 360°, and starts timing. After two minutes the pilot notes that the CDI has deflected 1 ½ dots—or what is three degrees. Here comes the math: Time to Station (minutes) Time to Station (minutes) The aircraft is 40 minutes from the VOR. Assuming that the aircraft travels at 120 KTS TAS, the pilot then wishes to estimate the distance of the aircraft from the VOR. Here we go: Distance to Station (NM) 120 x 40 Distance to Station (NM) The aircraft is 80 NM from the VOR. Now let us apply these formulas to use of NDBs. Again, the aircraft is tracking directly to an NDB and the pilot wishes to determine the exact time and distance required for station passage. Using a fixed card ADF the pilot turns 90° from the course and notes that it takes 2 minutes for the relative bearing to the NDB to change from 270° to 262°. Again, here comes the math: 120 seconds divided by 8 equals 15—the aircraft is therefore 15 minutes from the NDB. If the TAS of the aircraft is 150 KTS, 150 is multiplied by 15 to equal 2250, and 2250 is divided by 60 to equal 37.5—the aircraft is therefore 37.5 NM from the NDB. Whenever it is required to produce a quick measurement of estimated en route along an airway with a dogleg, or a series of airways with different tracks, an effective way to do this is to “eyeball-estimate” an average track. When the average track is determined, the forecast winds can be applied to determine the average groundspeed, and the total distance of the actual routing can be applied to the average groundspeed to determine the total time en route. Here are some examples of average tracks: 1 AIM GEN 5.1 (Glossary of Aeronautical Terms) 3 Unlike a VOR, the NDB signal is tested every time a new NDB is selected. If the ADF is equipped with a “test” button, this is pressed and the bearing indicator will move to the 090° relative bearing position; if the ADF does not have a test feature, move the function selector switch from the ADF position to the ANT position (the ANT position removes the directional “loop antenna” from the system, allowing only the non-directional “sense antenna” to receive the signal), and again the 090° relative bearing will be received. 4 In fact, you do not add or subtract, but instead simply glance at the ADF rotating card and read the intercept heading—presuming, of course that you have “bugged” the orientation heading. In the event of a fixed card ADF, simply transpose the bearing indication onto the heading indicator; as you turn to the intercept heading, you should see the desired track under either the 45° or 90° marker on the heading indicator. 5 This is quite tricky business and you should spend time on the ground reviewing this “tail pulling” and “head pushing” on a scrap of paper—but of course it is best seen in the air. 6 “Mary Barfed after Mary Had Roast Beef” or “Mary Had Roast Beef—Mary Barfed.” Thanks to Gerry Unger for this.

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|Please read FIRST and then watch the vids at the end of this ARTICLE. You will note, that what is used in my presentation (link at bottom of post) is data from 1976 from the NAVAL MEDICAL RESEARCH CENTRE, after the compilation of 2300 studies to show the effects of microwaves on humans: Here is some other military data: Ten years after in 1986 (and likely billions in taxpayer funded research, that continues to this day and started well before) this is what the navy figured out. Eldon Byrd, a scientist for the Naval Surface Weapon Centre, USN, in one of his lectures in 1986 on the effects of microwaves stated: ‘We can alter the behaviour of tissues, cells, organs and whole organisms…. you can cause up to six times higher foetus mortality and birth defects in laboratory animals, and these fields are so weak you can hardly detect them…You can do genetic engineering with ELF [extremely low frequency] weak magnetic fields without micro-surgical techniques that are currently employed to do genetic engineering. It is known how to induce malignant diseases in human cells and how to cure them. You can entrain human beings’ brain waves across a room with a very weak magnetic field.’ The link just above is a great piece of work for truth seekers on this technology, here are some excerpts: Byrd also stated: By using very low frequency electromagnetic radiation-the waves way below radio frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum-he found he could induce the brain to release behavior-regulating chemicals. “We could put animals into a stupor,” he says, by hitting them with these frequencies. “we got chick brains-in vitro-to dump 80 percent of the natural opiods in their brains,” Byrd says. He even ran a small project that used magnetic fields to cause certain brain cells in rats to release histamine. In humans, this would cause instant flulike symptoms and produce nausea. “…the technology has progressed to the point where even genetic engineering with fields is possible and demonstrable. That the technology to inflict mind control on human beings exists is beyond question” Later in the article, which I highly recommend reading, we see this: [Richard S.] Cesaro, [deputy director for advanced sensors at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency] helped run the classified [1960s] Project Pandora, in which monkeys were exposed to a ‘synthetic Moscow signal’ in a laboratory at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. …Cesaro, in an interview prior to his death two years ago, contended that “in our experiments we did some remarkable things. And there was no question in my mind that you can get into the brain with microwaves.” “…demonstrated that very small amounts of electromagnetic radiation could appreciably alter the functions of living cells” “…pathological effects close to those induced by highly toxic substances could be produced by electromagnetic radiation even at very low power” “…research seems to have confirmed that low-level electromagnetic fields, modulated to be similar to normal brainwaves, could seriously affect brain function. Experiments with pulsed magnetic fields carried out in animals have reportedly produced specific effects such as inducing sleep and triggering anxiety or aggressiveness” Here, we can see the FDA also admitted effects: “Evidence exists of nonthermal and cy- totoxic effects at power levels produced by cellular phones.” Of course nowhere in any cell phone, cordless phone etc. literature are you told of this, nor are you told studies are showing this: Pretty consistent wouldn’t you say? That’s what the EPA thought also: Robert Kane*s book **Cellular Telephone Russian Roulette** pages 84- 89 the EPA makes similar statement (Kane was a Motorola research scientist) **U.S. EPA released a draft copy of its report on the evaluation of the potential carcinogenicity of electromagnetic fields. The report, first of all, finds that In view of these laboratory studies, there is reason to believe that the findings of carcinogenicity in humans are biologically plausible. Of course, they were referring to laboratory studies that they had reviewed. This admission by the EPA means that the carcinogenic effects of electromagnetic energy are valid or likely….The EPA has concluded that the results of the occupational cancer studies are remarkably consistent …. Here are some pictures of chick embryos exposed to microwaves well below the level of a common cell phone and for much less time than even a weeks worth of phone time for the avg person, Photos from a great book I recommend: http://www.amazon.com/Cellular-Radiation-This-Next-Titantic/dp/1449961630 TAKE A LOOK AT #9 IN THE PICTURE BELOW from compiling 2300 Military studies and listing the effects! http://safeschool.ca/uploads/Navy_Radiowave_Brief_1_.pdf (Brain Operates at 8Hz +/- Phones operate at 928 000 000 to 6 000 000 000 Hz) DIRECTLY into the brain vibrating all cells billions of times per second including immune system) Consider now, that on average a woman has her first child at the age of 29, that is 29 years of exposure. Now consider, when that baby is born, her eggs (around 400 or so) There have been studies done that show after 7 generations of exposure… rats were no longer able to reproduce. Now, as shown before, this is what we are doing to our babies, and the babies So we see on a micro and macro scale we are being bathed in the frequencies that the military knows for a fact do what has been laid out in this article (and more). This is an old Cell tower map for Canada, wherever you are on the planet it is about the same. Only that this is old, does not include smart meter routers (part of 4G network) and the new masts/towers that go up every single day in Canada and across the globe. Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era: No matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behaviour for national advantages to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades.” What you may find interesting, is there is a chip inside the smart meter. It is called the Zigbee Chip. Brzezinskis’ nickname….. can you guess? ZeeBig! Last but not least, you can see the US Military is actively using these technologies in foreign countries RIGHT NOW. (and of course so is %90 of the population) So we have the ARMY, EPA, FDA, NAVY, study after study, showing Repeatability… but magically there are ‘no effects’? Think about that next time you use your phone, or see your kids on theirs. Thanks to all that are fighting this fight, this is in the end what you are protecting, life itself, from guys who not only say the above with excitement, but profit from it with the use of your tax dollars and the 100?s of billions they make off the public for ‘cell service’ “We need a program of psycho-surgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. . . Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. . . . We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electronic stimulation of the brain.” Fires, Greed, Health, Democracy, Privacy, Security They Knew: Microwaves Cause Autism, Downs Syndrome and Much Worse [For further data, links etc, see part 1 of this series] “A Radio frequency Toolkit for Environmental Health Practitioners.” released March 7, 2013, the BC CDC states that “the epidemiological studies of men assessed for infertility were consistent in demonstrating decreased sperm motility associated with increased use of mobile phones” and “biological effects on sperm motility related to RF exposure.” In the need to understand how harm is caused by exposure to microwave radiofrequency radiation, the review panel noted that “oxidative stress seems one of the more plausible mechanisms of RF-induced sperm damage. Mechanisms by which oxidative stress is caused by increased ROS (Reactive Oxygen Species) and decreased antioxidant have been shown to exist in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.” In my time speaking and writing about this topic, often the word that comes up is controversy. Mostly it is used in a manner that leads up to the person alluding to the fact that there are ‘two sides’ to the argument on safety of cell phones and associated devices. Immediately I know what Big Telecom has been trying to do has worked, making the issue muddied and unclear. This allows them to get people to think there is ‘no evidence’ or the classic ‘more long term study is needed’ or even more classic that any studies that found harm were ‘flawed.’ Usually after some time of being told the facts and truth in an easy to understand way, the confusion clears for that person. Slowly as we progress with informing these people, it becomes one or one hundred or one thousand fewer people using these devices. I am personally happy to allow people to come to the understandings of how dangerous they are. I also know that thousands of others across the globe are teaching this to people, which is allowing us to reverse course on this dilemma. Health agencies and those the profit from this will not do it for us, only we can and we must. This will be very costly for Big Telecom, Smart Grids, Big Cancer, Big Pharma, Utilities and more. Some of those companies are shown in the picture below. You can see some of the names, the money they represent and this is just for the smart grid. Here is a link for the presentation that contains this slide for more info on these players in the grid: I know why they set out to have people confused and make the subject matter difficult to understand, to shut people off from learning the truth and going back to the store to buy the latest gadget to microwave their brain with. If you are one of those people, if you want to remain ignorant, I encourage you to get away from this post quickly and never come back. However if you care about yourself, your kids, other people’s kids, animals and plants… read on, pass on and ACT on what you learn here. So back to the controversy, the two sides and how it happened. Long ago, microwaves were beginning to be used, somewhere in the 30?s or so for industrial purposes and some military applications. What happened was with the military being so close to this stuff, as time went on into WWII and beyond, they figured out how bad microwaves/RF were to humans. So in their infinite wisdom, rather than protecting the public at large, the soldiers and enemy… they decided they would work with this technology and find out just what it could do. Keep in mind, the military has 2 objectives: to understand “Can we hurt people with this?” and “How do we protect our side if the other side has this weapon?” So ALL sides and ALL militaries (Russia, UK, USA, Canada etc.) after learning a thing or two started to play around with this technology and as they went further, most of the projects went underground. Why? This happened because they figured out that this may be the greatest weapon known to man, if not at that time, certainly in the future. It is invisible, can travel large distances, costs very little, is tasteless, odourless, you can’t hear it and when being hit by it, the enemy has no idea it is even happening. If you want to dig into this further, a great, possibly the best source for data on all of this is here: So what happened is they found out that at very low levels (see Part 1 and links there also) they could cause serious damage to people. This was a big problem, but not unsolvable. It was a simple thing they did. They decided to create a very high number for exposure for heat effect alone, and all else under that was ‘safe.’ A world opened to them and at the same time closed for the prosperity and health for mankind. This allowed the massive proliferation of this technology for destruction; military style, but also for it to develop into the one of the biggest threats to health humanity has ever faced. This is evidenced by the fact that at least 5 billion people use and carry these devices on them everyday. Thus, with the new ‘safety level’, effects were recognized only if they showed ‘heating’ or ‘thermal effects’ This is the stance of Big Telecom, Military, Industry etc. Heating does occur at much higher levels than what a cell phone etc. can typically cause you to notice. However, heating still occurs at low levels as cells are being oscillated back and forth millions or billions of times per second, from multiple devices at multiple frequencies, 24/7. Even if heat is not detectable at all, you are causing great destruction. The stance of advocates against this technology, science, the laws of electricity and physics say we are vulnerable at levels far below ‘thermal effects’, this being called ‘non-thermal’. That is your controversy right there explained. They say nothing happens until you heat up, ‘we’ say you are disrupting every cell, frequency, signal and nerves of the body. Remember admitting this would instantly hold the military and telecoms accountable for untold numbers of deaths and diseases that have occurred. Liability is being avoided for the sake of profit, which in the end is the true driver of this technology. You can see here that your brainwaves operate at very low Hz (vibrations per second); anything compromising this (like cell phone microwaves to the brain at Billions of Hz) is a dangerous game to play, long term and short. You can see here how the microwaves do not ‘magically’ disappear once they reach your phone. You must think, if that wave can penetrate concrete, walls, metal and all else, why wouldn’t it go directly into your brain? If it did, just what exactly would happen when it did? This is what happens, your DNA is damaged, the fundamental building blocks of life (YOU) are being mutated and destroyed altogether…in your brain no less. Not to worry, here is what is protecting you. This is the test that is used, it is for 6 minutes to see if a soapy liquid inside a mannequin representing a 6’2? 220 lb male soldier heats up. If the liquid doesn’t heat up 1 degree, you can be exposed to the device (and all others like it) for life. Just to pile it on, now you are microwaving mercury and lead among other things contained in your phone right next to your nose eyes and brain. Causing problems also denied or ignored by phone makers. http://www.activistpost.com/2012/10/cell-phone-dangers-loaded-with-mercury.html That is on top of your metal fillings which is a whole other issue altogether. So, they have effectively left out long term chronic exposure (in every house in every city) and only measured short term effects, for heat. This allows the profits to roll in, the weapons to keep on being made/tested and the sicknesses to mount. This is further reference to the 2300 studies compiled by the NMRI (Naval Medical Research Institute) Recall why military docs are so important. They only want to know exact specifics, no lawyers, no lobbyists etc. “Can they kill us? Can we kill them?” That’s it. Here is some more of what they found. Part 1 http://bcfreedom.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/death-lies-and-mutations-what-the-military-kept-from-the-public-on-microwave-radiation/ had a lot to do with pregnancy and babies. Take a look down at the part of the doc here referencing “Genetic and Chromosomal Changes”; To even see one thing in this column is alarming. But look at #3. #3Mongolism. Don’t know what that is? (keep in mind this doc is from 1976 so ‘terms’ change over time) Simply put, this is Down’s Syndrome. Yes, that’s right, the military is fully aware that microwave radiation can cause these types of birth defects. Of course, so is industry, but they say nothing, too much money to be made. Note as well # 2 “Mutations” See this link on Autism: I will post this pic from part 1 again because it is so relevant here: So now millions of women are doing this, carrying phones in their pockets and more: Note here we see ‘alteration of heart rhythm’… then again consider the above photo or note the habits of many pregnant women with these devices. Remember as well, that the underdeveloped skulls of children, and in particular the unborn, take in more of the RF than anyone. Remember, your ‘safety study’ is done on a mannequin representing a 6’2? male, fully developed, full of a soapy liquid. You can get an idea of how this test came about, since rather than admit to hurting people, they denied you had electrical properties altogether, but of course you do, as well as do unborn children. Perhaps some of the additional findings we see here contribute to the massive growth in birth defects: #9 Specifically, “Alteration of Cell Division”; does anyone else think this might be an issue as the fetus develops from 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 cells and so on, all the while being radiated ? Then also for the next nine months and the rest of its life as well? As touched on in Part 1, how about the eggs the female child is carrying for life inside of it already being radiated 24/7 until age 29 (the average age a women has her first child). This is just one side of the story. Here is the other: Study after study is coming out saying this has effects on sperm as well (see part 1 for picture for excerpts from animal studies and the above pics) So we are destroying the eggs and the sperm, the DNA and we’re wondering why we are all sick from cradle to grave? Again, here we can see that this has been known all along ‘Decreased fertility to sterility’ How about learning disabilities, surely that would pop up somewhere? Keeping in mind just about every kid has one of these which of course requires highly profitable medication: This is from YALE university. Recall that the military docs also state “Lack of concentration, Loss of memory” among symptoms caused by microwave radiation. Starting to see a pattern here? Or ‘repeatable results?’ Science in general is defined by its ability to be repeated. This ends ALL controversy, removes opinion, and puts this much closer to fact than people may think. “Loss of memory, ATTENTION of school children” Also note that “Irreversible Sterility” was found in mice at levels even lower. Here is where it comes full circle. Notice that it is written above as 1000.00 Microwatts per square centimetre. That is is the level Health Canada and the FCC has found to be ‘unsafe’ because at that level ‘thermal effects’ begin to start. Now look closely: at 100 times less than that, what do we find ‘Damaged mitochondria, nucleus of cells in hippocampus of BRAIN’ At 5.0 we find ‘Changes in liver, heart, kidney and BRAIN TISSUE’. Repeatable results, this controversy is over. Loss of memory: think Alzheimers, Dementia… doesn’t it seem plausible this could come about from people doing this to their brains for 20-30 years? I will leave you with this last note from the 2300 studies compiled by the NMRI “ALTERED FETAL DEVELOPMENT, DECREASED FERTILITY TO STERILITY,” For all those who know that breast feeding is the best way to keep your newborn well nourished but keep there phone in near their breast (or even have a phone): “DECREASED LACTATION IN NURSING MOTHERS” “ALTERED MENSTRUAL ACTIVITY” Yes, even at low levels like your phone, it is still capable of altering your menstruation. Think about that. Do you really think the Telecoms, Government, Pharma, Military are oblivious to all of this? Or is money and greed a motivating factor? You decide, for indeed, this is a big decision. Think about all the issues mentioned plus the rest in the document, then think of how this plays right into the profit picture for these types of companies here, especially #3: For those of you who decided to read to this far, I apologize. I may have put you in a very inconvenient dilemma. I gave you knowledge, irrefutable knowledge. Knowledge that you are now responsible for. No more plausible denial, “controversy,’ allowance/excuse to continue to hurt yourself and others (and pay somebody for the right to do it). I may have put you in an awkward position, forcing you to choose life over pain and death. Asking you to support the health of children, pregnant women and the unborn over having not waiting 10 minutes to get home to use a landline with a corded phone. Perhaps now, you will consider that you might be paying someone $1200 +/- a year to poison yourself and others, while at the same time talking about ‘eating healthy’, ‘consciousness’, ‘saving the planet’ and the like; or maybe that’s not you at all. Still, you have to question whether you ACTUALLY care about yourself and others. This caring, this awake, this conscious starts with life itself, and no life or living can be attained in pain and suffering. That is mere existence; an animal state, primal and controllable. For the perpetrators of this crime, it couldn’t be more clever. This is a DIRECT RESULT of the choice you make to use these devices. This is a direct result of giving these Telecoms money to hurt you while profiting on the back end with shares in Pharma. This is a direct result of being passive, while allowing government to deny health consequences; while simultaneously subsidizing these very companies through health care expenses, grid roll outs, wi-fi in schools, etc. I apologize for putting you in a position of choice, of action, choosing life over death, light over dark, health over sickness, keeping money for beneficial things vs things that cause pain throughout existence. I hope what you have learned can bridge the time gap for you. That gap is witnessed all to often in humanity where we only decide to act AFTER tragedy, some sickness, loss of life… a shock. Why wait? How much more needs to happen? How much more do we have to give these guys? How much more do you have to hurt yourself when there are safe alternatives that are cheaper? How long will we radiate our kids in school when we can simply hardwire their computers? How many more cell towers (for you to have reception) will be built on hospital roofs, near daycares, nursing homes? How long will watch our ever-depleting health care (slow death with maximum profit extraction) resources be sucked up for profits, while causing society loss? How many more kids need to be born with birth defects, learning disorders, diseases? How much more can you need to know to make the right choice? If you can’t choose now, when? What other choice is there to make? Can you choose life? The answer to these questions is only found in action, the sooner the better for you and life itself. [Hat tip: Brian – tx] Death, Lies and Mutations: Proof the Military Knew All Along About Microwave Radiation Dangers

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Nasal trauma is defined as any injury to the nose or related structure that may result in bleeding, a physical deformity, a decreased ability to breathe normally because of obstruction, or an impaired sense of smell. The injury may be either internal or external. The human nose is composed of bone, soft tissue, and cartilage. It serves as a passageway for air to flow from the outside environment into the lower respiratory tract and lungs. At the same time the nasal passages warm and humidify the air that enters the body. Internal injuries to the nose typically occur when a foreign object is placed in the nose or when a person takes in drugs of abuse (inhalants or cocaine) through the nose. External injuries to the nose are usually blunt force injuries related to sports participation, criminal violence, child abuse , or automobile or bicycle accidents. This type of injury may result in a nasal fracture. The nasal bones are the most frequently fractured facial bones due to their position on the face, and they are the third most common type of bone fracture in general after fractures of the wrist and collarbone. A force of only 30 g is required to break the nasal bones, compared to 70 g for the bones in the jaw and 200 g for the bony ridge above the eyes. The pattern of the fracture depends on the direction of the blow to the nose, whether coming from the front, the side, or above the nose. Although not usually life-threatening by itself, a fractured nose may lead to difficulties in breathing as well as facial disfigurement. Fractures resulting from trauma to the nose may involve the bones of the septum (the partition of bone and cartilage dividing the two nostrils) as well as the bones surrounding the eyes. These bones include the nasal, maxilla, lacrimal, and frontal bones. Direct trauma to the bridge of the nose may also result in damage to a part of the base of the skull known as the cribriform plate. This injury in turn may allow cerebrospinal fluid to leak out of the skull and leave the body through the nose. Fractures may also damage the membranes that line the nasal passages, leading to possible formation of scar tissue, obstruction of the airway, and damage to the child's sense of smell. In addition to fractures, external injuries of the nose include soft-tissue injuries resulting from bites (human and animal), insect stings , cuts, or scrapes. Penetrating injuries to the nasal area caused by air gun or BB pellets were as of 2004 also reported with increasing frequency in older children and adolescents. When fired at close range, these pellets can penetrate the skin and cheekbone and lodge in the nasal septum or the sinuses near the nose. Lastly, nose piercing as a fashion trend is a type of intentional injury to the nose that has several possible complications, including infections of the cartilage and soft tissues in the nose; blockage of the airway due to a loosened stud or other nose ornament; and gastrointestinal emergencies caused by accidental swallowing of nose jewelry. If a patient's nasal trauma leads doctors to suspect child abuse, the incident must be reported to the police. The demographics of nasal trauma vary according to the type of injury. Internal nasal injuries are unusual in infants but occur fairly frequently in toddlers and young children as a result of playfulness or curiosity. Children often insert small hard objects (buttons, coins, watch batteries, dried peas or beans, plastic parts from toys , etc.) in their nostrils. One Japanese study of children brought to the emergency room for removal of foreign bodies from the respiratory and digestive tracts found that the nose was the most common location (39.4% of patients) of these objects. Sixty-seven percent of the children treated were between one and four years of age, with two-year-olds the most common age group. Another common cause of injury to the nasal passages in children is scratching or picking the inside of the nose, often as a reaction to dry and itching nasal membranes during the heating season in colder climates. In older children and adolescents, however, the single most common cause of internal nasal injuries is inhalant abuse or ingesting cocaine through the nose ("snorting"). Inhalants include such substances as toluene (paint thinner, nail polish remover, rubber cement, airplane glue), butane (lighter fluid, spray paint, room fresheners, hair spray), chlorinated hydrocarbons (dry cleaning fluid, spot removers, typewriter correction fluid), and acetone (rubber cement, permanent markers, nail polish remover). According to the American Academy of Family Practice (AAFP) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, nearly 20 percent of children in the United States have used inhalants at least once by the time they are in eighth grade. The average age of children experimenting with inhalants is 13, with Hispanic and Caucasian youth more likely to abuse these substances than African Americans. With regard to cocaine, figures from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) from the late 1990s indicate that that 3.2 percent of all eighth graders in the United States have used cocaine at least once, although young adults between the ages of 18 to 25 are the age group with the highest usage of the drug. Nose piercing as a fashion statement is most common among adolescents and young adults. One study of undergraduates at a university in upstate New York found that 51 percent had body piercing, with the nose and ears the most common sites. Seventeen percent of these students reported medical complications from the piercing, ranging from skin or cartilage infections to periodic bleeding from the nose. A less common cause of internal injuries to the nose in older children and adolescents is the use of magnetized jewelry as a substitute for body piercing. The external piece of jewelry is held in place on the outside of the nostril by a small magnet placed inside the nose. Displacement of these magnets has been reported to cause bleeding and perforation of the nasal septum, while accidental swallowing of these magnets may require emergency surgery. One British hospital reported no fewer than 24 such cases over an eight-week period. With regard to nasal fractures, one group of American researchers estimates that they account for about 24 percent of all facial fractures. The most common single cause is assault, accounting for 41 percent of nasal fractures. The second most common cause is automobile accidents (27%), followed by sports injuries (11%). Falls account for most other nasal fractures in children, although dog bites are reported with increasing frequency as a cause of nasal fractures in children below 16 years of age. Adolescents who have had plastic surgery on the nose (rhinoplasty) are at increased risk of nasal fractures in later life. As many as 10 percent of nasal injuries in younger children, however, result from physical abuse. Doctors in the early 2000s are advised to consider abuse as a possible diagnosis when evaluating nasal fractures in children under six years of age. Suspected child abuse must be reported to police. Causes and symptoms External trauma to the nose may be accidental (transportation accidents, animal bites, air gun injuries, and sports injuries) or intentional (fights, criminal assault, domestic violence, nose piercing). Nasal injuries from athletic activities may result from contact with equipment (being hit in the face by a baseball, hockey ball, or other small ball hit at high speed, or by the bat or stick itself) or the bodies of other players (football, boxing, martial arts, rugby). Nasal injuries from piercing include bacterial infections of the skin and nasal cartilage, allergic reactions to the jewelry, tissue damage, and periodic bleeding. Direct trauma and/or delayed type hypersensitivity reaction to nickel may occur from nasal rings and jewelry, facial adornments which as of 2004 are increasingly popular. In a few cases, external trauma to the nose may also be iatrogenic, or caused by medical care. Most of these injuries result from medical examination of the nose—particularly in emergency circumstances—or as complications of plastic surgery. Internal injuries to the nose may be either mechanical (caused by foreign objects in the nose or by picking or scratching the tissues lining the nose) or chemical (caused by environmental irritants or substance abuse). Chemical injuries to the nose are caused by accidental or purposeful breathing or sniffing of irritating substances. These may include tobacco smoke; household cleaners (ammonia and chlorine bleach) and furniture polish; ozone and other air pollutants; cocaine; and glue, paint thinners, solvents, and similar household products that produce toxic vapors. An increasingly common form of chemical injury to the nasal membranes in toddlers is alkali burns caused by leakage from small batteries placed in the nose. While chemical damage to the nose is usually accidental in younger children, it is more often the result of substance abuse in adolescents. Taking cocaine through the nose ("snorting") or inhalant abuse ("sniffing" or "huffing") are the most common causes of chemical damage to the nose in older children or teenagers. The symptoms of physical trauma to the nose may include the following: - flattening or other deformation of the shape of the nose - infections of the cartilage or soft tissue - epistaxis, or bleeding from the nose - crepitus, or the crackling or crunching sound heard when the ends of a fractured bone are rubbed together - pain and tissue swelling - airway blockage from bleeding, fluid discharge, or tissue swelling - rhinitis or inflammation of the mucous membranes lining the nose (In the case of a fracture, rhinitis may lead to increased tear production in the eyes and a runny nose.) - septal hematoma, a mass of blood from torn tissue that may collect within the cartilage that divides the two nostrils (It may become infected and form an abscess that eventually destroys the cartilage.) - bruising or discoloration (ecchymosis) of the tissues around the eye - leakage of cerebrospinal fluid through the nostrils Chemical trauma to the nose may result in the following: - runny nose and watering of the eyes - loss of the sense of smell - nasal congestion and sneezing - reddening and swelling of the mucous membranes lining the nose - eventual destruction of the cartilage in the nasal septum and the tissues lining the nose When to call the doctor Parents should call the doctor at once in the event of a nose injury when the following conditions are apparent: - The child is bleeding profusely from the nose. - The child is having difficulty breathing normally. - The injury involves an air gun, BB gun, or animal or human bites. - The child is seeing double, has other visual disturbances, or staggers when trying to walk. - The child's nasal discharge is watery as well as bloody. - The child is known to have inserted a battery into the nose or to have swallowed such a battery or piece of nose jewelry. - The child's appearance or behavior suggests inhalant or cocaine abuse. Some danger signals are: a chemical odor on the child's breath; constant runny nose; unusual or excessive use of nose drops or decongestants ; sores inside or around the mouth; stains on the fingernails; dazed appearance; anxiety , sleep disturbances, nausea and vomiting ; slurred speech; visual disturbances; and loss of physical coordination. History and physical examination In many cases the diagnosis of an injury to the child's nose is obvious to the doctor from taking a history, particularly if the parent witnessed the accident or saw the child putting something in his nose. The physical examination depends in part on the history. If the child's nose is bleeding without a history of a fall, blow to the face, or other obvious cause, the doctor gently examines inside the nose with a handheld speculum of the type used to examine the ears, in order to see where the nasal bleeding originates. Bleeding from the lower part of the nose is more common and usually less serious. In most cases the doctor is able to tell whether there is a foreign object in the nose or whether the child has been scratching or picking at the nose. Bleeding from the upper part of the nose closer to the throat is more serious because it can block the airway and because it may indicate that the child has a bleeding disorder rather than a traumatic injury. The doctor may then examine the child's throat for signs of blood from the upper nose trickling down into the throat. He or she will remove any blood clots from the nose with suction. In the case of a known accident, sports injury, or assault, the doctor begins with the ABCs, which means that he or she will check the child's airway , breathing , and circulation . The doctor will usually have the child sit upright or lie on one side, and will remove blood clots, broken teeth, or other foreign bodies from the nose or throat. He or she will then carry out a systematic examination of the child's face and head. The most common pattern of examination moves from the inside of the nose and mouth to the outside of the face and from the bottom of the face to the top. The doctor looks for signs of bruising and tissue swelling as well as bleeding and gently palpates, or touches, the various facial bones for movement and stability. If the doctor suspects that the nose itself is fractured, he or she will listen for crepitus when the nose is gently moved and will look for evidence of a dislocated septum or a septal hematoma, which will appear as a bluish bulging mass within the nasal septum. The child's teeth will be examined for looseness, and the muscles and nerves of the face will be evaluated. If there is a discharge from the nose, the doctor will look at it to see whether it contains cerebrospinal fluid, which would indicate damage to the bones of the skull as well as the nasal bones. Lastly, the doctor examines the child's eyes to make sure that the pupils are responding normally to light and that the child is not seeing double or having other visual problems that might indicate nerve damage or damage to the eye itself. In cases involving animal bites or other tearing or crushing injuries to the skin and external tissues of the nose, the doctor carefully cleanses the broken skin with soap and water or disinfectants such as benzalkonium chloride as well as checks for fractured facial bones. Many of the early signs of inhalant or cocaine abuse are not specific to these disorders; however, a careful history-taking and examination of the child's eyes, nose, and throat may lead the doctor to ask the child or adolescent appropriate questions about his or her use of inhalants or cocaine. Imaging studies and laboratory tests Computed tomography (CT) scans are the type of imaging study most commonly done to evaluate suspected nasal fractures. X-ray studies may be ordered to identify the location of a foreign body if it is metal, such as a pellet from a BB gun or air gun, or to evaluate the nasal area for evidence of repeated fractures when abuse is suspected. A blood test will be performed prior to surgery in order to determine the child's blood type, clotting time, and complete blood count. In some cases the doctor may order a filter paper or glucose content test of nasal secretions to check for the presence of cerebrospinal fluid. In some cases, the physician may ask the child's parents for photographs taken prior to the injury in order to determine the extent of deformity or other injuries to the nose. Photographs may also be taken for documentation if abuse is suspected and also for documentation of injuries for later plastic surgery. Drug-specific blood or urine tests may be ordered for children or adolescents suspected of abusing inhalants or cocaine. Nasal injuries should be treated as promptly as possible to lower risk of infection. If the child has been bitten by an animal, the injury must be cleansed as soon as possible to lower the risk of rabies . Batteries placed in the nose should be removed as soon as possible, preferably within four hours to avoid serious burns from their contents. If a septal hematoma has developed, the doctor must remove it as quickly as possible to prevent infection or eventual death of the tissues in the nasal septum. Treatment of nasal fractures is best performed during the first three hours after the injury. If this is impossible, management of a nasal fracture should be done within three to seven days. Timing is of utmost importance when treating nasal fractures because delays longer than seven to 10 days may allow the broken bones to set without proper alignment or lead to such complications as scar tissue formation and airway obstruction. Poorly set nasal fractures usually require surgical correction. Foreign objects in the nose can be removed by nasal suction in most cases. Most nosebleeds are treated by five to 30 minutes of direct pressure on the nostrils, with the child's head placed in an upright position. The doctor may also pack the child's nose with gauze coated with petroleum jelly. If the bleeding does not stop or if it appears to originate in the upper nose, the doctor will consult a head and neck surgeon or an otolaryngologist for specialized evaluation of the bleeding. Air gun or BB pellets that have penetrated the nose or nearby sinuses are generally removed with the help of an endoscope, which is a slender tubular instrument that allows the doctor to examine the inside of a body cavity. Treatment of nasal fractures depends on the extent of the injury; the most difficult fractures to treat are those that involve the nasal septum. The doctor will usually reduce the fracture, which means that he or she will restore the damaged bones to their proper position and alignment. Although local anesthesia is usually sufficient for treating nasal fractures in adults and older teenagers, general anesthesia is usually given when treating these injuries in younger children. Reductions of nasal fractures may be either open or closed. A closed reduction involves manipulation of the bones without cutting into the overlying skin. This type of reduction is performed for fractures of the nasal bones that are limited in size and complexity. Open reductions are performed for more complex nasal fractures. In an open reduction, the nasal bones are moved back to their original location after the surgeon has made an incision in the overlying skin. This procedure is done for fractures involving dislocation of the septum as well as the nasal bones. In addition, an open reduction is necessary if the child has a septal hematoma or an open fracture in which the skin has been perforated. If a septal hematoma is present, the doctor will drain it and pack the nose to prevent subsequent accumulation of blood. The nasal bones are held in the proper position with external splints as well as the internal packing, and the splints are kept in place for seven to ten days. The child is given antibiotics to lower the risk of infection and may be referred to an otolaryngologist or plastic surgeon for further evaluation. Ice packs or cold compresses can be applied at home to reduce swelling and ease the child's discomfort. In the case of animal bites, the child may be given passive or active immunization against rabies if there is a chance that the dog or other animal is rabid. This precaution is particularly important for animal bites on the nose or other parts of the face, as the incubation period of the rabies virus is much shorter for bites on the head and neck than for bites elsewhere on the body. Most types of nasal trauma have a good prognosis. Nosebleeds or tissue damage caused by scratching or picking at the nose usually clear completely once the child stops these habits. Infections or allergic reactions caused by foreign objects in the nose or piercing usually clear up promptly once the object or piece of jewelry is removed. Nasal fractures that do not involve the nasal septum or other facial bones and receive prompt treatment generally heal without deformities of the nose, cartilage destruction, or other complications. More extensive facial fractures, however, may require a second operation to correct the positioning of the bones and restore the appearance of the nose. The prognosis for soft-tissue injuries to the nose depends on the cause and extent of the injuries. Such tearing or crushing injuries as those caused by bites take longer to heal than simple cuts and may require plastic surgery at a later date to restore the appearance of the nose. Damage to the tissues lining the nose caused by exposure to tobacco smoke or other irritants in the environment is usually reversible once the child is removed from contact with the irritating substance. Erosion or destruction of the nasal cartilage as a result of inhalant or cocaine abuse, however, usually requires surgical treatment. Crepitus —A crackling sound. Dorsum —The medical term for the bridge of the nose. Ecchymosis —The medical term for a bruise, or skin discoloration caused by blood seeping from broken capillaries under the skin. Epistaxis —The medical term used to describe a bleeding from the nose. Hematoma —A localized collection of blood, often clotted, in body tissue or an organ, usually due to a break or tear in the wall of blood vessel. Iatrogenic —A condition that is caused by the diagnostic procedures or treatments administered by medical professionals. Iatrogenic conditions may be caused by any number of things including contaminated medical instruments or devices, contaminated blood or implants, or contaminated air within the medical facility. Otolaryngologist —A doctor who is trained to treat injuries, defects, diseases, or conditions of the ear, nose, and throat. Also sometimes known as an otorhinolaryngologist. Reduction —The restoration of a body part to its original position after displacement, such as the reduction of a fractured bone by bringing ends or fragments back into original alignment. The use of local or general anesthesia usually accompanies a fracture reduction. If performed by outside manipulation only, the reduction is described as closed; if surgery is necessary, it is described as open. Also describes a chemical reaction in which one or more electrons are added to an atom or molecule. Rhinitis —Inflammation and swelling of the mucous membranes that line the nasal passages. Rhinoplasty —Plastic surgery of the nose to repair it or change its shape. Septum —A wall or partition. Often refers to the muscular wall dividing the left and right heart chambers or the partition in the nose that separates the two nostrils. Also refers to an abnormal fold of tissue down that center of the uterus that can cause infertility. Preventive strategies for nasal trauma depend on the child's age group. For younger children, parents should take the following precautions: - Keep such small objects as coins, disk batteries, and buttons in childproof drawers or cabinets and throw out broken toys or toy parts. - Use a humidifier during heating season to prevent drying and itching of the nasal membranes and coat the inside of the child's nose with petroleum jelly. - Quit smoking completely or stop smoking inside the house. - Open windows or otherwise ventilate the room when using ammonia, chlorine bleach, oven cleaner, degreasers, spray paints, dry cleaning fluid, furniture polish, or other household products that give off strong vapors at room temperature. Keep all such products in a childproof cabinet or closet. - Teach the child basic rules of safety in playing with household pets as well as in dealing with large dogs and other animals outside the house. Have pet dogs or cats immunized against rabies. - Drive safely and make sure the child is using an age-appropriate protective seat or seat belt. - Make sure that the child understands basic safety precautions and traffic laws before allowing him or her to ride a bicycle in the street. - Check the home for safety hazards that might lead to falls (for example, loose carpeting, poorly lit stairwells, and toys allowed to lie on the floor after play). - Teach the child to deal with quarrels with other children without physical fighting and set the child a good example in relationships with others. For older children and adolescents, parents should take the following steps: - Set a good example of safe driving and make sure that teenagers have a mature attitude toward driving before they acquire a driver's license. - Inform themselves about such problems as drug abuse, bullying, or violence in dating relationships, and learn to identify the signs of these problems in their children. - Make sure that their child's sports teams use the appropriate safety equipment, that the equipment is in good condition, and that the teams have appropriate adult supervision. - Discourage the child from nose piercing and similar fads or at least make certain that he or she has the procedure done at a reputable business that follows Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines for cleanliness and sterilization of equipment. - Teach safe and responsible use of BB guns and air guns. Parental concerns regarding nasal trauma depend on the cause and severity of the injury. Minor nosebleeds and uncomplicated fractures of the nose caused by accidents generally heal without problems and are quickly absorbed into the family's routine. Complex fractures or other injuries requiring a second operation may require explanation or discussion with the child. Nasal injuries related to the neighborhood environment (street crime, chemical pollution), lifestyle choices (body piercing, smoking in the home), or family dysfunction (substance abuse, domestic violence), however, suggest the need for professional counseling and changes in the family's structure, geographical location, or increased level of functioning. "Fractures of the Nose." Section 7, Chapter 86 in The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy , edited by Mark H. Beers and Robert Berkow. Whitehouse Station, NJ: Merck Research Laboratories, 2002. Alvi, A., T. Doherty, and G. Lewen. "Facial Fractures and Concomitant Injuries in Trauma Patients." Laryngoscope 113 (January 2003): 102–6. Anderson, Carrie E., and Glenn A. Loomis. "Recognition and Prevention of Inhalant Abuse." American Family Physician 68 (September 1, 2003): 869–76. Brinson, G. M., B. A. Senior, and W. G. Yarbrough. "Endoscopic Management of Retained Airgun Projectiles in the Paranasal Sinuses." Otolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery 130 (January 2004): 25–30. Chhetri, Dinesh K., and N. L. Shapiro. "A Case of a BB-Gun Pellet Injury to the Ethmoid Sinus in a Child." Ear, Nose, and Throat Journal 83 (March 2004): 176–80. Higo, R., et al. "Foreign Bodies in the Aerodigestive Tract in Pediatric Patients." Auris, Nasus, Larynx 30 (December 2003): 397–401. Karkos, P. D., et al. "Magnetic Nasal Foreign Bodies: A Result of Fashion Mania." International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology 67 (December 2003): 1343–45. Mahajan, M., and N. Shah. "Accidental Lodgment of an Air Gun Pellet in the Maxillary Sinus of a 6-Year-Old Girl: A Case Report." Dental Traumatology 20 (June 2004): 178–80. Mayers, L. B., et al. "Prevalence of Body Art (Body Piercing and Tattooing) in University Undergraduates and Incidence of Medical Complications." Mayo Clinic Proceedings 77 (January 2002): 29–34. McCormick, S., et al. "Children and Mini-Magnets: An Almost Fatal Attraction." Emergency Medical Journal 19 (January 2002): 71–3. Tu, A. H., et al. "Facial Fractures from Dog Bite Injuries." Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 109 (April 1, 2002): 1259–65. American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP). 11400 Tomahawk Creek Parkway, Leawood, KS 66211–2672. Web site: http://www.aafp.org. American Academy of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery. One Prince Street, Alexandria, VA 22314–3357. Web site: http://www.entnet.org. American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). 401 West Michigan Street, Indianapolis, IN 46202–3233. Web site: http://www.acsm.org. Gluckman, William, Robert Baricella, and Huma Quraishi. "Epistaxis." eMedicine , January 23, 2004. Available online at http://www.emedicine.com/ped/topic1618.htm (accessed November 12, 2004). Mayo Clinic Staff. "Tattoos and Piercings: What to Know before You Go under the Needle." MayoClinic.com , June 3, 2004. Available online at http://www.mayoclinic.com/invoke.cfm?objectid=3DC17F76-13E3-499BAE9111954BDFFCA5 (accessed November 12, 2004). Ross, Adam T., and Daniel G. Becker. "Fractures, Nasal and Septal." eMedicine , July 13, 2004. Available online at http://www.emedicine.com/ent/topic159.htm (accessed November 12, 2004). Rupp, Timothy J., Marian Bednar, and Stephen Karageanes. "Facial Fractures." eMedicine , August 29, 2004. Available online at http://www.emedicine.com/sports/topic33.htm (accessed November 12, 2004). Rebecca Frey, PhD

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Fundamental Principles of Judo by Kenji Tomiki Kenji Tomiki was born March 15, 1900. In 1956 when the following was first published, Kenji Tomiki was 7th dan Judo, 8th dan Aikido, Professor of Judo at Waseda University, a member of the Kodokan's Special Direction Committee, and an official of the All Japan Judo Federation. In 1971 he was awarded the 8th dan in Kodokan Judo. Kenji Tomiki died December 25, 1979. Table of Contents 1. Physical Training 2. Shizentai (natural posture) 4. Sen (initiative) 5. Kuzushi (breaking balance) 7. Ju-no-ri (principle of gentleness) Judo as Physical Training It is a fundamental principle of sports to carry on exercises in proportion to the bodily strength. Judo as a game belongs to the fighting games and so often assumes all the aspects of an intensive feat of strength requiring strenuous exertions. In the practice of Judo, however, this evil can be averted by means of Kata (forms). That is, the kata enables the Judo student to adjust the amount of exercise according to his bodily strength and age, and yet is fully effectual both in respect to interest and benefit. Judo includes the following three points in its objective on the physical side: - Toughness (giving steadiness, elasticity and staying power to the muscles) - Flexibility (giving mobility to the spinal column and other joints together with full elasticity of the muscles) - Adroitness (quickening the function of the motor nerves and making movements both nimble and steady) The shizentai, or natural posture, is the posture of a person standing quietly with his head and upper body kept upright, arms hanging without constraint and legs not so firm and widely apart. This is the description of the proper posture as regards its form, but it has a deeper, wider significance. When this posture is maintained, it may be considered that 1) the body keeps stability and does not fall and 2)as the limbs are kept soft they can shift to any action at any moment. In the preceding paragraph the natural posture is explained as a standing posture. If, however, outward form or posture is left out of consideration, and the natural posture is an attitude of the body which is capable of repelling the opponent's attack, and moreover of assuming the offensive whenever there is an opening in the opponent's guard, the natural posture may be said to be possible not only when standing, but also when sitting or lying. In fact, in a Judo contest, the contestant who has fallen is not nedessarily beaten. On the contrary, he may make an attack against his opponent while lying on the mats. In fact, the natural posture is an attitude of the body which is always capable of taking the lead. There is an old expression, "Motion in rest." It means that rest is pregnant with motion as infinite activity, so it indicates the principle of natural posture. Functioning like this, the natural posture must necessarily be studied from a mental point of view, and from olden times the ultimate secrets of jujutsu have lain here. Courtesy is the formal manifestation of the spirit of respect. With the spirit of respect we recognize the dignity of another's personality. In other words, it is the spirit of living in harmony with one another in social life. In a Judo contest the contestants should face each other in the proper posture, looking properly at each other and using moderation in their actions. Thus they are in a state of harmony in which they never set each other at defiance, and maintain the dignity of personality. Hence it is taught that exercises in Judo should begin with courtesy and end with courtesy. In all athletic sports one must, in order to gain the victory, surpass the opponent in mental power, technical skill, and physical strength. These three factors must be united in gaining the mastery over an opponent. The mastery is brought into play in the form of various techniques, and although there are a large number of them, they may be summed up and resolved into one word sen (initiative or lead). In the old densho (books of secret principles) the way of taking the initiative is explained in three stages. - Sen-sen-no-sen (superior initiative). Superior initiative is given play in a delicate situation where one confronts an opponent who intends to attack, and gains mastery over him by subtly guessing his mentality and forestalling his actions. This is the highest reach of the mental cultivation in any military art and is regarded as not easily attainable. But if you consider it more deeply, you will find it too late to try to gain command over anything when it has taken a concrete form, and you must have the mental preparedness to hold it down beforehand. For this purpose it is necessary to learn to maintain the openness and serenity of mind as signified by the old expression, "Clear as a stainless mirror and calm as still water." Lao-tse teaches this almost divine state of mind in the following words: "It is the way of heaven to prevail without contention." - Sen (initiative). This is to forestall your opponent by starting an action before he begins attack on you. - Ato-no-sen (initiative in defense). This is not to guess the mentality of your opponent and check his action before it is done, but to start action in defense the moment you have an inkling of the offensive of your opponent. It is to avoid the opponent's attack the instant it is about to be launched upon you, and to make a counter-attack taking advantage of a pause in your opponent's movement and a disturbance in his posture. A man who takes the initiative in defense rises in opposition to his opponent's attack, and parries or averts it. Seemingly it is a defensive move. In order to stave off the opponent's attack at the last moment and restore one's position one must keep the moral attitude of initiative so as not to get worsted by the adversary. The secrets of victory thus lie in taking the initiative, and in getting the start of one's adversary there are included the following factors: - The first is the eyes. From old times it is said that the important things in a bout are "first the eyes, second the feet, third grit, and fourth strength." The eyes are said to be the window for the mind. They are an index to your mind. Where the eyes are fixed, there the mind is concentrated, and naturally the will is attracted. - The second in importance is the posture. In a wider sense, it is the bodily attitude. It is a preparatory posture either for attack or for defense. Therefore, unless a proper posture is well maintained, not only is it impossible to take advantage of any opening for attack in the adversary, but you get your posture broken and are given a blow. - The third is the movement. Even though you maintain the proper posture or bodily attitude, you cannot attain your object unless your movement and action conform to the rules. - The fourth is the space condition. It consists of your distance, direction, and position as against your opponent. It is essential to study the principles of space condition, for from this study you will realize the secret principle of "fighting after getting the better of the opponent first." |Kenji Tomiki performing ude garami| In the preceding section on the principle of natural posture, explanation was given regarding how to make oneself invulnerable to all possible attacks and how victory is gained. In this section on the principle of kuzushi (breaking the posture) it will he shown how it is that one is defeated. For in order to make clear the theory of victory one must at the same time know the theory of defeat. The Kodokan Judo found that the principle of the techniques (either with naked fists, or using a weapon like the sword, spear, club, etc.) of the old-school jujutsu consists in breaking the condition of the body which has lost equilibrium. It is called kuzure-no-jotai (state of broken balance). Sometimes the opponent himself loses the balance, and at other times you positively destroy the opponent's balance, leading him to a vulnerable posture. In Judo each technique is analyzed into tsukuri (preparatory action) and kake (attack). Preparatory action is further divided into aite-no-tsukuri (preparing of the opponent) and jibun-no-tsukuri (preparing of self). Preparing of the opponent consists in destroying the opponent's balance before performing a technique and putting him in a posture where it will be easy to apply it. At the same instant the contestant himself must be in a posture and position in which it is easy to apply a technique. This is the preparing of self. The nicety of judo techniques lies not in the action of performing techniques, but rather in the skill with which the preparing is done as a preliminary. It was the clear-sighted and original idea of the founder of the Kodokan Judo that analyzed the technique which is applied in an instant, and attached importance to the study and practice of preparatory action. In the case of the preparing of the opponent, the theory and practice of the principle of breaking the balance must be studied, while as regards preparing of self it is necessary to study the natural posture and also the theory and practice of ma-ai (space condition). The center of gravity of a standing man's body is nearly in the hypogastric region. When the perpendicular line drawn from the center of gravity passes through the fulcrum or the middle of the base formed by the two feet, the posture of the man is stabilized. A man is ready to fall when his body swings forward and backward or from side to side, and the perpendicular line drawn from the center of gravity departs from the fulcrum. However, when a living person's body loses its balance, he tries to regain it. Though the center of gravity wavers, he is able to maintain his erect posture. In case the center of gravity of a standing person wavers sharply and he is unable to maintain stability he supports his body by putting his foot forward in the direction in which the center of gravity tends. In short, the posture of a standing man appears unstable at first sight, but the equilibrium is cleverly kept by taking steps properly. If some external force acts upon the man the moment he loses balance, he falls at once, as is described below - The body falls easily, when something impedes the foot which is set in the direction in which the center of gravity tends, e. g., when the foot put out stumbles on a pebble. - When the equilibrium of the body is lost, the time when the center of gravity is lost is shorter than the time required for the peripheral sensory organ to communicate the loss of the body equilibrium to the nerve center and the latter to order the foot muscles through the foot nerve to put the foot forward; for instance, when the body inclines forward and falls forward because a sudden force is applied from the back, giving the person no time to put the foot forward. In the previous sections it was asserted that we are never defeated if we keep our proper posture and presence of mind, and in carrying on movements and actions we use the body in a natural and reasonable manner. It was also shown how easily we are defeated when the balance of the body is lost. Next we must learn how these two principles should be put into practice in the judo contest, namely how to deal with the opponent's power when applied upon us, and to gain the final victory. The rules of this activity are called ju-no-ri, or the principle of gentleness. - The Principle of Gentleness as Viewed from the Relation of Force When meeting an opponent, there are various ways that the principle of gentleness can be applied against the force that is used upon us. The bout may be performed in a standing position or sometimes in a lying posture. There are also various kinds of techniques such as standing position techniques, lying posture techniques, holding techniques, strangle-hold techniques, and the bending and twisting of joints. In order to give the techniques full play in their respective situations it is necessary to apply the principle of gentleness. What then is the principle of gentleness? In the standing position techniques the contestant does not act against the force applied by the opponent, but, while following it, he makes use of the force and tries to break the opponent's posture. For instance, when you and your opponent confront each other at some interval, and he takes a step forward and pushes your chest with his hand, you too take a step backward instead of acting against him, and you will not feel the resistance of the opponent's force. If at that time your step backward is longer than the opponent's step forward, his balance is broken forward by his own force, and you can throw him down forward by pulling the arm which he thrust forward. If, again, the opponent pulls your front lapel, then you can throw him down in the same way by moving forward following the pull. In short, the principle is to pull in response to the opponent's push and to push in response to his pull. In other words, while yielding to the force of the opponent's action upon you, you break his balance by striking at the weak point in his posture. In this case it will be more effective to dodge the opponent's push and pull him by seizing that opportunity than to retreat in the direction of your opponent's push and pull him. The direction of the opponent's movement shifts around you and the opponent not only has to make more movement than you, but he is apt to lose his balance partly owing to the action of centrifugal force. The saying goes among judo experts, “ Move round in response to push." While following your opponent's action, you must always make your movement so as to lead your opponent around you and destroy the balance of his posture. This principle of gentleness means in a wide sense action to maintain your initiative against the resistance and obstruction arising from the surroundings. The manners of taking your posture, taking your steps and moving your body as taught according to the principle of natural posture indicates that the action against all resistance should follow the principle of gentleness. In regard to the case where your body loses its balance and you fall at last, breaking falls are devised as a means to protect your own body from the impact on the ground. This is also an application of the principle of gentleness. As was explained elsewhere in detail, when your own body is about to fall you should round yourself up and fall instead of resisting the impetus, while you use your arms to protect the body from the impact on the ground. In short, you avert the resistance of the ground while yielding cleverly to the terrestrial gravitation (which acts on you before you come under the opponent's force), and thus endeavor to exercise the initiative. - The Principle of Gentleness as Viewed from the Relation of Movement In the foregoing passage explanation was given concerning the relations of the force between oneself and the opponent. It must further be given from the relation of movement. In a bout your opponent develops a feverish bodily activity; so it does not turn out as you want it to. For instance, it would be difficult for you to deliver a blow on your opponent's face, forearm, or side, or to sweep his foot or waist, because the opponent does not stand still a moment, either. Still more difficult is it to grasp the opponent's wrist or arm. An old book of secrets in martial arts mentions the three following opportunities to land a blow on the opponent: - Giving a blow at the beginning. - Giving a blow at the finish. - Giving a blow on the receipt. "Giving a blow at the beginning" is effected when the opponent is beginning an action in which he shifts from a stationary state. Close observation reveals that a man's movement is a succession of rest and motion, resting followed by motion and motion by rest. You land a blow on the opponent at the turn of his action. For instance, when the opponent strikes with his fist, he must first raise it. The moment he begins to raise his fist and the moment he begins to deal a blow with his raised fist are called the "beginning." In "giving a blow at the finish," "finish" means the moment the opponent has dealt a blow with raised fist and forearm fully stretched. "Giving a blow on the receipt" is effected when the opponent has received the blow you gave him and, intent only on parrying it, has ceased all other action. In all these cases you avail yourself of the pause at the change of one action to another. By taking advantage of the three above-mentioned cases you give a blow, grasp, or parry. But as a matter of fact, you must be more careful. The pause at the turn of one action to another means the instant the opponent comes to rest. The instant may perhaps be a minute fraction of a second and so it is difficult to give a blow or a grasp just that instant. When, for instance, you chase a fly or dragonfly, you often fail if you try to catch it the moment it settles on something. You will succeed if you catch it by adjusting the motion of your hand to the speed and direction of the insect before it alights. Thus one realizes that in order to seize the three opportunities giving a blow successfully, it is necessary to have practice in adjusting the rhythm of your action to that of the opponent's motion. One cannot understand the principle of gentleness unless one learns this relation of rhythm. As with the way of movement in the natural posture, it is possible to adjust the rhythm of the motion of your body to that of the motion of the opponent's body. It is only when the rhythm of the body movement is thus in accord that you can make the rhythm of your foot and hand movements in accord with that of your opponent and seize the opportunity of applying various techniques. The application of the principle of gentleness is well manifested in the techniques and five kata (forms) of the (ito school of jujutsu which are preserved as the koshiki-no-kata (forms antique) of the Kodokan Judo. The application of force and the movement of the body are effected quite naturally without causing any strain, and enable the contestant to bring the opponent under control without acting against his force. The movement makes a magnificent and beautiful rhythm. From olden times the principle of gentleness has been symbolized by a willow branch or a bamboo, which is pliant and not easily broken. It was also likened to the movement of billows rolling in and receding on the beach. Many of the old schools of jujutsu took their names from these symbols. The term aiki as used in the aikijujutsu or aikido signifies after all "gentleness." The Orientals sought the source of all human actions in ki (spirit). Force is derived from spirit, and movement of the body is effected by spirit. So they held it of primary importance to foster spirit. Mencius says: "Will leads spirit; spirit permeates the body." Issai-Chozan, ancient swordsman, writes, "Spirit carries the mind and controls the body." To adjust one's own spirit to the opponent's is to adjust one's own power to the opponent's, and this is an internal explanation of the principle of gentleness. Kenji Tomiki, author of "Judo, with Aikido", published in 1956 Jujutsu (art of gentleness) was also formerly called wa-jutsu (art of accord). This shows that ju (gentleness) has also the meaning of wa (accord). In the Ryuko-no-maki (lit. Book of Dragon and Tiger) which is regarded as one of the oldest volumes expounding the secrets of the martial arts, there is a passage, "If the enemy turns upon us we meet him; if he leaves we let him leave. Facing the enemy, we stand in accord with him. Five and five are ten. Two and eight are ten. One and nine are ten. All this shows accord." Wa, or accord, is the fundamental principle of the Japanese martial arts. Expressed in modern terms and made easy of practice to anyone, it became the principle of gentleness. The principle of gentleness teaches that one should go, not against, but with, the the opponent's force, and yet maintain one's proper position so as not lose one's balance. This corresponds to the spirit set forth in Confucius' remark in his Analects, "The superior man is compliant but not blindly yielding." Jujutsu originated as a method of fighting between men. But through practice by experts for many years it has been refined as an art, with its principles more and more closely studied and invested with moral significance, until it has developed into Judo as we learn and practice it today. Judo is neither a mere manifestation of violence nor a means of fighting, but can be studied and followed as a doctrine of life. Taken from the Judo Information Site - with kind permission from Neil Ohlenkamp

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Trilobites are a well-known fossil group of extinct marine arthropods that form the class Trilobita. Trilobites form one of the earliest known groups of arthropods. The first appearance of trilobites in the fossil record defines the base of the Atdabanian stage of the Early Cambrian period (521 million years ago), and they flourished throughout the lower Paleozoic era before beginning a drawn-out decline to extinction when, during the Devonian, all trilobite orders except Proetida died out. Trilobites finally disappeared in the mass extinction at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago. The trilobites were among the most successful of all early animals, roaming the oceans for over 270 million years. When trilobites first appeared in the fossil record they were already highly diverse and geographically dispersed. Because trilobites had wide diversity and an easily fossilized exoskeleton an extensive fossil record was left behind, with some 17,000 known species spanning Paleozoic time. The study of these fossils has facilitated important contributions to biostratigraphy, paleontology, evolutionary biology and plate tectonics. Trilobites are often placed within the arthropod subphylum Schizoramia within the superclass Arachnomorpha (equivalent to the Arachnata), although several alternative taxonomies are found in the literature. Trilobites had many life styles; some moved over the sea-bed as predators, scavengers or filter feeders and some swam, feeding on plankton. Most life styles expected of modern marine arthropods are seen in trilobites, with the possible exception of parasitism (where there are still scientific debates). Some trilobites (particularly the family Olenidae) are even thought to have evolved a symbiotic relationship with sulfur-eating bacteria from which they derived food. .and bigotinids (order Ptychopariida, superfamily Ellipsocephaloidea) dated to some 540 to 520 million years ago. Contenders for the earliest trilobites include Profallotaspis jakutensis (Siberia), Fritzaspis spp. (western USA), Hupetina antiqua (Morocco) and Serrania gordaensis (Spain). All trilobites are thought to have originated in present day Siberia, with subsequent distribution and radiation from this location. Early trilobites show all the features of the trilobite group as a whole; there do not seem to be any transitional or ancestral forms showing or combining the features of trilobites with other groups (e.g. early arthropods). Morphological similarities between trilobites and early arthropod-like creatures such as Spriggina, Parvancorina, and other “trilobitomorphs” of the Ediacaran period of the Precambrian are ambiguous enough to make detailed analysis of their ancestry far from compelling. Morphological similarities between early trilobites and other Cambrian arthropods (e.g. the Burgess Shale fauna and the Maotianshan shales fauna) make analysis of ancestral relationships difficult. However, it is still reasonable to assume that the trilobites share a common ancestor with other arthropods before the Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary. Evidence suggests that significant diversification had already occurred before trilobites were preserved in the fossil record, easily allowing for the “sudden” appearance of diverse trilobite groups with complex derived characteristics (e.g. eyes). Divergence and extinction For such a long-lasting group of animals, it is no surprise that trilobite evolutionary history is marked by a number of extinction events where some groups perished while surviving groups diversified to fill ecological niches with comparable or novel adaptations. Generally, trilobites maintained high diversity levels throughout the Cambrian and Ordovician periods before entering a drawn-out decline in the Devonian culminating in final extinction of the last few survivors at the end of the Permian period. Principal evolutionary trends from primitive morphologies (e.g. eoredlichids) include the origin of new types of eyes, improvement of enrollment and articulation mechanisms, increased size of pygidium (micropygy to isopygy) and development of extreme spinosity in certain groups. Changes also included narrowing of the thorax and increasing or decreasing numbers of thoracic segments. Specific changes to the cephalon are also noted; variable glabella size and shape, position of eyes and facial sutures & hypostome specialization. Several morphologies appeared independently within different major taxa (e.g. eye reduction or miniaturization). Effacement is also a common evolutionary trend. It is the loss of surface detail in the cephalon, pygidium, or the thoracic furrows. Notable examples of this were the orders Agnostida, Asaphida, and the suborder Illaenina of Corynexochida. It is believed that effacement is an indication of either a burrowing lifestyle or a pelagic one. Effacement poses a problem for taxonomists since the loss of details (particularly of the Glabella) can make the determination of phylogenetic relationships difficult. Phylogenetic biogeographic analysis of Early Cambrian Olenellidae and Redlichidae suggests that a uniform trilobite fauna existed over Laurentia, Gondwana and Siberia before the tectonic breakup of the super-continent Pannotia between 600 million years ago and 550 million years ago.Tectonic breakup of Pannotia then allowed for the diversification and radiation expressed later in the Cambrian as the distinctive olenellid province (Laurentia, Siberia and Baltica) and the separate Redlichid province (Australia, Antarctica and China). Breakup of Pannotia significantly predates the first appearance of trilobites in the fossil record, supporting a long and cryptic development of trilobites extending perhaps as far back as 700 million years ago or possibly further. Very shortly after trilobite fossils appeared in the lower Cambrian, they rapidly diversified into the major orders that typified the Cambrian—Redlichiida, Ptychopariida, Agnostida and Corynexochida. The first major crisis in the trilobite fossil record occurred in the Middle Cambrian; surviving orders developed isopygus or macropygius bodies and developed thicker cuticles, allowing better defense against predators (see Thorax above). The end Cambrian mass extinction event marked a major change in trilobite fauna; almost all Redlichiida (including the Olenelloidea) and most Late Cambrian stocks went extinct. A continuing decrease in Laurentian continental shelf area is recorded at the same time as the extinctions, suggesting major environmental upheaval. echinoderms, and graptolites with many groups appearing in the fossil record for the first time. Although intra-species trilobite diversity seems to have peaked during the Cambrian, trilobites were still active participants in the Ordovician radiation event with a new fauna taking over from the old Cambrian one. The Ordovician marks the last great diversification period amongst the trilobites, very few entirely new patterns of organisation arose post-Ordovician; later evolution in trilobites was largely a matter of variations upon the Ordovician themes. By the Ordovician mass extinction vigorous trilobite radiation has stopped and gradual decline beckons. Silurian and Devonian Most Early Silurian families constitute a subgroup of the Late Ordovocian fauna. Few, if any, of the dominant Early Ordovician fauna survived to the end of the Ordovician, yet 74% of the dominant Late Ordovician trilobite fauna survived the Ordovician. Late Ordovician survivors account for all post-Ordovician trilobite groups except the Harpetida. Carboniferous and Permian The Proetida survived for millions of years, continued through the Carboniferous period and lasted until the end of the Permian (when the vast majority of species on Earth were wiped out). It is unknown why order Proetida alone survived the Devonian. The Proetida maintained relatively diverse faunas in deep water and shallow water, shelf environments throughout the Carboniferous. For many millions of years the Proetida existed untroubled in their ecological niche. An analogy would be today’s crinoids, which mostly exist as deep water species; in the Paleozoic era, vast ‘forests’ of crinoids lived in shallow near-shore environments. Trilobites appear to have been exclusively marine organisms, since the fossilized remains of trilobites are always found in rocks containing fossils of other salt-water animals such as brachiopods, crinoids, and corals. Within the marine paleoenvironment, trilobites were found in a broad range from extremely shallow water to very deep water. Trilobites, like brachiopods, crinoids, and corals, are found on all modern continents, and occupied every ancient ocean from which Paleozoic fossils have been collected. The remnants of trilobites can range from the preserved body to pieces of the exoskeleton, which it sheds in the process known as ecdysis. In addition, the tracks left behind by trilobites living on the sea floor are often preserved as trace fossils. There are three main forms of trace fossils associated with trilobites: Rusophycus; Cruziana & Diplichnites – such trace fossils represent the preserved life activity of trilobites active upon the sea floor. Rusophycus, the resting trace, are trilobite excavations involving little or no forward movement and ethological interpretations suggest resting, protection and hunting.Cruziana, the feeding trace, are furrows through the sediment, which are believed to represent the movement of trilobites while deposit feeding. Many of the Diplichnites fossils are believed to be traces made by trilobites walking on the sediment surface. However, care must be taken as similar trace fossils are recorded in freshwater and post Paleozoic deposits, representing non-trilobite origins. Trilobite fossils are found worldwide, with many thousands of known species. Because they appeared quickly in geological time, and moulted like other arthropods, trilobites serve as excellent index fossils, enabling geologists to date the age of the rocks in which they are found. They were among the first fossils to attract widespread attention, and new species are being discovered every year. A famous location for trilobite fossils in the United Kingdom is Wren’s Nest, Dudley in the West Midlands, where Calymene blumenbachi is found in the Silurian Wenlock Group. This trilobite is featured on the town’s coat of arms and was named the Dudley Bug or Dudley Locust by quarrymen who once worked the now abandoned limestone quarries. Llandrindod Wells, Powys, Wales, is another famous trilobite location. The well-known Elrathia kingi trilobite is found in abundance in the Cambrian age Wheeler Shale of Utah. Spectacularly preserved trilobite fossils, often showing soft body parts (legs, gills, antennae, etc.) have been found in British Columbia, Canada (the Cambrian Burgess Shale and similar localities); New York State, U.S.A. (Ordovician Walcott-Rust quarry, near Russia, and Beecher’s Trilobite Bed, near Rome); China (Lower Cambrian Maotianshan Shales near Chengjiang); Germany (the Devonian Hunsrück Slates near Bundenbach) and, much more rarely, in trilobite-bearing strata in Utah (Wheeler Shale and other formations), Ontario, and Manuels River, Newfoundland and Labrador.The French palaeontologist Joachim Barrande (1799–1883) carried out his landmark study of trilobites in the Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian of Bohemia, publishing the first volume of Système silurien du centre de la Bohême in 1852. When trilobites are found, only the exoskeleton is preserved (often in an incomplete state) in all but a handful of locations. A few locations (Lagerstätten) preserve identifiable soft body parts (legs, gills, musculature & digestive tract) and enigmatic traces of other structures (e.g. fine details of eye structure) as well as the exoskeleton. Trilobites range in length from 1 millimetre (0.04 in) to 72 centimetres (28 in), with a typical size range of 3–10 cm (1.2–3.9 in). The world’s largest trilobite, Isotelus rex, was found in 1998 by Canadian scientists in Ordovician rocks on the shores of Hudson Bay. The exoskeleton is composed of calcite and calcium phosphate minerals in a protein lattice of chitin that covers the upper surface (dorsal) of the trilobite and curled round the lower edge to produce a small fringe called the “doublure”. Three distinctive tagmata (sections) are present: cephalon (head); thorax (body) and pygidium (tail). As might be expected for a group of animals comprising c. 5,000 genera, the morphology and description of trilobites can be complex. However, despite morphological complexity and an unclear position within higher classifications, there are a number of characteristics that distinguish the trilobites from other arthropods: a generally sub-elliptical, dorsal, chitinous exoskeleton divided longitudinally into three distinct lobes (from which the group gets its name); having a distinct, relatively large head shield (cephalon) articulating axially with a thorax comprising articulated transverse segments, the hindmost of which are almost invariably fused to form a tail shield (pygidium). When describing differences between trilobite taxa, the presence, size, and shape of the cephalic features are often mentioned. During moulting, the exoskeleton generally split between the head and thorax, which is why so many trilobite fossils are missing one or the other. In most groups facial sutures on the cephalon helped facilitate moulting. Similar to lobsters and crabs, trilobites would have physically “grown” between the moult stage and the hardening of the new exoskeleton. morphological complexity. The glabella forms a dome underneath which sat the “crop” or “stomach”. Generally the exoskeleton has few distinguishing ventral features, but the cephalon often preserves muscle attachment scars and occasionally the hypostome, a small rigid plate comparable to the ventral plate in other arthropods. A toothless mouth and stomach sat upon the hypostome with the mouth facing backwards at the rear edge of the hypostome. Hypostome morphology is highly variable; sometimes supported by an un-mineralised membrane (natant), sometimes fused onto the anterior doublure with an outline very similar to the glabella above (conterminant) or fused to the anterior doublure with an outline significantly different from the glabella (impendent). Many variations in shape and placement of the hypostome have been described. The size of the glabella and the lateral fringe of the cephalon, together with hypostome variation, have been linked to different lifestyles, diets and specific ecological niches. The anterior and lateral fringe of the cephalon is greatly enlarged in the Harpetida, in other species a bulge in the pre-glabellar area is preserved that suggests a brood pouch. Highly complex compound eyes are another obvious feature of the cephalon. The dorsal surface of the trilobite cephalon (the frontmost tagma, or the ‘head’) can be divided into two regions – the cranidium and the librigena (“free cheeks”). The cranidium can be further divided into the glabella (the central lobe in the cephalon) and the fixigena (“fixed cheeks”). The facial sutures lie along the anterior edge, at the division between the cranidium and the librigena. Trilobite facial sutures on the dorsal side can be roughly divided into five main types according to where the sutures end relative to the genal angle (the edges where the side and rear margins of the cephalon converge). - Absent – Facial sutures are lacking in the Olenellina. This is considered a primitive state, and is always combined with the presence of eyes. - Proparian – The facial suture ends in front of the genal angle, along the lateral margin. Example genera showing this type of suture include Dalmanites of Phacopina (Phacopida) and Ekwipagetia of Eodiscina (Agnostida). - Gonatoparian – The facial suture ends at the tip of the genal angle. Example genera showing this type of suture include Calymene and Trimerus of Calymenina (Phacopida). - Opisthoparian – The facial suture ends at the posterior margin of the cephalon. Example genera showing this type of suture include Peltura of Olenina (Ptychopariida) and Bumastus of Illaenina (Corynexochida). This is the most common type of facial suture. - Hypoparian or marginal – In some trilobites, dorsal sutures may be secondary lost. Several exemplary time series of species show the “migration” of the dorsal suture until it coincides with the margins of the cephalon. As the visual surface of the eye is on the diminishing free cheek (or librigena), the number of lenses tends to go down, and eventually the eye disappears. The loss of dorsal sutures may arise from the proparian state, such as in some Eodiscina like Weymouthia, all Agnostina, and some Phacopina such as Ductina. The marginal sutures exhibited by the harpetids and trinucleioids, however, are derived from opisthoparian sutures. On the other hand, blindness is not always accompanied by the loss of facial sutures. The primitive state of the dorsal sutures is proparian. Opisthoparian sutures have developed several times independently. There are no examples of proparian sutures developing in taxa with opisthoparian ancestry. Trilobites that exhibit opisthoparian sutures as adults commonly have proparian sutures as instars. Hypoparian sutures have also arisen independently in several groups of trilobites. There are also two types of sutures in the dorsal surface connected to the compound eyes of trilobites.They are: - Ocular sutures – are sutures surrounding the edges of the compound eye. Trilobites with these sutures lose the entire surface of the eyes when molting. It is common among Cambrian trilobites. - Palpebral sutures – are sutures which form part of the dorsal facial suture running along the top edges of the compound eye. - Connective sutures – are the sutures that continue from the facial sutures past the front margin of the cephalon. - Rostral suture – is only present when the trilobite possesses a rostrum (or rostral plate). It connects the rostrum to the front part of the dorsal cranidium. - Hypostomal suture – separates the hypostome from the doublure when the hypostome is of the attached type. It is absent when the hypostome is free-floating (i.e. natant). it is also absent in some coterminant hypostomes where the hypostome is fused to the doublure. - Median suture – exhibited by asaphid trilobites, they are formed when instead of becoming connective sutures, the two dorsal sutures converge at a point in front of the cephalon then divide straight down the center of the doublure. The rostrum (or the rostral plate) is a distinct part of the doublure located at the front of the cephalon. It is separated from the rest of the doublure by the rostral suture. During molting in trilobites like Paradoxides, the rostrum is used to anchor the front part of the trilobite as the cranidium separates from the librigena. The opening created by the arching of the body provides an exit for the molting trilobite. It is absent in some trilobites like Lachnostoma. - Natant – Hypostome not attached to doublure. Aligned with front edge of glabella. - Conterminant – Hypostome attached to rostral plate of doublure. Aligned with front edge of glabella. - Impendent – Hypostome attached to rostral plate but not aligned to glabella. Each segment consists of the central axial ring and the outer pleurae, which protected the limbs and gills. The pleurae are sometimes abbreviated or extended to form long spines. Apodemes are bulbous projections on the ventral surface of the exoskeleton to which most leg muscles attached, although some leg muscles attached directly to the exoskeleton. Determining a junction between thorax and pygidium can be difficult and many segment counts suffer from this problem.Trilobite fossils are often found “enrolled” (curled up) like modern pill bugs for protection; evidence suggests enrollment helped protect against the inherent weakness of the arthropod cuticle that was exploited by anomalocarid predators. Some trilobites achieved a fully closed capsule (e.g. Phacops), while others with long pleural spines (e.g. Selenopeltis) left a gap at the sides or those with a small pygidium (e.g. Paradoxides) left a gap between the cephalon and pygidium. In Phacops, the pleurae overlap a smooth bevel (facet) allowing a close seal with the doublure. The doublure carries a Panderian notch or protuberance on each segment to prevent over rotation and achieve a good seal. Even in an agnostid, with only 2 articulating thoracic segments, the process of enrollment required a complex musculature to contract the exoskeleton and return to the flat condition. The pygidium is formed from a number of segments and the telson fused together. Segments in the pygidium are similar to the thoracic segments (bearing biramous limbs) but are not articulated. Trilobites can be described based on the pygidium being micropygous (pygidium smaller than cephalon), subisopygous (pygidium sub equal to cephalon), isopygous (pygidium equal in size to cephalon), or macropygous (pygidium larger than cephalon). Prosopon (surface sculpture) Trilobite exoskeletons show a variety of small-scale structures collectively called prosopon. Prosopon does not include large scale extensions of the cuticle (e.g. hollow pleural spines) but to finer scale features, such as ribbing, domes, pustules, pitting, ridging and perforations. The exact purpose of the prosopon is not resolved but suggestions include structural strengthening, sensory pits or hairs, preventing predator attacks and maintaining aeration while enrolled. In one example, alimentary ridge networks (easily visible in Cambrian trilobites) might have been either digestive or respiratory tubes in the cephalon and other regions. Some trilobites such as those of the order Lichida evolved elaborate spiny forms, from the Ordovician until the end of the Devonian period. Examples of these specimens have been found in the Hamar Laghdad Formation of Alnif in Morocco. There is, however, a serious counterfeiting and fakery problem with much of the Moroccan material that is offered commercially. Spectacular spined trilobites have also been found in western Russia; Oklahoma, USA; and Ontario, Canada. Some trilobites had horns on their heads similar to those of modern beetles. Based on the size, location, and shape of the horns the most likely use of the horns was combat for mates, making the Asaphida family Raphiophoridae the earliest exemplars of this behavior. Another use for these spines was protection from predators. When enrolled, trilobite spines offered additional protection. This conclusion is likely to be applicable to other trilobites as well, such as in the Phacopid trilobite genus Walliserops, that developed spectacular tridents. Soft body parts Only 21 or so species are described from which soft body parts are preserved, so some features (e.g. the posterior antenniform cerci preserved only in Olenoides serratus) remain difficult to assess in the wider picture. Trilobites had a single pair of preoral antennae and otherwise undifferentiated biramous limbs (2, 3 or 4 cephalic pairs, followed by one pair per thorax segment and some pygidium pairs). Each exopodite (walking leg) had 6 or 7 segments, homologous to other early arthropods. Exopodites are attached to the coxa, which also bore a feather-like endopodite, or gill branch, which was used for respiration and, in some species, swimming. The inside of the coxa (or gnathobase) carries spins, probably to chew prey items. The last exopodite segment usually had claws or spines. Many examples of hairs on the legs suggest adaptations for feeding (as for the gnathobases) or sensory organs to help with walking. The toothless mouth of trilobites was situated on the rear edge of the hypostome (facing backwards), in front of the legs attached to the cephalon. The mouth is linked by a small esophagus to the stomach that lay forward of the mouth, below the glabella. The “intestine” led backwards from there to the pygidium. The “feeding limbs” attached to the cephalon are thought to have fed food into the mouth, possibly “slicing” the food on the hypostome and/or gnathobases first. Alternative lifestyles are suggested, with the cephalic legs used to disturb the sediment to make food available. A large glabella, (implying a large stomach), coupled with an impendent hypostome has been used as evidence of more complex food sources, i.e. possibly a carnivorous lifestyle. While there is direct and implied evidence for the presence and location of the mouth, stomach and digestive tract (see above) the presence of heart, brain and liver are only implied (although “present” in many reconstructions) with little direct geological evidence. Although rarely preserved, long lateral muscles extended from the cephalon to mid way down the pygidium, attaching to the axial rings allowing enrollment while separate muscles on the legs tucked them out of the way. The pair of antennae suspected in most trilobites (and preserved in a few examples) were highly flexible to allow them to be retracted when the trilobite was enrolled. Also, one species (Olenoides serratus) preserves antennae-like cerci that project from the rear of the trilobite. Trilobite eyes were typically compound, with each lens being an elongated prism. The number of lenses in such an eye varied: some trilobites had only one, while some had thousands of lenses in a single eye. In compound eyes, the lenses were typically arranged hexagonally. The fossil record of trilobite eyes is complete enough that their evolution can be studied through time, which compensates to some extent the lack of preservation of soft internal parts.Lenses of trilobites’ eyes were made of calcite (calcium carbonate, CaCO3). Pure forms of calcite are transparent, and some trilobites used crystallographically oriented, clear calcite crystals to form each lens of each of their eyes. Rigid calcite lenses would have been unable to accommodate to a change of focus like the soft lens in a human eye would; however, in some trilobites the calcite formed an internal doublet structure, giving superb depth of field and minimal spherical aberration, according to optical principles discovered by French scientist René Descartes and Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens in the 17th century. A living species with similar lenses is the brittle star Ophiocoma wendtii. In other trilobites, with a Huygens interface apparently missing, a gradient index lens is invoked with the refractive index of the lens changing towards the center. - Holochroal eyes had a great number (sometimes over 15,000) of small (30–100 μm, rarely larger) lenses. Lenses were hexagonally close packed, touching each other, with a single corneal membrane covering all lenses. Holochroal eyes had no sclera, the white layer covering the eyes of most modern arthropods. Holochroal eyes are the ancestral eye of trilobites, and are by far the most common, found in all orders except the Agnostida, and through the entirety of the Trilobites’ existence. Little is known of the early history of holochroal eyes; Lower and Middle Cambrian trilobites rarely preserve the visual surface. The spatial resolving power of grated eyes (such as holochroal eyes) is dependent on light intensity, circular motion, receptor density, registered light angle, and the extent to which the signal of individual rhabdoms are neurally combined. This implies that lenses need to be larger under low light conditions (such as for Pricyclopyge, when comparing it to Carolinites), and for fast moving predators and prey. As the circular velocity caused by the forward speed of an animal itself is much higher for the ommatidia directed perpendicular to the movement, fast-moving trilobites (such as Carolinites) have eyes flattened from the side and more curved were ommatia are directed to front, back, up and down. Thus eye morphology can be used to make assumptions about the ecosystem of trilobites. - Schizochroal eyes typically had fewer (around 700), larger lenses than holochroal eyes and are found only in Phacopida. Lenses were separate, with each lens having an individual cornea that extended into a rather large sclera. Schizochroal eyes appear quite suddenly in the early Ordovician, and were presumably derived from a holochroal ancestor. Field of view (all around vision), eye placement and coincidental development of more efficient enrollment mechanisms point to the eye as a more defensive “early warning” system than directly aiding in the hunt for food. Modern eyes that are functionally equivalent to the schizochroal eye were not thought to exist, but are found in the modern insect species Xenos peckii. - Abathochroal eyes are found only in Cambrian Eodiscina, and have around 70 small separate lenses that had individual cornea. The sclera was separate from the cornea, and did not run as deep as the sclera in schizochroal eyes. Although well preserved examples are sparse in the early fossil record, abathochroal eyes have been recorded in the lower Cambrian, making them among the oldest known. Environmental conditions seem to have resulted in the later loss of visual organs in many Eodiscina. Secondary blindness is not uncommon, particularly in long lived groups such as the Agnostida and Trinucleioidea. In Proetida and Phacopina from western Europe and particularly Tropidocoryphinae from France (where there is good stratigraphic control), there are well studied trends showing progressive eye reduction between closely related species that eventually leads to blindness. Several other structures on trilobites have been explained as photo-receptors. Of particular interest are “macula”, the small areas of thinned cuticle on the underside of the hypostome. In some trilobites macula are suggested to function as simple “ventral eyes” that could have detected night and day or allowed a trilobite to navigate while swimming (or turned) upside down. There are several types of prosopon that have been suggested as sensory apparatus collecting chemical or vibrational signals. The connection between large pitted fringes on the cephalon of Harpetida and Trinucleoidea with corresponding small or absent eyes makes for an interesting possibility of the fringe as a “compound ear”. Trilobite larvae are known from the Cambrian to the Carboniferous and from all sub-orders. As instars from closely related taxa are more similar than instars from distantly related taxa, trilobite larvae provide morphological information important in evaluating high-level phylogenetic relationships among trilobites. Despite the absence of supporting fossil evidence, their similarity to living arthropods has led to the belief that trilobites multiplied sexually and produced eggs. Some species may have kept eggs or larvae in a brood pouch forward of the glabella, particularly when the ecological niche was challenging to larvae. Size and morphology of the first calcified stage are highly variable between (but not within) trilobite taxa, suggesting some trilobites passed through more growth within the egg than others. Early developmental stages prior to calcification of the exoskeleton are a possibility (suggested for fallotaspids), but so is calcification and hatching coinciding. The earliest post-embryonic trilobite growth stage known with certainty are the “protaspid” stages (anamorphic phase). Starting with an indistinguishable proto-cephalon and proto-pygidium (anaprotaspid) a number of changes occur ending with a transverse furrow separating the proto-cephalon and proto-pygidium (metaprotaspid) that can continue to add segments. Segments are added at the posterior part of the pygidium but, all segments remain fused together. The “meraspid” stages (anamorphic phase) are marked by the appearance of an articulation between the head and the fused trunk. Prior to the onset of the first meraspid stage the animal had a two-part structure — the head and the plate of fused trunk segments, the pygidium. During the meraspid stages, new segments appeared near the rear of the pygidium as well as additional articulations developing at the front of the pygidium, releasing freely articulating segments into the thorax. Segments are generally added one per moult (although two per moult and one every alternate moult are also recorded), with number of stages equal to the number of thoracic segments. A substantial amount of growth, from less than 25% up to 30%–40%, probably took place in the meraspid stages. The “holaspid” stages (epimorphic phase) commence when a stable, mature number of segments has been released into the thorax. Moulting continued during the holaspid stages, with no changes in thoracic segment number. Some trilobites are suggested to have continued moulting and growing throughout the life of the individual, albeit at a slower rate on reaching maturity.Some trilobites showed a marked transition in morphology at one particular instar, which has been called “trilobite metamorphosis”. Radical change in morphology is linked to the loss or gain of distinctive features that mark a change in mode of life. A change in lifestyle during development has significance in terms of evolutionary pressure, as the trilobite could pass through several ecological niches on the way to adult development and changes would strongly affect survivorship and dispersal of trilobite taxa. It is worth noting that trilobites with all protaspid stages solely planktonic and later meraspid stages benthic (e.g. asaphids) failed to last through the Ordovician extinctions, while trilobites that were planktonic for only the first protaspid stage before metamorphosing into benthic forms survived (e.g. lichids, phacopids). Pelagic larval life-style proved ill-adapted to the rapid onset of global climatic cooling and loss of tropical shelf habitats during the Ordovician.

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February 21, 2011 When we started this blog in April 2010, we weren't quite sure what we would do with it or how it would relate to the rest of the Sing About Science project. Ten months later, it's clear that the blog is integral to the project and something that we should keep writing. To give it an appearance that is more professional and more consistent with the rest of SingAboutScience.org, we've moved it to a new WordPress-based directory: http://www.singaboutscience.org/wp/. If you've enjoyed reading the posts here at singaboutscience.blogspot.com, please update your feed readers, bookmarks, etc. Virtually all of the content posted here is now available at the new address, and future entries will be posted only to the new address. Posted by crowther at 12:22 PM February 18, 2011 Well, They Might Be Giants' stellar Here Comes Science did not win the Grammy Award for Best Children's Album last weekend, and a bunch of scientists are pretty upset. In fact, the journal BioTechniques went so far as to create its own Best Lab Song of the Year category, select nominees, and appoint itself the judge of the nominees. I'm not sure this represents the peer review process at its best, but you are welcome to view the BioTechniques article ("And the Grammy for best lab song goes to...") and decide whether you agree with the selections. February 17, 2011 From Geophysical Research Letters via Science News comes the word that corals off the coast of Japan are moving northward, perhaps in response to the warming of the ocean. The team, led by geographer Hiroya Yamano of the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan, analyzed maps of corals from four time periods starting in the 1930s. They found that of nine common coral species, four had expanded northward, and two went as far as temperate waters. The study confirms what marine biologists and fishermen have speculated for years. For some background information on choral reefs, we go to a live performance in which Billy B is supported by a coral group, er, choral group, of schoolchildren. If this song doesn't teach you the word "zooxanthellae," I don't know what will! February 14, 2011 Sing About Science's searchable database now includes over 3700 math and science songs, which seems like a lot. But does it include virtually all of the relevant songs out there? I doubt it. Just yesterday I discovered a couple of artists of whom I was not previously aware: Jonny Berliner and Doug Edmonds. Berliner is a musician with a knack for lines like, "With Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle you can be uncertain for sure." Edmonds is a junior high school teacher who has been written up in the TribLocal branch of the Chicago Tribune ("Singing science teacher attracts YouTube following"). I look forward to discovering even more singing scientists and adding them to the database. Suggestions are always welcome! Posted by crowther at 8:35 AM February 11, 2011 Alison McCook notes certain parallels between the guitar-smashers and the gene-cloners. "Punk ethos is typified by a passionate adherence to individualism, creativity and freedom of expression with no regard to established opinions," Bill Cuevas, biochemist at the biotech company Genencor and music director at the Stanford University radio station KZSU, tells The Scientist. "Good scientific discipline is also typified by such qualities, including inquisitiveness and curiosity, with no entrenchment to established beliefs." ...Importantly, punk is "about the freedom to express what you want to express," says Milo Aukerman, a plant researcher at DuPont and lead singer of legendary punk band The Descendents. In many ways, research is the same -- more so than in other professions, scientists can set their own schedules and decide what they want to study. "There is a certain freedom implied there," Aukerman adds. Unfortunately, the article backs away from the possible conclusion that more punk rock music should be about science. Of course, even if punk music and science share many elements, the comparison can be taken too far, says Aukerman. For instance, you don't see many punk musicians singing about science. "I will probably never ever write a song about DNA," he says. Thanks to Joel Tetreault for pointing us toward this article. Posted by crowther at 12:49 PM February 10, 2011 Our featured science story of the week is Turning garbage into gas (from The Economist). Appropriately tweaked, the destruction of organic materials (including paper and plastics) by plasma torches produces a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen called syngas. That, in turn, can be burned to generate electricity. Add in the value of the tipping fees that do not have to be paid if rubbish is simply vaporised, plus the fact that energy prices in general are rising, and plasma torches start to look like a plausible alternative to burial. A science song that aligns fairly well with this story is "Making biogas is a gas, gas, gas" by T. H. Culhane. Note, however, the difference between syngas, discussed in the article, and biogas, discussed in the song. The gases produced are different -- syngas is carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2), while biogas usually consists mostly of methane (CH4) -- and they are produced by different processes, with biogas arising from the metabolism of living organisms such as bacteria. February 9, 2011 Sorry for yet another bit of self-promotion, but here I am in "UW professor a mad scientist behind songs about science," a KING 5 TV piece that aired earlier tonight. Posted by crowther at 11:38 PM February 7, 2011 On January 6th I gave a brief presentation -- "Global health, neglected diseases, and drug development" -- to students in Glacier Peak High School's biotechnology program. At the end of it I tacked on an a cappella rendition of a song about malaria written by my boss. A couple of weeks later I received a very nice thank-you card signed by 21 of the students. Although they only had space to write a sentence or two apiece, 14 of them mentioned the song! Although we cannot conclude anything about my singing ability or the students' comprehension of the song lyrics, the song was obviously memorable. And if any of the students turn their attention to malaria again in the future, they may well recall the existence of this song, search for it on YouTube or my database, and perhaps digest the words and ponder their meaning. That's exactly the sort of informal learning that we want to encourage. Posted by crowther at 3:33 PM February 3, 2011 Jonathan Coulton, who we've mentioned before, is somewhat famous for his "Thing a Week" project, in which he recorded a new song every week for a year. A pretty strict schedule ... and yet downright lax compared to that of Jonathan Mann, who has been posting a new song to YouTube every single day for over two years running! His Song A Day #686 ("CERN Created and Held Anti-Matter") is our selection as this week's Science Song of the Week. Feel free to sing along with the chorus: "Antimatter hey, antimatter ho -- our model of the universe needs you, bro...." Mann's song was chosen because it may serve as a fun entry point into a recent Science News article, "Sizing up the electron," which explains the connection between electrons and antimatter as follows. [The electron] inspired the mathematical equation that first hinted at the existence of antimatter, the exotic, oppositely charged counterpart to ordinary matter. Now the electron is poised to go one step further, by helping scientists understand why matter triumphed over antimatter in the early universe. In theory, the Big Bang should have created matter and antimatter in equal amounts, but if so they would have annihilated each other and left nothing behind. Though the standard model of particle physics, the mathematical framework for explaining how stuff is held together, can't quite account for how matter beat out antimatter, some theories that go beyond the standard model do. By carefully measuring the shape of the electron, through a particular property known as the electric dipole moment, scientists think they can narrow those theories down to get at the one that best reflects reality. "The electron EDM is one of the places where there should be a good chance of seeing some new phenomena that can't be explained in the standard model, and could in turn help to explain this matter-antimatter imbalance in the universe," says physicist David DeMille of Yale University. February 1, 2011 I got a rare call on my office phone this past Friday at about 4:30 PM. It was my boss, calling in from California. We chatted for a couple of minutes and then I said, "Look, I'm sorry but I have to go. We're, ah, making a music video about the lab's research." I would have preferred not to cut off my boss with such a frivolous-sounding excuse, but felt safe in doing so. He himself has been known to sing about medicine in public. Besides, the video was sort of meant to celebrate the work being done by his group. In general terms, this entails the very early stages of drug development for infectious diseases. Like most biomedical research, it requires a constant influx of grant money ... which is why I called the song "Money 4 Drugz." Many thanks to Ryan Choi, who directed the video, and everyone else who helped! January 31, 2011 Last June we made a list of the YouTube science/math song videos that had been seen by the most viewers. That list has been rendered obsolete by the release of Bad Project, the grad student nightmare set to music by Hui Zheng's lab at the Baylor College of Medicine. New rankings are below; let us know if we're missing any "platinum" songs. Note that #3, #5, #8, and #9 on the current list all belong to John Boswell's Symphony of Science. 1. Waking Up Is Hard To Do. 8,186,590 views as of 1-31-11. (4,566,200 views as of 6-16-10.) 2. Large Hadron Rap. 6,347,199 views as of 1-31-11. (5,888,305 views as of 6-16-10.) 3. A Glorious Dawn. 5,165,197 views as of 1-31-11. (3,824,241 views as of 6-16-11.) 4. The Elements. 1,992,228 views as of 1-31-11. (1,329,187 views as of 6-16-10.) 5. We Are All Connected. 2,927,577 views as of 1-31-11. (1,967,245 views as of 6-16-10.) 6. Chemical Love. 1,595,210 views as of 1-31-11. (961,327 views as of 6-16-10.) 7. Bad Project. 1,506,819 views as of 1-31-11. (Didn't exist as of 6-16-10.) 8. The Poetry Of Reality. 1,311,977 views as of 1-31-11. 9. Our Place In The Cosmos. 1,112,445 views as of 1-31-11. 10. Diagnosis Wenckebach. 1,134,013 views as of 1-31-11. (1,012,912 views as of 6-16-10.) 11. I Will Derive. 1,096,814 views as of 1-31-11. (883,882 views as of 6-16-10.) January 28, 2011 Most examples of science-inspired art that we've highlighted on this blog consist of individual scientists doing something artistic or individual artists making art about science. A neat article from the University of Washington highlights something a bit different: an exhibit of 36 artists, ALL of whom worked with scientists to create weather-related pieces. Seattle artist Scott Schuldt worked with [UW atmospheric scientist Celia] Bitz, whose climate research focuses on the Arctic. Schuldt, who quit an engineering career in 2005 to concentrate on art, and Bitz created "The Melt," beadwork on a canvas anorak modeled after those worn by early Arctic explorers and based on Inuit designs. The anorak was sized to fit Bitz and the beadwork represents various aspects of her work in the Arctic. "For me, the inspiration comes in seeing the focused and very important work that Cecilia is engaged in. It's just fascinating stuff," Schuldt said. "Scientists wear their work on their sleeves, so to speak, so it wasn't that big of an artistic jump to clothe a scientist in her own work." ...Such collaborations between artists and scientists can be beneficial to both, Bitz believes, but it also gives the viewer a different way of perceiving science. "Visualizing science through art offers a way to communicate science on a different level than most of us experience from lectures or textbooks," she said. "Through art, scientists can share the beauty that inspires us along our journey to understand the natural world." Posted by crowther at 6:54 AM January 27, 2011 Back on December 9th, we mentioned the controversial Science paper on a bacterium that can supposedly substitute arsenic for phosphorus in the structure of its DNA. The most relevant freely available song that I could find at the time was a DNA Replication Song that reviewed the structure of DNA.... But now there is at least one song that directly addresses the Wolfe-Simon paper: "GFAJ-1 Arsenic Blues" by Adrian Ebsary. We at Sing About Science and Math have no official position on the correctness of the original research or this particular response to it (which seems mostly critical of the publicity blitz rather than the research itself). However, we do think that singing about the primary literature has great potential for increasing the public's awareness of this literature. More interesting stuff from Adrian is coming soon at ScienceSounds.com (currently under construction). January 25, 2011 From physicist Chad Orzel's links dump comes a New York Times article of interest to fans of art/science fusion: "An infusion of science where the arts reign." The "Citizen Science" program basically immerses non-science majors in hands-on science work, but with some room for creative expression at the end.... While there is no final grade, there is a final project, and Ms. Batkin and six classmates came up with an idea that is pure Bard: a dance performance that illustrates how an influenza vaccine works. Students assumed the roles of the antigen, B cell, T cell and antibodies. "We’re using rubber bands and bubbles to show the B cell alerting the T cell that there’s a foreign invader," Ms. Batkin said. "I’m narrating the process, but I am also the antibody at the end." This sort of reminds me of a course at my alma mater, Williams College, taught by Professor of Mathematics Edward Burger. In "Exploring Creativity," students are challenged to convey core concepts of one discipline using the tools of another discipline. For example, as discussed in this Alumni Review article, students might be asked, "What is the fourth dimension? Write a two-sentence definition and then create an artistic representation of a four-dimensional object or of four-dimensional space." What these courses and Wendy Silk's "Earth, Water, Science and Song" seem to have in common is a sense that there is meaning and value in the challenge of creatively expressing scientific and mathematical concepts. Arts-related assignments are given not because the students can't handle more traditional "hard-core" assignments, but because science and math can and should inspire singing and dancing and drawing. January 20, 2011 "Whether it's the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says." Thus begins Malcom Ritter's article (Study: Love music? Thank a substance in your brain) summarizing a study just published in Nature Neuroscience (Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music by Valorie Salimpoor et al.). To complete the dopamine/music pleasure circuit, how about listening to a song about this particular neurotransmitter (as well as its cousin norepinephrine)? "Chemical Love" by Charlie McDonnell is sure to fire up those striatal neurons! January 18, 2011 Thanks to Prof. Kira Wennstrom of Shoreline Community College for pointing us to this super-cool activity: Downeaster Alexa: A Fishery Story (PDF file). It was created in 1991 through a National Science Foundation grant to an Ohio State University team led by Victor J. Mayer and Rosanne W. Fortner. Its in-depth consideration of the lyrics of the Billy Joel song "The Downeaster 'Alexa'" (embedded below), and its connection of those lyrics to relevant data, offer a strong rebuke to anyone tempted to dismiss educational uses of science songs as superficial or frivolous. January 13, 2011 Tuesday's Nature News announced, "Tevatron faces final curtain." After much debate, officials at the US Department of Energy's Office of Science revealed this week that they have decided not to extend funding for the Tevatron, the proton–antiproton collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, by an additional three years. The decision means that the first glimpse of the long-predicted Higgs particle, thought to endow other particles with mass, will probably be achieved by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva in Switzerland.Below is the YouTube video for "Particle Business" by rapper funky49 (a.k.a. Steven Rush). It does a nice job conveying that CERN's LHC and Fermilab's Tevatron have been in a high-stakes race to find evidence of the Higgs particle: Tevatron, OG atom smasher say hello to CERN’s party crasher, the new "Lord of the Rings" LHC, hear me, this be competitive collaboration baby... rock stars of physics, particle business smash matter, antimatter and witness quarks, bottom to top they don’t stop "where the Higgs at?" yo that’s their mark where the Higgs at? where the Higgs at? where the Higgs at? January 6, 2011 The Scientist has published several compilations of the year's top biology papers, including a top 7 in biochemistry and a top 5 for all of biology, both ranked by the Faculty of 1000. The key advances included two prized crystal structures: complex I of the bacterial electron transport chain, and the two subunits of the yeast ribosome. The most pertinent song I found was "The Structural Biology Rap" by Zach Powers (a.k.a. The Science Rapper), which gives an overview of pertinent techniques including protein expression and crystallography. January 4, 2011 NPR reports on Lily Asquith's attempts to analyze LHC data by converting them into sounds in "Particle Pings: Sounds of the Large Hadron Collider." [Asquith] thought about a heart monitor in a hospital; it turns the electrical data from your heart into sound. "You don't have to watch the monitor because you can hear it without making any effort," she says. "Just a steady beep — you can quite easily detect if it starts going quicker or if it stops even for a second." She wondered what would happen if she used music composition software to turn data from the collider into sound.... What she got isn't quite music, but sounds that are more out of this world — bells, beeps and clangs. Right now, Asquith says, the sounds don't tell scientists very much. But she hopes that in the future, it could help them understand the data in new ways. She says that in certain situations, it's much easier to use your ears than your eyes, particularly with something that's changing over time. Collider data do that. Posted by crowther at 9:27 AM

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Photos courtesy of Sir Harold Kroto. Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno fought for us to have the freedom to doubt and question those who claim authority on dogma unsubstantiated by evidence. This is the fundamental basis for the ideas expressed by Sir Harold Kroto, as he speaks to international groups ranging from Nobel Laureates to the up-and-coming scientists and other young decision-makers of the future. It will be a major theme of his SLAS2013 keynote presentation "Science and Society in the 21st Century," Tuesday, January 15 in Orlando, FL. "Think about it." Why such a statement by a winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and SLAS2013 keynote speaker? Because Sir Harold Kroto, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, is overwhelmingly committed to challenging not only scientists but everyone, to discover and act upon the truth and not allow the perpetuation of ancient dogma or politically self-seeking propaganda to drive important decisions. "Scientists have a responsibility, or at least I feel I have a responsibility, to ensure that what I do is for the benefit of the human race," Kroto says. "It is important that we try to point out facts to help those in power to make decisions. Unfortunately, this is not often the case. Although knowledge cannot guarantee good decisions, common sense suggests that wisdom is an unlikely consequence of ignorance." Harry Kroto received a B.Sc. in chemistry and a Ph.D. in molecular spectroscopy from the University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. After postdoctoral work at the National Research Council, Ottawa, Canada, and Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA, he started his academic career at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, in 1967, became a professor in 1985 and a Royal Society Research Professor in 1991. In 1996, he was knighted for his contributions to chemistry and later that year, together with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley of Rice University, Houston, TX, USA, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of C60 Buckminsterfullerene, a new form of carbon. "Science is misunderstood in many ways," he adds. "We need everyone to know how to think rather than accept unquestioningly what we are told. It is amazing to me what people will believe without any proof." For example, he points out "common sense indicates that the sun goes around the earth because in the morning the sun is on one side and later it is on the other, and it is quite reasonable for people to accept this." However science is really something else, which he calls: "un-common sense." People "believed" that the Earth was at the center of the solar system for centuries until Nicolaus Copernicus in the 16th century looked more carefully into the problem and the motions of other planets and showed these motions were consistent with the heliocentric system for the solar system first proposed by Aristarchus of Samos in 270 BC. He went against the prevailing religious attitudes of the time as he recognized that the evidence indicated that the earth-centered model could not be correct and it was because the Earth was a sphere rotating on an axis that made it appear to us on the Earth that the Sun was rotating around us. It was not until the French physicist Léon Foucault (1819-1868) set up his famous pendulum in the Pantheon in Paris that these beliefs began to change. He demonstrated that the earth rotates on its axis by suspending a heavy iron ball with a pin on the bottom with a 200-foot wire. As the pendulum swung, it left a mark. Over the course of 36 hours, the mark in the sand moved to the right, proving movement of the earth. "A similar system set up at the poles would follow a 24-hour period," Kroto adds. "In fact the earth is turning on its axis and that made it seem as the sun was going around," he points out. "It is ‘scientific' perspective that forces us to look very carefully at everything and when something does not seem quite right to ask what is going on. I call this attitude Natural Philosophy, which changed a long-standing belief that truth is to be found in the Holy Scriptures and results in democracy and science – that is, The Enlightenment." It is because Kroto wants to see more people act like Copernicus that he spends about half of his year advocating his cause in front of international audiences of students, researchers, business people and government entities. "What bothers me is that a majority of people accept a whole load of material without knowing the evidence and much of it cannot possibly be correct as a few moments of rational thinking unequivocally indicates," he says. "The majority are not able to decide on whether what they are being told is true or false and they are quite happy to accept claims that make them feel comfortable and unfortunately shy away from the truth if they suspect it will cause discomfiture. Sometimes, they do not want to think about very important issues carefully because it conflicts with what they want to believe. Learning the truth is not always pleasant or even useful to them. They are much happier not knowing the truth. While perhaps this is OK for an individual, it is not OK for those charged with making decisions in positions of responsibility in government, the judiciary and in industry. "If we are going to make good decisions, we must think very carefully about the questions," Kroto stresses. "Then, we must make decisions on the basis of really understanding the issues at a deep level rather than on a dogmatic precept or misunderstanding. We must apply scientific analysis to whether dogmatic constructs are actually true or false." Kroto knows this is not easy. In fact, he believes it has become harder in these difficult times of increasing unemployment and financial uncertainty. In the case of science funding, one of the biggest challenges to researchers is a total misunderstanding by those controlling the research support of how major breakthroughs are made, Kroto states. He indicates that to obtain most funding today, research scientists are asked to "predict the value of the impact of the science they have not yet done and the discoveries they have not yet made. Almost invariably in science, the major breakthroughs are those that are totally unexpected," he notes. "By and large, they are usually made by researchers who are curious about something they've seen or noticed. When they probe the observations that have made them personally curious more deeply, they uncover the totally unexpected. It is these unsuspected breakthroughs that invariably lead to totally unexpected applications." He cites laser eye surgery as an example. "That major breakthrough was made in physics by a scientist who wanted to develop a high frequency amplifier," Kroto states. "There was absolutely no way that anyone could predict that such an amplifier would in time (ca. 20-30 years later) lead to a new and powerful application in eye surgery. "The worry I have is that as research funding becomes ever more restricted, the funding agencies will demand more-and-more ridiculous impact statements as determinants of funding," he continues. "Many young scientists are now spending 50% of their time writing research proposals where they are expected to hypothesize about ‘impact.' They can have no real idea of impact at this point, so if they are honest on this issue they will be denied funding because it's perceived that they're doing research that is not particularly useful. Thus an intrinsically corrupt approach is being fostered which slowly but surely is destroying our discipline which is based on doubt, questioning and more importantly a deep respect for evidence-based truth." In the private sector, Kroto says that "today's pharmaceutical companies simply buy up research breakthroughs from start-ups. They no longer are places to develop the next generation of researchers. The highly successful approach of AT&T's Bell Laboratories, which conflated fundamental and applied research so successfully prior to its execution in the 1970s has been destroyed – perhaps forever." "I work on things that puzzle me and which I find personally interesting," Kroto explains. "I didn't actually make any big decision to become a scientist. The route to becoming an academic researcher and teacher at a university (Sussex in the UK) gradually opened up and I kept going as I needed a job and I discovered – a bit to my surprise – that I was pretty good at scientific research and teaching. I do not claim to be an intellectually exceptional person but I do have an innate curiosity about almost everything from the arts to the sciences and everything in-between. This curiosity is allied with an attitude that will not let me put in a second-rate effort for anything I start. Once I have initiated a job, I pursue it to the end to the best of my ability. This might not be better than others could do it but in general they are not as interested in the things that interest me personally. As time progressed one neat breakthrough followed another. My work has resulted in some nice contributions. I had no prior aspirations to be successful and did not predict the breakthroughs, many of which were discovered on the backs of other research proposals. One never can tell what might be uncovered." Kroto indicates his first significant contribution came in the early to mid-70s. "I had been working in molecular spectroscopy and an idea about phosphorus chemistry compounds had been on my mind." His ponderings led to making the first phosphaalkenes (compounds with carbon phosphorus double bonds), which drove his interest in molecules with chains of carbon atoms. Sitting next to a colleague, John Nixon, he hatched a joint project that led quite unexpectedly to a whole new area of phosphorus chemistry. Later that decade and into the early ‘80s, carbon continued to fascinate Kroto and a project with a close friend and colleague, David Walton, resulted in a synthetic/spectroscopy project with an undergraduate, Anthony Alexander. This led later to a radioastronomy project with astronomers in Canada that uncovered the exciting result that large linear carbon chain molecules existed in interstellar space. This observation was the catalyst of the research project with Rice University scientists Robert Curl and Richard Smalley and their research co-workers, Jim Heath Sean O'Brien and Yuan Liu, that uncovered the totally unexpected existence of C60, which he named Buckminsterfullerene and is now affectionately known as the Buckyball. This was the discovery that led to the Nobel Prize. "This is the third form of pure carbon and we were completely surprised, as was almost everyone else, that this hollow spheroidal carbon cage molecule existed at all," he says. "I suggested to my colleagues at Rice University that the large linear carbon molecules we had detected by radioastronomy were made in stars, and we set out to prove that. Rice had the equipment to do the experiments, and this resulted in the totally unexpected discovery of the Buckminsterfullerene." According to the Florida State University website: The most remarkable of the fullerenes is the 60-carbon alkene buckminsterfullerene, also known as a Buckyball. This highly unusual molecule was named after the geodesic dome, a structure that exhibits a geometry that approximates a truncated icosohedral soccerball-shape, invented by visionary engineer, author, and architect R. Buckminster Fuller. The roundest known molecule in the world, the Buckyball has carbon atoms at 60 chemically equivalent vertices that are connected by 32 faces, 12 of which are pentagonal and 20 hexagonal. Due to their unique structure, Buckyballs are remarkably rugged, being capable of surviving collisions with metals and other materials at speeds in excess of 20,000 miles per hour, a pace that would tear most organic molecules apart. Higher and lower order Buckyballs containing different numbers of carbon atoms deviate from the strict geodesic dome structure and are consequently not as stable, but are still composed primarily of pentagons and hexagons. "It was this discovery for which we were awarded the Nobel Prize," Kroto states. "Some say this discovery also opened up the field of nanotechnology. These experiments were carried out, however, because I wanted to understand the chemistry in a star based on an earlier radio astronomy study. It was driven by curiosity not by any prescient idea of what we might discover." Regarding Kroto's point about today's funding requests needing to show expected value? He says none of the contributions from his work on phosphorus compounds, carbon chain molecules in interstellar space or the Buckyball were predictable and almost certainly would not have met today's funding requirements. "It's that sort of rather haphazard way that research lurches forward unpredictably that people in government departments find very difficult to accept and support," he concludes. Kroto, who adores neat quotations, attributes this situation to the quote from the Lord of the Rings, "Not all those who wander are lost." With government funding requiring more actionable proposals and corporations doing less original research, perhaps the way to promote innovation is to encourage curiosity. That is why Kroto spends so much time traveling the globe speaking to any group prepared to listen. "I give lectures at major institutions and meetings," he says, such as a summer 2012 presentation at the 62nd Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting. The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting brings together Nobel Laureates and young researchers for intergenerational inspiration. A key line in his Lindau presentation was "I'm not here to make you feel comfortable. I'm here to make you think." "At the Lindau conference, I spoke to 600-700 young people," Kroto recounts. "These are some of the smartest young people from all over the planet, some of whom will become the decision-makers of the future. I think some of the observations I make are important for them to hear and digest. My hope is that some of them will become senior people in industry and government and they will think carefully about scientific issues and other issues of humanitarian and social responsibility as well sustainability. They should learn how scientists think and how they determine new knowledge and make decisions. New knowledge leads to technology and finally to valuable applications to society. One would hope that these applications would be used for the benefit of the human race and not for its destruction." "I never set out to win a Nobel Prize," Kroto says. "I only set out to do everything to the best of my ability and as I have said, I never put in a second rate effort. I do not think I am any smarter than any other good scientist, but I am prepared to work until three, four or five in the morning to ensure whatever I'm doing is the best I can personally do at that moment. I think it is this attitude more than anything else that brought me whatever relative success I have achieved." Another factor has been finding and securing the correct tools to conduct his work. "In the early part of my career, I needed a microwave spectrometer and it turned out to be very difficult to get it. At the time it was very expensive and I had great difficulty convincing my funding agency that I needed to get it. "Between 1969 and 1974, I was placed in the outrageous situation of having to travel for a week each month with my research students to another university to use the equipment for which I had actually written the research proposal!" he continues. "However notwithstanding this ridiculous situation, my students and I obtained outstanding results using ‘my' equipment. Finally after much pressure, the funding agency (SRC) agreed to fund an instrument to be located in my own laboratory." Kroto said that then his career really took off. Kroto thinks that while today more young assistant professors seem to be given sufficient tools, there is tremendous pressure on them to bring home the bacon. "The pressures are really quite enormous and very disturbing I think. It is not a good intellectual environment in some cases," he surmises. Today, Kroto has tools provided generously by Florida State University, which has been his academic home since 2004/5. He has great colleagues such as Naresh Dalal to carry out novel functional materials research as well as Alan Marshall at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. Marshall is co-inventor of Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometry (FT-ICR-MS), which has developed into one of the most powerful analytical tools. In fact, the Magnet Lab boasts a spectrometer featuring a "superconducting ICR magnet with a field of 14.5 tesla – the highest field in the world for such an instrument." Using the high-power equipment in this laboratory, Kroto and his colleagues recently released a paper, "Closed network growth of fullerenes," in Nature Communications that put another piece of the C60 jigsaw puzzle in place. According to the abstract: Tremendous advances in nanoscience have been made since the discovery of the fullerenes; however, the formation of these carbon-caged nanomaterials still remains a mystery. Here we reveal that fullerenes self-assemble through a closed network growth mechanism by incorporation of atomic carbon and C2. The growth processes have been elucidated through experiments that probe direct growth of fullerenes upon exposure to carbon vapour, analysed by state-of-the-art Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry. Our results shed new light on the fundamental processes that govern self-assembly of carbon networks, and the processes that we reveal in this study of fullerene growth are likely be involved in the formation of other carbon nanostructures from carbon vapour, such as nanotubes and graphene. Further, the results should be of importance for illuminating astrophysical processes near carbon stars or supernovae that result in C60 formation throughout the Universe. "A fundamental scientist is someone who goes into a laboratory day-in-and-day-out, week-in-and-week-out, year-in-and-year-out to solve basic problems which advance our knowledge about how the universe works and hopefully will also be of value to society," Kroto says. "The universe teaches us to have an intrinsic respect for the truth; no other profession has this attitude. Politicians are conveniently selective with the truth, journalists hyperinflate it and many others turn a blind eye to it." That's why Kroto is committed to global science education and the development of Internet streaming technologies, which allow people to create and upload material to help one another. His present major effort is GEOSET, Global Education Outreach for Science, Engineering and Technology, which captures the clever ideas that teachers have for explaining complex science and sharing resources. "We discovered that undergraduate and graduate research students are outstanding at explaining the work they are doing," he says. "Additionally, they have a lot of passion and many are excellent at presenting the things they are fascinated by even though they may not have a lot of teaching experience." The material is completely free and all are welcome to download and share most of the teaching resource material available on GEOSET. Presentations address a complete range of topics from astronomy and the arts to social science and from biology to physics. Viewers can browse resources by age, level and presenter and further search by title, synopsis and keywords. Kroto, himself, has 44 presentations posted on GEOSET. "A tremendous spinoff from GEOSET is the revolution that it has achieved with the résumé for students," Kroto explains. "Students combine data with their video presentation and send the resulting URL along with their job or scholarship applications. This provides a great amount of extra information for the reviewer which is impossible to transmit in an arid pile of paper which is the basis of a standard résumé or CV." Kroto believes that young people today have a major disadvantage that he did not have – the opportunity to take things apart, study and fix them. While schools try to replicate it by setting up hands-on experiments, they are mainly artificial and not the same as real-life objects he says. "In my home, there was very little technology – there was a radio," he recalls. "I could open up the back and see the valves and if they were not lit up. A valve would go every few months, and I could replace it – by fixing things one learns how things work and one develops an analytical approach to find out what the problem might be. I could see resistances and how the electronics was wired up for example. In fact one time as a kid I made my own radio. My world was relatively simple; there was no television, Internet, telephone or car but at least I could see roughly how much of my world worked. "Today we are surrounded by television, computers, recorders, mobile phones, memory sticks – what is going on inside these?" he continues. "When something no longer works it is generally obsolete, has to be discarded and one has no option but to buy the new model. There is a major disconnect here. Kids are very fond of their mobile phones, but they can't open them up and fix them when they no longer work. They have to throw them away and get new ones. How much reverence can they have for technology that has been intrinsically designed to be discarded? Society teaches an attitude: that if one can do nothing else but throw something away, it is not intrinsically important and one does not need to know how it works." Kroto insists we need to develop the natural curiosity that all small children possess until the age of eight or nine. "We need to nurture that curiosity from ages 10 to 15 so young people stay intrigued. If we don't, it means that a large number of people do not know how their world actually works." Kroto knows the SLAS2013 audience will be filled with people who agree that nurturing the scientific mind and making decisions should be based on the knowledge obtained through scientific method and reliability. He invites everyone to join him in his lifelong quest to encourage all to learn how to think. "Apply scientific analysis to test whether dogmatic constructs are actually true or false," he cautions. "That is the best way to solve issues not only of sustainability and survival but also humanitarian ones requiring a fundamental attitude related to social responsibility." September 7, 2012

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The human genome refers to approximately three billion chemical letters (nucleotides) comprising the sequence of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in almost every cell of each human being. There are four different nucleotides (adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymidine), such that each of the approximately three billion sites of the human DNA sequence comprising the human genome is occupied by one of these four nucleotide chemical letters. Human genome analysis has revealed that on the face of the planet, on average, any two individuals differ from each other at fewer than merely 0.1% (1/10,000) of these sites. These differences among individuals arise from inaccuracies during the process wherein DNA is replicated and transmitted from generation to generation. Furthermore, the pattern of variable sites is not randomly scattered across the 3 billion-nucleotide genome. Rather, certain combinations of variable sites are often transmitted in blocks known as haplotypes. DNA sequence variants are detected by genotyping or DNA sequencing methods. In the minority of cases, such variable sites may predispose to disease (disease-predisposing mutations), but for the most part they simply serve as "neutral DNA markers." In addition to medical and forensic applications, DNA sequence variation markers are convenient for tracing shared ancestries, family relations, genealogic networks, migratory patterns, and geographic origins of individuals, communities, and populations. This discipline is called DNA sequence based phylogenetics or phylogeography. While analysis of the genome provides important insights with respect to population history, including Jewish origins and history – for both scientific and ethical reasons, such analysis does not provide an appropriate tool for establishing Jewish or any other religious or ethnic identity at an individual or community level. Scientifically, the variation in DNA sequence identity among Jews is too broad, and overlaps that of non-Jews sufficiently, so as to negate the concept of unique or characteristic genomic markers for Jews. Furthermore, Jewish identity is a concept based on tradition, law, culture, and custom, rather than on physical considerations, including DNA sequence. Attempts to use any biological markers to establish Jewish identity in individuals have been fraught with unwanted and tragic consequences in the past. Therefore, inferences regarding patterns of DNA sequence variation should be interpreted with great caution, with regard to both scientific and societal considerations. DNA markers are distributed across all of the various distinct regions of the genome, which in humans consists of 22 pairs of autosomal chromosomes, the sex chromosomes (XX in females and XY in males), and mitochondrial DNA. Most of the genome is diploid, meaning that there is representation of each nucleotide site from both parents. However, the Y-chromosome of the genome in males, and mitochondrial DNA in both males and females are haploid, meaning that there is only representation from one parent (uniparental). In the case of the Y-chromosome, the DNA sequence including its variable site markers is transmitted only from fathers to their sons. In the case of mitochondrial DNA, the DNA sequence including its variable site markers is transmitted only from mothers to Application of Phylogenetics to Jewish Populations The molecular principles described above have been usefully applied to the evolutionary studies of humankind as a whole, as well as to the phylogenetics of various populations of interest. These studies address questions related to geographic origins, ancestry, history, migration, and demography of populations. Likewise, it is possible to phrase similar questions with regard to the parental ancestry of contemporary Jews. To do so, it is necessary, first, to delineate accepted nomenclatures and classifications for Jewish communities and second, to clarify how the use of different classes of genetic markers enables distinct questions of interest to be addressed. To this end, contemporary Jews can be considered as descending from two large population groups which had somewhat separate demographic histories during the past approximately two millennia. These are the Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi groups, which in turn are comprised of numerous different communities. It is clear that this division oversimplifies the relations and hierarchy between the various Jewish communities. Thus the Ashkenazi population of Europe, which refers to Jews whose recent ancestry traces to Central and Eastern Europe, is, often regarded as one population subgroup, despite clearly being composed of multiple communities. This classification has emerged because of shared adherence to similar religious rituals, liturgical style, and the shared use of the Yiddish language, and geographic location in Central and Eastern Europe. Of relevance to phylogenetics was the practice of a high level of endogamy, wherein Ashkenazi Jews married within the population subgroup. The non-Ashkenazi population subgroup is a much more culturally and geographically diverse population. The majority of the non-Ashkenazi population is composed of communities that resided in the Near and Middle East, North Africa, and geographic locations to which the Jews fled following the Iberian expulsions, beginning in 1492 C.E. These communities share similar religious rituals, most probably due to their presumed common historical origin from a gradual movement of Babylonian Jews, and are sometimes collectively referred to as the "Sephardi (Spanish)" or "Mizraḥi (Eastern)" Jews. In the current entry, we shall adhere to this convention though, where appropriate, based on available information, the term "Spanish exile" will refer to members of Jewish communities descended from the Iberian expulsions, and shall use the term "non-Ashkenazi" when the detailed geographic origin does not permit a more precise description. Moreover, neither the term "Sephardi" nor "Mizraḥi" takes into account some additional Jewish communities such as some of the Italian, Georgian, Yemenite, and Indian communities. Following the foregoing definitions, two complementary sets of questions arise. First, what is the overall pattern of the contemporary NRY and mitochondrial DNA sequence variation at the level of the entire Jewish population in comparison to non-Jews, and of individual population subgroups or communities? More specifically this set of questions relates to our overall ability to trace recent or contemporary Jewish communities to a particular geographic origin such as the Near East, and allows analysis of parameters such as admixture and gene flow with Diaspora host populations. Second, DNA marker analysis enables clarification of micro-evolutionary mechanisms and events that have shaped the population history of each of the Jewish communities. These include the actual number of founding ancestors, their rate of expansion, their most likely geographic origin, and the level of identity between the various Jewish founding ancestors in different Jewish communities. The answers to both sets of questions are addressed separately for paternal and maternal population history, using the NRY-region of the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA respectively, and in some cases these are expected to yield different patterns. To gain a clearer understanding of the way in which these questions can be addressed, it is important to clarify the different kinds of DNA sequence variation markers that are available for analysis, and the ways in which they can be combined to generate phylogenetic trees, with different levels of temporal resolution. Haplogroups are generally defined by a series of hierarchically arranged stable variations or polymorphisms in DNA sequence (usually at a single nucleotide site and hence termed single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPS) that have usually occurred only once in the course of human evolution. These are binary or bi-allelic, since there are only two variants in the human population, rather than multiple different variants. Numerous such binary sites are located throughout the NRY, and when combined they define major haplogroups. Individuals belonging to the same NRY haplogroup share common paternal ancestry at a level of resolution and timeframe that is a function of the number and choice of such binary Jewish Paternal Ancestry – View from the NRY Markers of the Y-Chromosome The first recorded studies at the level of the genomic DNA sequence variation appeared in 1993, and compared Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews in comparison to non-Jewish Czech males. These reported that the two Jewish population subgroups show a great similarity of NRY DNA marker frequencies, and appear to show very little evidence for admixture with host non-Jewish neighbors. Of interest, comparison with Lebanese non-Jews supported the notion of a shared Near East origin for both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewish population subgroups examined. Studies over the subsequent decade utilized progressively larger and more diverse sample sets, and a greater number of DNA sequence markers. Taken together this decade of work on the NRY markers strongly supports the hypothesis that the paternal gene pool of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Near Eastern ancestral population, and suggest that most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora. The two most prevalent major NRY haplogroup affiliations shared among all Jewish communities are those denoted J and E. Further research based on haplogroup markers has shown that, with some notable rare exceptions, the NRY chromosome pool of both Ashkenazi Jews and non-Ashkenazi Jews originates as an integral part of the genetic landscape of the Near East. Further analysis at the haplotype level suggested that the pattern of haplotype differentiation within these shared haplogroups differs between the Jewish population and non-Jewish Near Eastern populations. This is entirely consistent with a shared remote Near East origin but subsequent separation of the ancestors of contemporary Jews from their non-Jewish Near East shared Haplogroup E-M35 and haplogroup J-12f2a fit the criteria for major Ashkenazi Jewish founding subhaplogroups, because they are widespread both in Ashkenazi Jewish communities and in Near Eastern populations, and occur at much lower frequencies in European non-Jewish populations. Subhaplogroups G-M201 and Q-P36 show a similar pattern, but are found at lower frequency, and are therefore considered to have been part of the founding paternal Ashkenazi Y-chromosome pool. It has not yet been established if these minor subhaplogroups are shared with non-Ashkenazi Jews. The best candidates for subhaplogroups that entered the Ashkenazi Jewish population more recently via admixture from the neighboring European populations include I-P19, R-P25, and R-M17. Taken together these results confirmed that the majority of NRY haplogroups found among contemporary Ashkenazi Jews originated in the Near East, with an approximately 8% introgression from non-Jewish European populations. Two events of interest seem to have made very specific independent contributions to this minor degree of introgression, and these will be described in the subsequent section. However, overall genomic analysis provides definitive evidence refuting a major contribution to the Ashkenazi Y-chromosome pool of any large scale entry into the population from the Caucasus, the putative geographic location of the Khazarian Kingdom, or from any other European or Eurasian source population. While a study of this detail in non-Ashkenazi communities is still to be done, multiple lines of evidence from the genomic literature strongly support a common Near Eastern paternal origin for all Jewish communities, with low levels of introgression from neighboring non-Jews in the Diasporas. These findings also provided the backdrop for detailed analysis of lineages to clarify demographic patterns and microevolutionary forces that have shaped the detailed population structure of different Jewish communities and Jewish population subgroups. A number of illustrative examples are provided herein. GENOMIC ANALYSIS OF THE JEWISH PRIEST AND LEVITE CASTES Phylogenetic analysis is based upon relatedness of individuals within a group. Genetic analysis has confirmed that all of humankind is phylogenetically related as descendents of a common maternal and paternal ancestor. In some societies, extensive records are maintained which document relationships and establish pedigrees extending over many generations, and this information can be used to facilitate genomic studies. While such biparental pedigree information is not available extending back to the early history of the Jewish people, there exists an oral tradition which may provide information about shared paternal ancestry, which has proven to be of interest, and must be taken into account in phylogenetic studies of Jews. In particular, a long-established system of Jewish male tribal or caste affiliation categorizes Jewish men into three groups: Jewish *priests or kohanim, *levites, and Israelites. Within the Jewish community, membership in the male castes noted above, is determined by patrilineal descent. Kohanim are, in biblical tradition, the descendants of Aaron, who along with his brother Moses was a male descendant of Levi, the third son of biblical patriarch Jacob. According to the same tradition, Levites are considered to be those remaining male descendants of Levi who are not kohanim. These categories are recognized and affiliations of individual Jewish males to one of the three castes is widely known in virtually all Jewish communities, including Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and other. More specifically, self-identification with the Jewish priestly caste reflects an oral tradition of transmission by inheritance from father to son with no halakhically sanctioned mechanism for introgression of males who are not descendents along the paternal line from the founder of this male dynasty. Accordingly, this tradition carries with it specific scientific predictions based on the molecular genomics of the Y-chromosome. Since, as noted, the Y-chromosome is also transmitted from fathers only to their male offspring, it is predicted that the Y-chromosome of historically and geographically dispersed priests should have a significantly greater similarity of DNA sequence markers compared to Y-chromosomes of other groups. Comprehensive clarification of the patterns of paternal relatedness, based on NRY marker analysis, requires combining haplogroup with haplotype analysis, to trace actual Of interest, the same studies in 1997 and 1998 found high frequencies of multiple haplogroups in the levites, indicating that no single recent origin could be inferred for the majority of this group, despite an oral tradition of a patrilineal descent similar to that of the kohanim (with some exceptions outlined in talmudic tractate *Bekhorot). This led to a more detailed NRY analysis of the levites. In particular, given the importance of the paternally defined levite caste in Jewish history, together with multiple theories of the ethnogenesis of the Ashkenazi Jewish community, and a suggestion that Yiddish is a relexified Slavic tongue, Behar and Skorecki, together with an international team of scientific collaborators, reported in 2003 a detailed investigation of the paternal genetic history of Ashkenazi levites. They compared the results with matching data from neighboring populations among which the Ashkenazi community lived during its formation and subsequent demographic expansion. The finding clearly demonstrated among the Ashkenazi levites, a major tightly clustered lineage within NRY haplogroup R-M17, which comprises 74% of Ashkenazi levites within this haplogroup and 52% of Ashkenazi levites overall. The presence of the R-M17 haplogroup within Ashkenazi levites is striking for several reasons. Firstly, this haplogroup is found at high frequency in the Ashkenazi levites but not in Sephardi levites, nor any other geographically or religiously designated Jewish grouping examined to date. This means that a large and closely related subgroup of the Ashkenazi levites and the Sephardi levites differ in paternal ancestry. This is a very different pattern from that observed among the kohanim. Second, the STR marker-based haplotypes within this Ashkenazi levite haplogroup form an exceedingly tight phylogenetic cluster, indicative of a very recent origin from a single common ancestor. Coalescence calculation following the same principles used for the Cohen Modal Haplotype point to a founding event that occurred approximately 1,000 years before the present, with the same caveats regarding time estimates based on genomic analysis as were pointed out above. Third, the haplogroup is extremely rare in other Jewish groups and in non-Jewish groups of Near Eastern origin, but is found at high frequency in populations of East European origin. This contrasts with the Cohen Modal Haplotype, which belongs to a haplogroup that is abundant in the Near East. For the reasons stated above, it is likely that the event leading to a high frequency of R-M17 Y-chromosomes within the Ashkenazi levites involved very few, and possibly only one, founding paternal ancestor. The question then arises regarding the possible origins of the founder(s). Haplogroup R-M17 is found at very low frequency in other Jewish groups. It is possible, therefore, that this haplogroup was also present at very low frequency among the levites present within the Ashkenazi founding community, followed by exceeding reproductive success, rendering the descendents of one such Levite, with this rare haplogroup, more numerous. Likewise, the haplogroup is also found at very low frequency within DUTCH JEWS AND LEMBA Two additional illustrative examples of geographic rather than caste designation can be given wherein genomic analysis of NRY marker variation has provided insights of relevance to Jewish population history. NRY analysis of Ashkenazi Dutch Jewish males has shown that approximately 25% of their NRY chromosomes belong to the most prevalent haplogroup in Western Europe and one that is rare in the Near East, R-P25. Therefore, when various indices of genetic distances are measured between this Ashkenazi community and the non-Jewish host population, greater similarities are observed, reflecting more substantial male-origin gene flow from the host population to the Ashkenazi Dutch community. This is consistent with greater religious tolerance which may have characterized Dutch society. Interestingly, the pattern of this possible introgression is different from that observed for the R-M17 haplogroup described for the levites. The genetic distances between the haplotypes comprising haplogroup R-P25 in contemporary Ashkenazi Dutch Jews coalesce prior to the migration of Jews to Europe and therefore are likely explained by repetitive introgression events (admixture) of European non-Jewish males into this community. Another group of interest has been the *Lemba tribes of Southern Africa. While not identified as Jews in religious or halakhic terms, these individuals relate an oral tradition of descending from a group of men who migrated via the Hadramout from the ancient kingdom of Judea in the Near East. Following their eventual settlement in their current villages, located in modern-day South Africa, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, the Lemba founders are said to have intermarried with local Bantu-speaking women, and to have adopted the language and many cultural practices of their neighbors. However, they also maintained some traditions, reminiscent of a Near East and Jewish origin. Genomic analysis of NRY markers at the haplogroup and haplotype level indeed confirmed a pattern of admixture, with clear-cut evidence of Y-chromosomes of Near East origin in a substantial number of Lemba males, with frequencies approaching those found in some Ashkenazi and Sephardi Diaspora Jewish communities, with a strikingly high frequency of Lemba males with the Cohen Modal Haplotype. These are virtually absent among the non-Lemba neighboring populations. More detailed STR-based lineage and coalescence analysis with a large number of markers could provide additional insights of historical interest. Additional studies have been done, and are continuing to focus on the mechanisms that shaped the population genomic structure of the remaining majority of Jewish groups and communities. Questions of special interest amenable to this type of analysis include these: how limited is the number of founders which gave rise to the contemporary global Jewish population? Do Ashkenazi and various non-Ashkenazi Jewish populations share overlapping or distinct founding lineages? Can geographic origins for each of the Jewish haplogroups be determined with greater accuracy? Studies carried out between 2002 and 2004 have provided some initial information in this regard. By focusing initially on the Ashkenazi population and investigating the STR marker variation within each of the founding haplogroups, Behar and Skorecki, together with an international group of scientific collaborators, confirmed previous findings that Ashkenazi Jews show high levels of haplogroup diversity compared with their non-Jewish counterparts. However, a vastly reduced number of haplotypes within Ashkenazi Jewish haplogroups, as well as reduced haplotype variance within haplogroups, was clearly observed. What do these contrasting patterns tell us about the possible role of a bottleneck in the Ashkenazi population? Despite the fact that Ashkenazi Jews represent a recently founded population in Europe, they appear to derive from a large and diverse ancestral source population in the Near East, a population that may have been larger than the source population from which European non-Jews derived. This is consistent with the finding that contemporary Ashkenazi Jews display higher levels of haplogroup diversity than European non-Jewish populations. The reduced haplotype diversity within Ashkenazi Jewish haplogroups compared to non-Jewish populations may be the signature of a founder event/population bottleneck in the Ashkenazi population history. Indeed, the extremely low STR-based haplotype diversity of some of the less frequent founding haplogroups (e.g., NRY haplogroups R-M17, Q-P36) suggest a single male lineage expansion comprising most or all of these and other haplogroups in Ashkenazi Jews. Comparable analyses have yet to be carried out for the many non-Ashkenazi communities. In addition, the study demonstrated that the many different Ashkenazi communities in Central and Jewish Maternal Ancestry: View from Mitochondrial DNA The available data on the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA in Jewish communities is still scant, but is being collected at a rapid rate as DNA sequencing and genotyping technology improves, and is also fueled by the interest of the public in genealogic questions. An initial study, which focused only on a region of the D-loop of mitochondrial DNA known as hyper-variable sequence 1 (HVS-1), demonstrated greatly reduced mitochondrial DNA diversity in the Jewish populations in comparison with the host populations, together with a wide range of different modal haplotypes specific to each of the different communities. The results indicated specific founding events in the Jewish populations. A simple explanation for this exceptional pattern of mitochondrial variation across Jewish populations was that each of the different Jewish communities is composed of descendants of a small group of maternal founders. After the establishment of these communities, inward gene flow from the host populations must have been very limited. As the study focused on haplotype diversity and did not include deep haplogroup analysis, a putative origin of each of the founding lineages was not suggested. A subsequent study conducted by Behar and Skorecki, together with an international group of scientific collaborators, focused in greater detail on the Ashkenazi population using a large set of samples from descendents of numerous communities across Europe, and utilized markers which permitted deep phylogeographic analysis at the mitochondrial haplogroup and haplotype levels. The analysis of Ashkenazi mitochondrial sequence variation portrays a pattern of highly reduced diversity, with an unusually large proportion of haplotypes that are unique to the Ashkenazi gene pool, and a reduction in frequency of rare haplotypes and singleton sites compared with both European and Near Eastern populations. At the haplogroup level, the Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA variation was found to have a number of peculiarities. For example, in two separate studies nearly ten years apart, haplogroup K appears as the most common haplogroup, with its frequency almost an order of magnitude greater than among European or Near Eastern non-Jewish populations. More detailed sequence analysis enabled the construction of mitochondrial DNA-based phylogenetic networks, which resolved the haplogroup K samples into three separate lineages, whose phylogeographic origins are thought to antedate by far the founding of the Ashkenazi population. Furthermore, mitochondrial DNA haplogroup N1b, rare in most European populations, was found to comprise nearly 10% of the Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA pool, and strikingly, haplotype analysis of this N1b haplogroup in Ashkenazi Jews revealed only a single lineage. These Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA lineages were virtually absent from surrounding non-Jewish populations, and therefore provide a genetic signature of the Ashkenazi maternal gene pool, and bear witness to the strong effects of genetic drift acting on this population. Similar to the observation for male ancestry based on Y-chromosome analysis in the Ashkenazi population, the mitochondrial DNA results also show that the various Ashkenazi communities throughout Central and Eastern Europe cannot be readily distinguished from each other, likely reflecting shared recent origins from a common small ancestral deme, followed by continuous migration among the Ashkenazi communities. Micro-Evolutionary Mechanisms that Have Shaped Mitochondrial DNA Sequence Variation in Jewish Communities Based on the foregoing, and with the development of advanced technological approaches to facilitate DNA sequence analysis, the highest possible level of maternal phylogeographic resolution can be obtained from compete sequencing of the entire approximately 16,500 nucleotides of mitochondrial DNA from samples of interest. Recent studies by Behar and Skorecki and their international scientific collaborators, as well as other research groups, are utilizing such an approach in an attempt to shed light on the absolute number of individual women who gave rise to the lineages among Ashkenazi Jews, to shed light on their putative origin. Based on the complete sequencing analysis in Ashkenazi Jews and existing complete sequences from non-Jews, the exact phylogenetic branches in which the Ashkenazi lineages could be traced were identified. The new information was used to screen a global set of haplogroup K samples to include or exclude them from these Ashkenazi lineages. The results showed that the Ashkenazi lineages were virtually absent in other populations, with the important exception of low frequencies among non-Ashkenazi Jews. These results indicate that the three Ashkenazi haplogroup K lineages are virtually restricted to this population, and are likely to be of Near Eastern rather than European origin. The same approach was followed for mitochondrial DNA haplogroup N1b, and concluded that for this haplogroup all samples belong to one expanding lineage. Taken together, these four lineages indicate that four individual women gave rise to fully 40% of contemporary Ashkenazi Jews, or approximately 3.5 million people. The coalescence times for the expansion of these four lineages coincide well with the historical timeframe of less than 2,000 years for Ashkenazi population expansion from a small founding deme, providing the most powerful and detailed information about the maternal Ashkenazi population founding event. Similar studies in non-Ashkenazi Jewish communities remain to be carried out, and should provide comparable information regarding absolute numbers of founding maternal lineages, as well as their approximate founding dates and possible ancestral locations. Integration of the Paternal and Maternal Genetic History Taken together, the data available from Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA phylogenetic analysis of Jewish populations has been very informative in uncovering patterns and mechanisms that complement information gleaned from more conventional historical, linguistic, archival, liturgical, and archeological approaches. Furthermore, NRY and mitochondrial DNA markers continue to be used to seek possible Near East origins for communities which claim shared remote ancestry with the majority of Jewish population groups (so-called "Lost Tribes"). At the population level it seems that the genetic histories of the maternal and paternal ancestors tell different stories about population genomic structure of the Jews. Y-chromosome genomic analysis strongly points to a common origin in the Near East while the genetic data from the mitochondrial DNA point to separate local events with a putative geographic origin that might or might not be in the Near East. Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA analyses are congruent in suggesting that a limited number of founding ancestors gave rise to the various Jewish communities, with remarkably low levels of introgression from the host populations. It is also clear that many questions remain unanswered and the scope of future studies is potentially very large. Data on the non-Ashkenazi population is needed to answer more accurately questions pertaining to the mechanisms that have shaped each of the communities and the possible connection among them and with the Ashkenazi and host populations. It is important to note that information gleaned from the study of the haploid regions of the genome provide information that is of relevance to population level genomic effects. Population level effects, such as founder and bottleneck events, influence overall patterns of DNA sequence variation across the genome as a whole. Thus a founder effect, followed by population expansion, may lead to the drift to high frequencies of specific disease-predisposing or phenotype-modifying sequence variants at other parts of the genome. However, they do not substitute for direct analysis at these diploid and autosomal regions of the genome in ascertaining mutations. Furthermore, recombination, which characterizes the pattern of inheritance at the diploid regions of the genome, accounts for the influence of even small degrees of admixture of Jews with their non-Jewish neighbors on diverse traits or phenotypes that are determined by DNA sequence variation throughout the genome. This partly explains some of the differences in physical features that may be noted among Jewish communities, despite common ancestral origins, and high levels of intra-community endogamy. Interestingly, recently it has been shown that in other parts of the genome as well, there may be regions of limited recombination, or regions in which DNA sequence variation markers are inherited in a block like pattern. This finding may open up the ability to utilize such diploid regions to enhance our understanding of population genomic history, especially with respect to disease predisposition. The potential implication of findings such as paucity of ancestors and their possible effect on other parts of the genome, especially those relevant for diseases prevalent among Jews, remains an important continuing frontier for study with respect to genomic analysis of Jewish populations. These questions are particularly important for the Ashkenazi community in which the reasons for the well-documented excess of rare recessive disorders have been repeatedly discussed without a definitive resolution. It is anticipated that future studies integrating analysis of the haploid genomic regions and other genomic regions such as the X-chromosome and the autosomes will be complementary and shed additional light of historical and population health importance. The future holds great promise in clarifying these important chapters in the history of the Jewish people. B. Bonné-Tami, M. Korostishevsky, J. Redd, Y. Pel-O, M.E. Kaplan, M.F. Hamme, "Maternal and Paternal Lineages of the Samaritan Isolate: Mutation Rates and Time to Most Recent Common Male Ancestor," in: Ann. Hum. Genet., 67 (2002), 153; D.M. Behar, D. Garrigan, M.E. Kaplan, Z. Mobasher, D. Rosengarten, T.M. Karafet, L. Quintana-Murci, H. Ostrer, K. Skorecki, M.F. Hammer, "Contrasting Patterns of Y Chromosome Variation in Ashkenazi and Host Non-Jewish European Populations," in: Hum. Genet., 114 (2004a), 354–65; D.M. Behar, M.G. Thomas, K. Skorecki, M.F. Hammer, E. Bulygina, D. Rosengarten, A.L. Jones, K. Held, V. Moses, D. Goldstein, N. Bradman, M.E. Weale, "Multiple Origins of Ashkenazi Levites: Y Chromosome Evidence for Both Near Eastern and European Ancestries," in: American Journal of Human Genetics, 73 (2003), 768–79; D.M. Behar, E. Metspalu, T. Kivisild, A. Achilli, Y. Hadid, S. Tzur, L. Pereira, A. Amorim, L. Quintana-Murci, K. Majamaa, H. Herrnstadt, N. Howell, D. Gurwitz, B. Bonné-Tamir, A. Torroni, R. Villems, K. Skorecki, "The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event," in: Amer. J. Hum. Genet.; S. DellaPergola, "Major Demographic Trends of World Jewry: The Last Hundred Years," in: B. Bonné-Tamir, A. Adam (eds.), Genetic Diversity among Jews: Diseases and Markers at the DNA Level (1992), 3–32; M.F. Hammer, A.J. Redd, E.T. Wood, M.R. Bonner, H. Jarjanazi, T. Karaget, S. Santachiara-Benerecetti, A. Oppenheim, M.A. Jobling, T. Jenkins, H. Ostrer, B. Bonné-Tamir, "Jewish and Middle Eastern Non-Jewish Populations Share a Common Pool of Y-Chromosomes Biallelic Haplotypes," in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 97:6769–74; M.A. Jobling, C. Tyler-Smith, "The Human Y Chromosome: an Evolutionary Marker Comes of Age," in: National Review of Genetics, 4:598–612; M.C. King, A.G. Motulsky, "Human Genetics. Mapping Human History," in: Science, 298:2342–43; A. Nebel, D. Filon, B. Brinkmann, P.P. Majumder, M. Faerman, A. Oppenheim, "The Y Chromosome Pool of Jews as Part of the Genetic Landscape of the Middle East," in: American Journal of Human Genetics, 69 (2001), 1094–1112; A. Nebel, D. Filon, M. Faerman, H. Soodyall, A. Oppenheim, "Y Chromosome Evidence for a Founder Effect in Ashkenazi Jews," in: European Journal of Human Genetics, 13:388–91; A. Nebel, D. Filon, D.A. Weiss, M. Weale, M. Faerman, A. Oppenheim, M.G. Thomas, "High-Resolution Y Chromosome Haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs Reveal Geographic Substructure and Substantial Overlap with Haplotypes of Jews," in: Human Genetics, 107:603–41; M.B. Richards, V.A. Macaulay, H.J. Bandelt, B.C. Sykes, "Phylogeography of Mitochondrial DNA in Western Europe," in: Ann. Hum. Genetics, 62, Pt. 3 (1998), 241–60; A.S. Santachiara-Benerecetti, O. Semino, G. Passarino, A. Torroni, R. Brdicka, M. Fellous, G. Modiano, "The Common Near-Eastern Origin of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews Supported by Y-Chromosome Similarity," in Ann. Hum. Genetics, 57, Pt. 1 (1993), 55–64; K. Skorecki, S. Selig, S. Blazer, R. Bradman, N.

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ELIAS S. DENNIS - A YANKEE GENERAL IN KING COTTON'S COURT Including Several Versions of the Battle of Milliken's Bend By Richard P. Sevier (email@example.com) Carolyn Dennis Kress of Sterling, Nebraska graciously supplied much of the material used herein. By the end of the Civil War Madison parish was in shambles (see Civil war in Madison Parish). The parish seat, Richmond, had been burned to the ground in 1863, never to rebuild, and only two houses in the entire parish escaped the Yankee's torch. The old plantation homes had been burned or torn down, and the plantations themselves were in a state of disrepair, having been abused and stripped bare by the Union troops, former slaves and the carpetbaggers and scalawags who leased them from the Government during the War. The slaves were free, but most of the plantation owners had borrowed money to buy them and were deep in debt with no collateral to show for it. Paradoxically, during this period many former Union soldiers returned to live on the land they conquered, including at least three of Grant's Generals. Among these was Brigadier General Elias Smith Dennis of Illinois, former Commanding General of the District of Northeast Louisiana and Commandant of the Union Troops during the Battle of Milliken's Bend - an extremely bloody, hand-to-hand conflict that was the first important Civil War battle involving Negro troops. Although he must have been hated at first, General Dennis proved to the Madison Parish populace that he was not a carpetbagger and gained their confidence when he was elected Parish Judge in 1874 and Sheriff in 1880. Before the War Dennis had served in the Illinois House of Representatives and later as an Illinois State Senator, so he was not unfamiliar with politics. He ultimately became one of the most prominent of Madison Parish's Reconstruction politicians. Dennis also married a Madison Parish widow who owned a plantation. Elias S. Dennis was born in Newburgh, New York on December 4, 1812 and grew up on Long Island. About 1836 he migrated to Carlysle, Illinois, and on February 24,1838 married Mary D. Slade, widow of Charles Slade, founder of Carlyle and US Congressman at time of his death. One of Dennis' stepsons was the legendary Jack Slade, a notorious western gunslinger and self-appointed vigilante whose exploits were described by several authors including Mark Twain in his book Roughing It. In 1840 his only surviving son, Elias S. Dennis, Jr. was born. From 1842 to 1844 Dennis served in Illinois House of Representatives. He also served as Circuit Clerk until 1844 when his stepson, Charles Richard Slade, replaced him. During 1846 to1848 he served as State Senator in Illinois. In 1848 he was reappointed Circuit Clerk to replace his stepson who was killed in the Mexican War. In 1857 he was appointed by President Buchanan to serve as US Marshal of Kansas during the period when violent disputes over the slavery question earned the state the title of "Bloody Kansas." He and his family lived in Leavenworth for about 3 years during this assignment. It is unclear exactly when Dennis returned to Illinois, but on August 28, 1861 he was mustered into the service and named Lieutenant Colonel in the 30th Illinois Infantry. In February 1862 he participated in the capture of Fort Donelson, Tennessee. He was later promoted to Colonel on May 1, 1862 and to Brigadier General on November 29, 1862. In April 1863 he fought in the Battle of Port Gibson, Mississippi and in May 1863, the Battle of Raymond, Mississippi. Later in May 1863 he was placed in command of the District of Northeast Louisiana when guerillas were causing problems on the leased plantations there. Ironically, it appears that Grant's first choice for this post was J. P. Hawkins instead of Dennis. However Hawkins was sick at the time and thus was unable to accept the command. Although there were many Civil War skirmishes in Madison Parish, there were only two conflicts that can be classified as battles. These were the Battle of Milliken's Bend on June 7, 1863 and the Battle of Richmond on June 15, 1863. Neither of these battles ever received their share of publicity from historians (or were even located properly by some) although they were very important to Madison Parish history. Recently the well known Civil War author Shelby Foote (The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian-1986) located Milliken's Bend in Mississippi, and Horace Greely (The American Conflict-1866) located it in Arkansas. The Battle of Milliken's Bend (for more detail click here) Today Milliken's Bend is no more, (See Curtains for the Bend) having succumbed in the early 1900's to the declining steamboat trade and the westward migratory erosion of the Mississippi River. However, prior to the Civil War, Milliken's Bend had been a fairly important steamboat port on the River. It was located about twenty miles upstream from Vicksburg and about six miles northeast of the current parish seat of Tallulah, which was only a railroad station in 1863. Many large cotton plantations were located near Milliken's Bend, and most of the Madison Parish cotton was shipped to market from there. During the Civil War Milliken's Bend was used as a staging area prior to the Battle of Vicksburg, and at one time Generals Grant and Sherman had over 30,000 troops there, including their own headquarters. There are several versions of the Battle of Milliken's Bend. Most of these disagree on the number of troops and casualties on each side; the bravery or cowardice of both Negro and white troops and even the winner of the battle, if there was one. However, everyone agrees that this was a most fierce and bloody fight. General Dennis' official version was reported as follows: HEADQUARTERS NORTHEAST DISTRICT OF LOUISIANA, Young's Point, La., June 12, 1863 "COLONEL: I have the honor to report that, in accordance with instructions received from me, Colonel Lieb, commanding the Ninth Louisiana, African descent, made a reconnaissance in the direction of Richmond on June 6, starting from Milliken's Bend at 2 a. m." "He was preceded by two companies of the Tenth Illinois Cavalry, commanded by Captain Anderson, whom he overtook 3 miles from the Bend. It was agreed between them that the captain should take the left side of Walnut Bayou and pursue it as far as Mrs. Ames' (Amis?) plantation, while Colonel Lieb proceeded along the main Richmond road to the railroad depot 3 miles from Richmond, where he encountered the enemy's pickets and advance, which he drove in with but little opposition, but, anticipating the enemy in strong force, retired slowly toward the Bend. When about half-way back, a squad of our cavalry came dashing up in his rear, hotly pursued by the enemy, Colonel Lieb immediately formed his regiment across an open field, and with one volley dispersed the approaching enemy." "Expecting the enemy would contest the passage of the bridge over Walnut Bayou, Colonel Lieb fell back over the bridge, and from thence to Milliken's Bend, from whence he sent a messenger informing me of the success of the expedition, and reported the enemy to be advancing. I immediately started the Twenty-third Iowa Volunteer Infantry to their assistance, and Admiral Porter ordered the gunboat Choctaw to that point." "At 3 o'clock the following morning, the enemy made their appearance in strong force on the main Richmond road, driving the pickets before them. The enemy advanced upon the left of our line, throwing out no skirmishers, marching in close column by division, with a strong cavalry force on his right flank. Our forces, consisting of the Twenty-third Iowa Volunteer infantry and the African Brigade (in all, 1,061 men), opened upon the enemy when within musket-shot range, which made them waiver and recoil, a number running in confusion to the rear; the balance pushing on with intrepidity, soon reached the levee, when they were ordered to charge, with cries of "no quarter!" "The African regiments being inexperienced in the use of arms, some of them having been drilled but a few days, and the guns being very inferior, the enemy succeeded in getting upon our works before more than one or two volleys were fired at them. Here ensued a most terrible hand-to-hand conflict of several minutes' duration, our men using the bayonet freely and clubbing their guns with fierce obstinacy, contesting every inch of ground, until the enemy succeeded in flanking them, and poured a murderous enfilading fire along our lines, directing their fire chiefly to the officers, who fell in numbers. Not till they were overpowered and forced by superior numbers did our men fall back behind the bank of the river, it the same time pouring volley after volley into the ranks of the advancing enemy." "The gunboat now got into position and fired a broadside into the enemy, who immediately disappeared behind the levee, but all the time keeping up a fire upon our men." "The enemy it this time appeared to be extending his line to the extreme right, but was held in check by two companies of the Eleventh Louisiana Infantry, African descent, which had been posted behind cotton bales and part of the old levee. In this position the fight continued until near noon, when the enemy suddenly withdrew. Our men, seeing this movement, advanced upon the retreating column, firing volley after volley at them while they remained within gunshot. The gunboat Lexington then paid her compliments to the fleeing foe in several well directed shots, scattering them in all directions." "I here desire to express my thanks to the officers and men of the gunboats Choctaw and Lexington for their efficient services in the time of need. Their names will be long remembered by the officers and men or the African Brigade for their valuable assistance on that dark and bloody field." "The officers and men deserve the highest praise for their gallant conduct and especially Colonel Glasgow, of the Twenty-third Iowa, and his brave men, and also Colonel Lieb, of the Ninth Louisiana, African descent, who, by his gallantry and daring, inspired his men to deeds of valor until he fell, seriously though not dangerously wounded. I regret to state that Colonel Chamberlain, of the Eleventh Louisiana, African descent, conducted himself in a very unsoldierlike manner." "The enemy consisted of one brigade, numbering about 2,500, in command of General [H. E.] McCulloch, and 200 cavalry. The enemy's loss is estimated at about 150 killed and 300 wounded. It is impossible to get anything near the loss of the enemy, as they carried the killed and wounded off in ambulances. Among their killed is Colonel [R. T. P.] Allen, Sixteenth [Seventeenth) Texas." "Enclosed please find tabular statement of killed, wounded, and missing; in all, 652 (11 officers and men killed, 17 officers and 268 men wounded, and 2 officers and 264 men captured or missing.) Nearly all the missing blacks will probably return, as they were badly scattered." "The enemy, under General [J. M.] Hawes, advanced upon Young's Point while the battle was going on at Milliken's Bend; but several well-directed shots from the gunboats compelled them to retire." "Submitting the foregoing, I remain, yours, respectfully, ELIAS S. DENNIS Brigadier-General, Comdg. District Northeast Louisiana." John D. Winters in his book The Civil war in Louisiana (1963 pp. 199-201) states: "General Dennis' defending forces consisted of the Twenty-third Iowa and the African Brigade, numbering in all 1,061 men. McCulloch went into action with 1,500 men. Many of the Negro troops were inexperienced in the use of a gun, and some had had only a few days of drill. As the Confederates charged up the first levee most of the white troops and some of the Negroes in this line fled back to the second line of defense, leaving the Negro troops to defend the position. Hand-to-hand fighting with bayonet and clubbed rifle broke out between the Negroes and the Confederates. Many colored troops cowered below their cotton works and were shot in the head." "In this controversial encounter, charges and countercharges were later made against both sides. General Dick Taylor had ordered General Walker to take Milliken's Bend and drive the Federal forces into the river before they had a chance to escape to their transports and before the gunboats could go into action. Walker had chosen to remain behind with the reserves and had sent McCulloch, who displayed dash and bravery but, according to Taylor, had "no capacity for handling masses." The Confederates moved too slowly and were seized with great fear of the gunboats, a fear which kept them frozen behind the protection of the first levee to which they had retreated." "McCulloch sent back some five miles to ask for reinforcements. Walker came forward just after noon with Randal's brigade but found that McCulloch had already withdrawn his troops. Walker ordered a general retreat back toward Richmond, instead of moving down to Duckport and Young's Point to aid General Hawes, as Taylor had instructed." "The Confederates captured 50 Negro soldiers and 2 of their white officers and brought back a number of horses and mules, small arms, and commissary stores. McCulloch's losses were light; 44 were killed, 130 wounded, and 10 were missing. General Dennis reported his total losses numbered more than 650. Of this number, about 100 were killed and the rest were wounded and missing. Some of those reported missing straggled back into camp later on. Exact tabulations of losses on both sides are impossible." "Negro historians and those with a special interest in the success of the Negro as a soldier tend to exaggerate the bravery displayed by the colored troops at Milliken's Bend. The long-drawn-out hand-to-hand combat that is described by some of the partisan reports actually lasted only a few minutes. The Negroes did not all stand and fight. Many of them fled to the river bank when the first Confederate assault took place. Later, others quickly disappeared and hid out in the hedges. Some of the white officers who commanded Negro units absented themselves during the thick of the battle, then overpraised the performance of their black recruits in order to vindicate themselves. McCulloch's report concerning the Negro and the ferocity of the entire encounter must be weighed carefully. He failed in his mission, and he was trying to give excuses for his failure." "Whatever the truth may be, many of the Negroes did fight, and their service to the Union as outpost guards helped to free many thousands of white troops for the more important task of laying siege to Vicksburg." In another account, well-known author Horace Greeley, in his massive two-volume history The American Conflict a History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America 1860-65 (1866 Vol. II pp. 318-319) states the following: "While the siege of Vicksburg was in progress, Gen. Grant, compelled to present a bold front at once to Pemberton and to Johnston, had necessarily drawn to himself nearly all the forces in his department, stripping his forts on the river above him so far as was consistent with their safety. Milliken's Bend had thus been left in charge of Brig. Gen. E. S. Dennis, with barely 1061 effectives, (Greely reports that Mr. G. G. Edwards, who was there, claimed that Dennis had 1,410) whereof the 23d Iowa, Col. Glasgow, numbered 160; the residue were Negroes, very recently enlisted, and organized as the 9th and 11th Louisiana and 1st Mississippi. Against this post, a Rebel force from the interior of Louisiana, said to consist of six regiments under Gen. Henry McCulloch, numbering 2,000 to 3,000, advanced from Richmond, La., driving in the 9th Louisiana and two companies of cavalry who had been out on a reconnaissance, and pursuing them nearly up to our earthworks at the Bend, where they were stopped by nightfall, and lay on their arms, not doubting that they would go in with a rush next morning." "But, just at dark, a steamboat passed, enabling Dennis to send to Admiral Porter for aid; when the boats Choctaw and Lexington were sent down from Helena; the former arriving just as the Rebels, at 3 a.m., advanced to the assault, with cries of "No quarter!" to Negroes and officers of Negro troops, rushing upon and over our intrenchments, before the green, awkward Blacks had been able to fire more than one or two rounds. A hand-to-hand fight of several minutes, with bayonets and clubbed muskets, ensued; wherein combatants were mutually transfixed and fell dead: the struggle resulting favorably to the Rebels, who had flanked our works and poured in a deadly enfilading fire, which compelled our men to give ground and retire, still fighting, behind the levee. And now the Choctaw opened on the exulting foe with such effect as to compel them also to shrink behind their side of the levee, keeping up a fire, while attempting to outflank our right. Thus the fight was maintained with little loss till noon; when the Rebels, having the worst of it, drew off, under a heavy fire from our troops and gunboats, but without being pursued. Some of the newspaper correspondents state, what Dennis's report conceals, that our Blacks, impelled to charge the Rebels in their flight, were led directly under the fire of our gunboats, by which they were far worse cut up than by the Rebels. Hence, our heavy loss of 127 killed, 287 wounded, beside some 300 missing at the close of the action; most of whom probably turned up afterward. As Dennis estimates the Rebel loss at about 150 killed and 300 wounded, it is probable that the fire of the gunboats, while it frightened only the Rebels, killed more of our men than of theirs." "A Rebel demonstration against Young's Point was made simultaneously with that against Milliken's Bend; but had no result, and was probably intended only to distract attention from the latter. A few shots from gunboats were sufficient to compel a retreat." Thus, the controversial Battle of Milliken's Bend, bloody as it was, ended on June 7, 1863, the same day it started. It bears mentioning here that on June 15, 1863, Union General Joseph A. Mower, with a contingent of 8,000 men, burned the town of Richmond, the seat of Madison Parish's government, to the ground. Had it been Mower rather than Dennis who returned to Madison Parish after the war, he would probably have been lynched. Vicksburg surrendered on July 4, 1863, and July 4 was not to be celebrated in the area for almost another 100 years. General Dennis’ command was not without scandal – although apparently unfounded. In an article on April 20,1864, a correspondent of the St. Louis Missouri Republican accused Dennis of selling a large amount of provisions under his command to the enemy while his soldiers were on half-rations. Although Dennis himself requested an investigation of the charges, his commanding officer, Major General Slocum, felt they were unfounded and not worthy of an investigation. In Dennis’ letter to request the investigation he quotes the article in the Missouri Republican as saying: “Genl Dennis, recently commanding the forces at the Big Black, was threatened with violence by the soldiers of his brigade, his guard discovered and he himself compelled to come out and make an apologetic speech to save himself. It appears from the statements of the soldiers, that, at one evening alone, not less than two hundred barrels of flour were passed out of the lines, besides thousands of dollars worth of other goods, while the soldiers were on half rations! The report got credit that the officers were selling their rations to the rebels. The indignation was tremendous & a very mutinous spirit prevailed. They made a raid across the river and found at the house of one widow not less than seven barrels of salt – a kind of depot for the articles.” Dennis’ subordinates rose to his defense and wrote letters certifying his innocence. Among these letters were: a letter from the Picket Officer at Big Black Station, Capt. A. F. Crane: “…I know that there was not exceeding twenty-five barrels of flour sold at that point during the whole period. I also certify that nothing passed beyond the lines without a proper permit from the Commanding Officer at Vicksburg. Very frequently Genl Dennis prevented supplies from passing there that were permitted at Vicksburg. … I have not met a more faithful, vigilant and watchful Officer than Genl Elias S. Dennis …”. A letter from the Provost Marshall at Big Black Station, Lieut. C. Lockwood: “The correspondence contained in the Missouri Republican of the 20th inst. in regard to the passing of contraband goods and enormous quantities of provisions is untrue. …My instructions from Genl Dennis were to permit as little as possible, that under no circumstances to permit more than ten days supply of flour to a family (not including the negroes), other supplies were similarly regulated. Four fifths of all the goods crossed at Big Black were permitted at Vicksburg, over which Genl Dennis had no control.” A letter from Local Special Agent of the Treasury Department, C. W. Niurander: “…every allegation (in the Missouri Republican) contained therein is false. I know Genl Dennis issued an order which was executed by the Provost Marshall limiting the supply of flour to 100 lbs for each family, no goods could have passed without my knowledge and I state unhesitatingly that nothing passed which was contraband of war…” And finally, a letter to the Missouri Republican signed by eleven of his Captains and Lieutenants denouncing the correspondent and the paper as follows: “Apr. 23, 1864, Editor Missouri Republican “In your issue of the 20th inst. we find a communication written by your Vicksburg correspondent charging Brig General Dennis Commanding at the Big Black, with permitting almost fabulous amounts of supplies to Rebels alleging the same to be a most disgraceful affair. Your correspondent in his vivid imagination leads your readers to suppose that the General occupies not only a hostile attitude towards his men, but that his own life was jeopardized by his mal-administration. Whether true or false it could have been ascertained by your special (correspondent) before any public exhibition of his righteous indignation provided the facts were found to be correct; the common courtesy ordinarily due a Genl Officer, would demand such an inquiry by an impartial or gentlemanly reporter. The boldness or brazen effrontery of the charge alluded to can only be regarded as emanating from a vulgar mind or “’The entire statement as published is a deliberate premeditated lie, concocted for wicked purposes by a dangerous and designing man.’” “The whole article indicates most clearly the low breeding of its irresponsible author.” “To relieve Genl Dennis from the slightest suspicions of disloyalty is an unnecessary duty from us. His record is before the people and Country both for inspection and criticism.” “The undersigned members of the Staff of Genl Dennis publicly brand the loose statements of your correspondent as libelous in every particular. We claim it as a right to call for an explanation of this wanton unprovoked and cowardly assault upon the character of a brave soldier whose fame belongs to the state of Illinois which he so faithfully represents in the field.” “In our judgment no punishment severe enough could be inflicted by us upon the individual who would sacrifice truth either for personal ill-will or to carry out the behests of political gamblers.” “Your correspondent is unworthy to represent the Missouri Republican and we assure him that he will not be allowed to slander with impunity an Officer whose Military record is beyond reproach. We offer him this gratuitous advice. If scribbling be his vocation, he should learn and profit by his knowledge that the public press should be a medium of truth and not a weapon of calumny to be wielded by those who for partisan purposes practice a fraud upon the credulity of the people.” NOTE: Many thanks go to Carolyn Dennis Kress of Peosta, Iowa, who obtained the above-quoted letters from the “Southern Historical Collection” in the University of North Carolina Library. It is not exactly certain in which battles or campaigns General Dennis was involved after Vicksburg (General Dennis' statue can be found in the Vicksburg National Military Park.), although for the remainder of the Civil War he assumed command of several different Divisions. Immediately before being mustered out, Dennis served for a short time as Military Governor of Shreveport. He was mustered out on August 24, 1865 after being given the honorary rank of Brevet Major General on April 13, 1865 for his "gallant and meritorious services in the capture of Mobile, Alabama." Apparently shortly after his discharge from the Union Army, Dennis moved back to Madison Parish where he had been a conqueror. This time he became a cotton farmer and politician. At first Dennis was not trusted, but the populace soon realized that he was not a carpetbagger and his sympathies lay with the Democratic Party. Some prominent whites realized Dennis' value in being able to win the black vote and treat whites fairly once in office. They supported Dennis in his election in 1874 as Parish Judge and in 1880, as Sheriff. During his tenure as Parish Judge from 1874-1880 Dennis performed more than 100 marriages among other duties. Throughout his administration Dennis acted with fairness, wisdom and moderation in mediating between his black and white constituents. At some point Dennis became much admired by one of Madison Parish's plantation-owning widows, thought to have been Mrs. Celia Groves, who ultimately willed her plantation to him. Unfortunately, the will proved to be defective and Dennis received nothing from it when she died. The 1870 Census lists Dennis as a “farm laborer” living in the same household as Mrs. Groves. Mary Kain Slade Dennis, Elias' first wife who apparently never lived in Madison Parish, died in Carlysle, Illinois on January 16, 1873. In her obituary in the January 23, 1873 Carlisle Union Banner, the following statement was noted: "After remaining four years a widow, Mrs. Slade was married the second time, on the 24th of February 1838, to Mr. Elias S. Dennis, with whom she lived until his ignominious desertion a few years ago." On June 7, 1875 Elias married Mrs. Mary A, McFarland, another Madison Parish land-owning widow. Madison Parish Tax Rolls for 1879, 1881, and 1885 show that Mrs. Mary A. Dennis owned 757 acres located in T15N R13E. In 1879 and 1881 the property was described as "McFarland Place", but in 1885 it was called "Oak Ridge" Plantation. The property, which was located along Roundaway Bayou about 7 miles southeast of Tallulah, was not listed in 1890. Dennis was elected Sheriff of Madison Parish in 1880 and served well in that position for several years. In late1886 Elias's son Elias S. Dennis, Jr. visited his father in Madison Parish, and the following appeared in the January 6, 1887 edition of the Carlisle, Illinois Constitution and Union: " Elias Dennis, who has been down into Louisiana to visit his father, General Dennis, reports everything lovely in that region. The farmers were plowing and the trees were green. He says the colored people are happy and contented and vote the Democratic ticket. The Republicans swindled them out of their earnings after the war and left the country, hence the colored man's dislike of the Yankee. General Dennis resided in this city before the war. He was a general in the union army and made a good record. After the war was over he married the daughter of the sunny South, and has resided there ever since." Elias Dennis moved back to Carlyle, Illinois in March 1887 and lived on a small farm with his son. Apparently his wife, Mary, stayed in Madison Parish rather than move to the North. However, she did visit him from time to time as mentioned in the Carlyle, Illinois Constitution and Union on February 28, 1889: " Personal Mention. - Mrs. General Dennis of Louisiana came here on a visit on Tuesday." Brigadier General Elias Smith Dennis died of pneumonia almost in anonymity in Carlyle, Illinois at 10 a.m. on December 17, 1894 and was buried in the city cemetery. From Brigadier General Elias S. Dennis is Carlyle's Forgotten Hero of Civil War by Helen Sharp Wickliffe: "Probably no other officer of his ranks, accomplishments and distinction has had his career so completely overlooked by the contemporary newspapers upon the occasion of his death. No obituary appeared in the Chicago Tribune, nor any other Illinois newspaper. Two days later the New York Tribune carried 16 lines, apparently having been alerted by its Southern Illinois correspondent." Although Elias S. Dennis was certainly "A Yankee General in King Cotton's Court", he was well respected in a community that could have hated him. He will be remembered in Madison Parish not so much that he was the Union Commanding Officer during the Battle of Milliken's Bend, but that he was a fair and impartial man, even if he was a Yankee, and was a friend of both the blacks and whites alike. At his death he probably had many more friends in Madison Parish, Louisiana, the home of his former enemies, than he did in his hometown of Carlyle, Clinton County, Illinois. © 2000 Richard P. Sevier (firstname.lastname@example.org)

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The words "extreme weather" are rarely associated in the mainstream media with another two words: "global warming." But scientists argue that these extreme weather events are consistent with changes they have long predicted would accompany global warming. We speak to Joseph Romm of ClimateProgress.org and Perry Beeman of the Des Moines Register. [includes rush transcript] AMY GOODMAN: We’ve all come to know the words “extreme weather.” Wildfires rage across California, and a state of emergency is declared in several counties. Torrential rain in the Midwest and historic levels of flooding from Iowa to Missouri. At least six people are killed by tornadoes in Iowa and Kansas. A heat wave on the East coast has claimed the lives of a number of people. In China, people have barely had time to recover from the recent earthquake. Flooding and rain have killed over sixty and left over a million people homeless. Meanwhile, record drought in many parts of the United States and Australia continue. The words “extreme weather” are rarely associated in the mainstream media with another two words: “global warming.” But scientists argue these extreme weather events are consistent with changes they have long predicted would accompany global warming. We turn now to climate blogger and scientist Joseph Romm. He’s a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, was Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy during the Clinton administration. We’re also joined on the phone from Des Moines by environmental journalist Perry Beeman. He’s an award-winning investigative reporter for the Des Moines Register. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I want to begin with the big picture. Joseph Romm, can you talk about what’s happening around the world and how it is conveyed to us? JOSEPH ROMM: Sure. Well, I think that to any objective observer, the weather has definitely gotten more extreme. We hear more about these record floods, not just in Iowa, but in Great Britain and in China. We’re seeing the spread of drought and deserts in places like Australia, and here, of course, in the United States, more intense rainfall, more extreme heat, record wildfires. And in general, the media is covering this as this all sort of unconnected events, just regular weather maybe gone a little wacky. But, in fact, the scientific community has predicted for more than two decades now that as we pour more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the planet will heat up, and that would redistribute water. If you heat up the planet, then places that are kind of arid will lose soil moisture, and they’ll become drier, whereas you put — you heat up the planet, you evaporate more water, and areas that are wetter will tend to see more intense rainfall and deluges and earlier snowmelts, and all that will lead to flooding. So what we’re seeing is exactly what scientists have been telling us would happen because of human emissions. AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think this lack of coverage, of making the connection? I mean, the coverage of the extreme weather is pervasive; it is extensively covered on all of the networks. JOSEPH ROMM: Well, there is a couple of reasons, one of which is —- and if you read the work of Ross Gelbspan, a Pulitzer Prize— winning reporter from Boston, he talks about how those who oppose action on global warming and those who are skeptical of global warming have worked very hard to attack the media whenever they point out this connection. I think — so I do think that that is part of the reason. I also think that part of the reason is that the people who write about global warming for most newspapers and TV are not the same people as those who tend to cover weather. You know, the New York Times has a reporter who covers global warming, and he’s quite good, but he is not the guy who goes to Iowa to write about the flooding there. So I think this is a failure of the editors at newspapers, whose job is to sort of assign reporters and look at the big picture. And I say this as someone — my father was a newspaper editor for thirty years, so that was his job, was to figure out the big picture and educate his readers. AMY GOODMAN: And what is the connection, for example, between the wildfires that have raged in places like Santa Cruz to Sacramento, to the flooding we see in Iowa, to what’s happening now in China, the very place where the earthquake devastated Sichuan province, now the terrible rains and flooding? JOSEPH ROMM: Well, I think global warming puts more water vapor into the atmosphere, and so you are — what you are expected to see is more rain, but not just any type of rain, but rain that comes in very intense downpours over one or two days, you know, that we would call deluges. So that is something we expect. Wildfires are quite interesting, because they have multiple causes. Obviously, when it’s dry and hasn’t rained for awhile and the soil is drier, you’re going to see wildfires. But the other thing that has occurred across much of the country and Canada is that pests, particularly the so-called bark beetle, used to be wiped out in the winter — the larvae used to be wiped out by very cold winters, but since winters aren’t as cold anymore, the larvae survive. So we’ve had these huge infestations of bark beetles that, for instance, have pretty much — they’re on track to a wipe out every harvestable pine tree in British Columbia. And when you combine drier soil with more pests, and the trees, of course, need water to produce the sap to fight off the beetles. And then, finally, the other piece you see is the earlier snowmelt. A lot of the West doesn’t get rainfall in the summer and early fall. In order to stay moist, what has happened traditionally is that the snow has melted slowly over the course of the summer, and the streams have provided water and humidity for the West. But now, because of global warming, the snow is melting earlier and earlier, so that gets you (a) the more intense streams and flooding in the early — in the late spring and early summer, and then you just get very dry by the midsummer and late summer, and so you get more wildfires. And although wildfires don’t get a lot of attention in this country, except when they hit Californian homes, it might surprise people to know that since the year 2000, the United States has lost in wildfires an area of trees equal to the state of Idaho. We have seen record-breaking wildfire season after record-breaking wildfire season. AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Joseph Romm. He runs the blog “Climate Progress” at climateprogress.org, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. We’re also joined by Perry Beeman, staff writer for the Des Moines Register . Are you dry right now, Perry? PERRY BEEMAN: Well, we’re dry in most parts of Des Moines. The north of downtown in Des Moines, we have an area where we had a levee break, that people are just now being able to survey the damage, and it’s still very wet up there. The eastern part of the state is still pretty much a disaster zone along several of the major rivers. AMY GOODMAN: First, can you sum up what the state of Iowa looks like right now from Cedar Rapids to Iowa City to Des Moines? What are the reports coming in? PERRY BEEMAN: Well, we have — we now still have 36,000 people who are out of their homes. They’ve been evacuated. Cedar Rapids, the water is falling, but we went from 100 blocks covered to 400 blocks, and I think it was somewhere over a thousand yesterday. A lot of the central — just a lot of the very heavily developed neighborhoods in downtown Cedar Rapids are under. The river is falling there. Iowa City, the Iowa River crested yesterday, which is good news, but the University of Iowa is seeing flooding in places it never has on record. This is a flood that’s worse than 1993 in places in Iowa, and those are two places that it definitely is worse than ’93. In Des Moines, it was at least equal to ’93, but there has been less damage, because there were considerable improvements made after ’93. Interestingly, though, the levee that broke the other day that flooded a reasonably poor area and one of the major Des Moines high schools, at least surrounded that high school with water, is a levee that was a known problem in ’93. The Corps has a plan to fix it, but so far has — Congress hasn’t appropriated money to even design the levee. And so, it was one of these that was improperly built, it got saturated, and it failed. In ’93, it was overtopped. So, in some cases, we haven’t fixed problems we knew about. And in many cases, in particular in a suburban area of Des Moines that is prone to having, you know, six or seven feet of water in a major flood, there’s not a drop of water in that district this time around. So there’s good news and bad news. AMY GOODMAN: You’re the former president of the Society of Professional Journalists. What about that? PERRY BEEMAN: Society of Environmental Journalists. AMY GOODMAN: Sorry? PERRY BEEMAN: Society of Environmental Journalists. AMY GOODMAN: Of Environmental Journalists, I meant. PERRY BEEMAN: Right. AMY GOODMAN: What about that issue of connecting extreme weather, which is getting extensive coverage, to global warming? PERRY BEEMAN: Well, interestingly enough, in my reporting for the Des Moines Register, just not even a few weeks before this all happened, we were in the middle of doing a climate change series that’s going to run over the year, and I had just examined that very issue. In fact, we had a double truck or two-page spread graphic talking about the different things that would happen and pointing out just what the previous speaker has said, that you would expect more torrential rains. We had — Cedar Rapids had twelve inches of rain in ten days leading up to this event. And I believe that the eastern part of the state was averaging ten to fifteen percent — sorry, ten to fifteen inches of rain since May 15. We had a tornado in Parkersburg in the eastern part of the state that killed eight on May 25, and on June 13, we had one of the — the Boy Scout camp in Little Sioux that killed four from Nebraska and Iowa. And so, you know, my thing on this is that you can’t really — just as you can’t always attribute something that looks like an environmental exposure to cause an illness because there may be other factors, it’s hard to say definite cause and effect, but what we can say is, based on the international panel — international panel’s work and work at Iowa State University and the University of Iowa, that what has happened here is consistent with many scientists’ view of what global warming will mean in the Midwest. AMY GOODMAN: The piece you wrote, Perry Beeman, on several groups acting to help the state roll with changes, a team of Iowa State University scientists including several involved in a Nobel Peace Prize-winning report last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are some of those members of the Intergovernmental Panel in Iowa? PERRY BEEMAN: Yes, one of my main sources, Gene Takle from Iowa State University. There actually are three or four scientists at ISU who were involved in the international panel, and I think Gene has been involved in previous ones. And then there’s also a center at the University of Iowa; I don’t know that they have been directly involved in the last assessment, but certainly are probably offering technical information. AMY GOODMAN: You’ve also written about the sewage treatment plants that have just shut down, the sewers also. Can you talk about the problem of the contaminated water all over Iowa? PERRY BEEMAN: Well, that’s correct. I mean, I was — you know, sewage bypasses unfortunately are a fact of life in Iowa. By “bypasses,” I mean that when they get overloaded with rain, of course, they have to just pretty much shut down and let the water go straight into the river. A few days ago, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources reported that there wasn’t a single sewage treatment plant in the northeast corner of Iowa on the Cedar, the Wapsipinicon and one other major river up there that was operating. Cedar Rapids’s plant is down and could be down for two weeks. And, of course, what that means is, is all that sewage is, diluted as it may be by the floodwaters, is going to go into the river. And we have now a monitoring program for our state park beaches. When it rains heavily, usually we get pretty high E. coli readings at some of the lakes, and we’ll have beach advisories. And certainly this isn’t going to help. So we have an infrastructure problem with the sewage treatment plants. Even in Des Moines, we had some flooding downtown that was based on two factors. One is that the storm sewers can’t run into the river if the river is so high it’s covering the pipe that leads into the river. And worse, we have combined sewers. I think Des Moines estimates somewhere around $750 million they need to spend to fix sewers, some of which go back to like 1930, ’40, ’50. They can’t handle the load. AMY GOODMAN: Cedar Rapids, running out of water, ironically? PERRY BEEMAN: Well, Cedar Rapids was down to about 25 percent capacity. They were down to their last well. And, you know, maybe your viewers would be interested in knowing that in Des Moines, which lost its water in ’93, we have built a backup water treatment plant. But the main plant also was fortified, and it was never really threatened this time around, and they have several backups. But Cedar Rapids, last I knew, was down to one well, and they were asking people to use as little water as possible. And I believe that FEMA and the National Guard were bringing in bottled water in case they needed that, too. AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to break, then we’ll come back to this discussion. We’re talking with Perry Beeman. He is staff writer for the Des Moines Register, has been writing extensively about the flooding. He’s the former president and board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. We’re also joined on the telephone from Washington by Joseph Romm, editor of the blog “Climate Progress” at climateprogress.org. We’ll be back with them in a minute. AMY GOODMAN: Our guests, Perry Beeman, staff writer for the Des Moines Register; we are also joined by Joseph Romm, editor of the blog climateprogress.org. As we turn now to President Bush in London today for talks with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the trip is part of Bush’s final European tour before he leaves office. He spoke about climate change at a news conference at 10 Downing Street. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Finally, we talked about global climate change and briefed Gordon on our strategy for the major economies meeting to hopefully reach an international goal for 2050 that will have intermediate strategies that are binding on each nation within the UN framework. And the reason why I believe this is the right approach to take, that unless China and India are a part of a binding international agreement — and the United States — then we will not have effective policy in dealing with climate change. It might make us all feel good, but the results won’t be satisfactory. And so, hopefully, you know, in Seoul, South Korea, coming up, there will be a major economy meeting agreement on a long-term goal with binding commitments. AMY GOODMAN: President Bush in London at 10 Downing Street. Joseph Romm, your response? JOSEPH ROMM: Well, you know, the administration has been the worst in the world on global warming, and not only has it refused to take any action at home in the United States, it’s fought in the courts, efforts to block the states from taking action, and it’s been working behind the scenes to undermine global action. There’s no question that if China and India are not a part of a global treaty, we won’t be able to stop catastrophic warming. But, you know, we are the richest country, and we have been responsible for the vast majority of the cumulative emissions over the past two centuries, and everyone expects that we need to show some leadership. We need to take some action to reduce emissions at home. And obviously, if the richest country in the world won’t take some action, why would developing countries like China and India? So I think, you know, the President’s argument sounds superficially persuasive, but they’ve been saying this for very long time, that we can’t act until poor countries act. And, of course, if you ever talk to people from China or India, they just laugh at the notion that somehow the richest and most powerful country in the world can’t figure out a way to cost-effectively reduce its own emissions and lead on this issue. So I think, you know, the good news is that the next president of the United States is going to take some action on global warming, and, you know, it’s just a few more months left in President Bush’s administration. AMY GOODMAN: Perry Beeman, I wanted to ask about hog farms in Iowa, the issue of pollution and what’s happening with them with this immense flooding. PERRY BEEMAN: I don’t have a lot of information on that, but I did talk to the chief of environmental protection for Iowa a couple of days ago, and he said that we do have a couple of hog farms where the — most of them have these concrete storage pits underneath the hog confinements now for manure, and because of all this groundwater and the changing pressures, I think a couple of them have had collapses in those systems and, I assume, some leaking. Maybe even more serious than even that is that we have these old clay lagoons. They’re sort of the old model; they’re being replaced quickly. But the Department of Natural Resources is concerned that if those pits are not full, then it’s sort of a Catch-22: if the pits aren’t full, then the walls may collapse because of the pressure from the groundwater; if they are full, then they might overflow because of the rain. So we don’t have — I think right now the sewage treatment plants are probably a bigger issue, but I’m sure that we’ve had, you know, some manure runoff from all of this. Of course, if anybody has applied reasonably lately to the fields, the crop fields, some of that may be running off, as well. AMY GOODMAN: I also understand that the University of Iowa, which has quite a remarkable museum, was able to get all of its art out secretly before the flood and is now being kept in a secret location in Chicago. PERRY BEEMAN: You’re wondering if that’s true, you think? AMY GOODMAN: Well, I assume it’s true. PERRY BEEMAN: Well, and I guess I don’t have any information on that, although I do — I can say that they evacuated some buildings in Iowa that was — that have never been evacuated for a flood. The Iowa River runs through the middle of Iowa City, and the land to the east of the river rises just pretty dramatically. It’s a river valley, after all. But the amazing thing to me is that they had to evacuate a couple of buildings that are up that hill a ways and had sandbagged those streets. And again, they had water in places that they didn’t have water in ’93. I do think ’93 was worse, a worse flood in the Des Moines area than it was in Iowa City, but I think the University of Iowa has been pretty aggressive at getting a lot of its valuables out. And, of course, the Old Capitol, I think, is not threatened with water, but it would be kind of ironic if that building had damaged, since they just replaced the dome that had burned a few years ago. That’s the symbol of the university. AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both very much for being with us, Perry Beeman, staff writer for the Des Moines Register, former president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, and Joseph Romm, runs the blog at climateprogress.org.

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Kashmiri Pandits are a minority ethnic group from the Kashmir Valley in northern India. In 1989, the separatist movement to free Kashmir from India culminated in widespread violence against members of all communities, and initially against Kashmiri Pandits in particular. There was a mass exodus of nearly 95% of the Kashmiri Pandit community during the early 1990s. Sixteen years later, there are approximately 7,000 Kashmiri Pandits who permanently reside in Kashmir. These “non-migrants” have remained in Kashmir due to economic constraints, familial circumstances, and/or a deep attachment to the land, to name a few reasons. They face grave problems today, including lack of employment opportunities, government corruption and complacency, and inadequate monetary and moral support from the Kashmiri Pandit Diaspora. Trisal N. Those Who Remain: The Survival and Continued Struggle of the Kashmiri Pandit ‘Non-Migrants’. The Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies. 2007 Aug;5(3): Edited for conciseness and clarity by Indo-American Kashmir Forum. Distributed by Indo-American Kashmir Forum. [Download a PDF copy of this report.] Introduction and Overview of the Kashmiri Pandit Community Kashmiri Pandits, also known as Kashmiri Hindus, are a minority ethnic community who belong to the Kashmir Valley in northern India. Kashmiri Hindus comprised the majority population in Kashmir until the introduction of Islam to the Kashmir Valley in the fourteenth century. There is some evidence that a caste system once existed in Kashmir made up of Brahmans (Pandits), Kayasthas, Vaishyas, and Shudras. However, by the end of Muslim rule in 1819, Pandits were the only Hindus who had neither migrated from Kashmir nor converted to Islam (Pant, p. 14). There have been several exoduses of the Kashmiri Hindu community from Kashmir throughout history, precipitated at times by religious persecution at the hands of Muslim rulers and at other times because of lack of economic opportunities within Kashmir (Pant, p. 11). The most recent and largest recorded exodus occurred in 1989-1990, following the start of a violent separatist movement. Estimates vary on the number of KPs who fled in 1989; some scholars put the number at 170,000 whereas Kashmiri Pandit leaders cite a figure close to 350,000 (Evans, pp. 24-26). Due to a lack of or inaccurate census data, neither figure can be fully substantiated. The Kashmiri Pandits (KPs) who have remained in Kashmir following the mass exodus of the minority community in 1989-1990 are commonly known as ‘non-migrants.’ Their reasons for not leaving Kashmir are varied, ranging from economic constraints to an emotional attachment to the land. Each family has its own unique and compelling story that explains why it stayed in Kashmir despite the exodus of more than 95% of the Pandit community (Evans, p. 19). Little attention is given to the 1,300 families, or approximately 6,654 KPs, who permanently reside in the Kashmir Valley (Sanjay Tickoo, Past-General Secretary Hindu Welfare Society of Kashmir, HWSK, personal communication, June 10, 2006). The literature and media coverage about Kashmiri Pandits—what little there is in the mainstream media—deals largely with the displaced population living in one-room tenements in Jammu. Even non-camp migrants, many of whom are under similar socio-economic pressure as those living in the Jammu camps, have been largely neglected in media accounts and literature about Kashmir and Kashmiri Pandits. This paper will begin with an overview of the 1989-1990 exodus of the Kashmiri Pandit community and a breakdown of the non-migrant population living in Kashmir today. After discussing the fieldwork parameters, I will address the general misconceptions about and conditions of the KP community living in Kashmir. Finally, I will consider the potential return of the broader KP community to Kashmir and conclude with action steps aimed specifically at the Kashmiri Pandit Diaspora. Overview of 1989-1990 Exodus A number of factors contributed to the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in 1989-1990. On a broader level, a growing sense of alienation and even fear had been spreading in the Kashmiri Pandit community over the last several decades, as a result of the state government’s socio-economic policies that seemed to favor the Muslim majority. Bhat (2003) outlines these policies: the institutionalization of land reforms that took land from Pandits and gave it to Muslims without compensation, the formation of a delimitation commission whose gerrymandering led to a significant diminishing in the Pandits’ political power, and the establishment of an informal system of reservations that favored the majority community (pp. 13-14): “The point must be made…that the measures taken were not implemented to specifically target the Pandit community but rather to address the plight of the people of the state. But, given the seething socio-economic scenario, each of these steps resulted in changes that added to the feeling of alienation amongst the Kashmiri Pandits.” (Bhat, p. 10) In July 1988, the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) officially began its armed struggle for independence from India. This mobilization raised concerns across the Pandit community, but still did not trigger the exodus. It was the selective killings which followed in late 1989 and early 1990, conducted by the JKLF and other militant organizations—who were varied in their goal of independence, accession to Pakistan, or Islamization of society—and the heightened sense of fear and paranoia that resulted, which caused the Pandits to leave en masse. Although the murders, attacks, and kidnappings seemed to mainly target politicians, government employees, and other high-profile Kashmiri Pandits, the majority of community members felt that it was only a matter of time till they too would be affected. Threats against KPs—in local newspapers as well as from taped messages played on loudspeakers of mosques throughout Kashmir—added to the already palpable sense of fear and prompted the exodus. The latest data collected by the state and local government in 2004, and supported by the Hindu Welfare Society Kashmir (HWSK), indicates that 6,654 Kashmiri Pandits continue to live in 258 locations throughout Kashmir. In terms of the concentration of KP populations according to district, the order from highest to lowest is as follows: Pulwama, Anantnag, Srinagar, Budgam, Baramulla and Kupwara, with the last two districts having only 12 villages in which Pandits reside. Sanjay Tickoo, former General Secretary of the Hindu Welfare Society Kashmir, believes that the population of KPs in the Valley must now be even less than the 6,654 figure recorded in 2004, as migrations continue to occur due to lack of economic opportunity (personal communication, June 10, 2006). My fieldwork consisted of conducting interviews with a representative sample of non-migrants in various settings, ranging from personal residences to educational institutions to places of worship. I also attended a variety of gatherings at which non-migrants were present and thus had first-hand experience with the lifestyles and conditions of these individuals. Although restricted mainly to Srinagar district, I was able to visit a number of homes in Anantnag and Budgam districts as well. The majority of information I obtained regarding the KPs living in the Valley was through personal interaction with the community as well as through the Hindu Welfare Society Kashmir, the only social and political forum for non-migrant KPs. Since its creation in 1998, the HWSK has been fighting for the welfare of the non-migrants on a grassroots level. Leaders of the HWSK have visited nearly every location in Kashmir in which Kashmiri Pandits still live in order to record their conditions and provide relief when necessary. The organization has also made significant inroads with the central and state government on behalf of the non-migrant KPs. Why the Non-Migrants Stayed in Kashmir Sanjay Tickoo argues that of those who stayed back, generally speaking, 20% did so primarily because of economic constraints, 30% primarily because of love for and attachment to the land, and the remaining 50% assumed that conditions would improve within a few months (personal communication, June 10, 2006). I found that a combination of all these factors in addition to a host of others led to individuals staying back, with certain socio-economic classes identifying more with some factors than others. A number of upper class Pandit families have remained in Kashmir, mainly in Srinagar. These include relatively well-known individuals such as politicians, businessmen, doctors, and high-level government employees, among others. These individuals’ professions require them to engage with the majority community and therefore they cannot afford to alienate themselves from this population. These KPs remained in the Valley because their occupations were tied to Kashmir, they felt a strong attachment to the land and their homes, and most of their children had already migrated from the Valley or left immediately following the beginning of the insurgency. A number of individuals from this profile spend winter months outside of Kashmir, visiting their children and relatives. Some also have personal security officers, although this has not always ensured safety (Khemlata Wakhlu, Congress Party member, personal communication, June 8, 2006). It was the upper class Pandits who in fact the militants first targeted. Many of these individuals have been victims of kidnappings and multiple attacks. When asked why they stayed in Kashmir despite the numerous attempts on their lives, their first response is a defiant one: ‘why should I leave my own home?’ They talk matter-of-factly about the inevitability of death and destiny. Leaving Kashmir would have been a kind of death in and of itself, and so they chose to remain and face the consequences. Dr. Vimla Dhar explained to me that while staying back in Kashmir has not been easy, she could not bear living anywhere else. “My life is not the same as it was before 1990. I cannot say that, ‘oh…it has not affected my life at all.’ It has affected my life, it has affected my lifestyle, it has affected my day-to-day life. It has affected everyone’s life. But I would prefer to live it this way [in Kashmir] than anywhere else. Because that [leaving Kashmir], I could not stand. I could not stand it.” As for the KP non-migrant families of middle and lower socio-economic status, their main reasons for staying back were economic constraints or an ill/aging family member. Many of these families only had one income-earner in the family, and traditionally that individual had a government job or another occupation that required him or her to remain in Kashmir. Those who lived in the villages depended on agriculture and their orchards for their livelihoods and so were tied to their land and homes. A number of families were comprised of elderly individuals who could not bear to leave Kashmir or were physically unable to, and thus the whole family stayed back. Nearly every Kashmiri Pandit I spoke with attributed their staying back partly to the direct and indirect support of their mohallas (neighborhoods)—which were comprised mainly of the majority community—as well as other Muslim friends and co-workers. The instances of being provided protection and help are plenty. Mr. R.K. Mattoo and his wife Mrs. Neerja Mattoo conveyed one such story to me. In 1991 an attempt was made to kidnap Mr. Mattoo near their home. If not for the help of his driver, who was a Muslim, Mr. Mattoo would have most likely been kidnapped that day. He remembers hiding at the home of one of his Sikh neighbors while the driver spoke to the kidnappers and eventually convinced them to leave. Mr. Mattoo telephoned his other neighbors from the Sikh family’s home, and within minutes a procession of nearly 15 men from the neighborhood, most of them Muslims, led Mr. Mattoo back to his home. In the weeks that followed the Mattoos received an incredible outpouring of support and solidarity. When asked why they stayed back despite the attempted kidnapping and numerous other attacks made on their lives, Mr. Mattoo says that it would have been simply wrong to leave the neighbors and friends who had without hesitation supported he and his wife. A Kashmiri Pandit woman who is involved in the education field conveyed another similar anecdote to me. She considers her supervisor—who is a Muslim—to be her godmother. The supervisor is one of the main reasons why this woman remained in Kashmir, because it was she who helped secure alternate accommodations for the Pandit woman and her family after the 1998 Wandhama massacre near Ganderbal, the town in which the Pandit woman lived. Many KPs who stayed in Kashmir after 1990 did so because they thought the situation would improve within a few months, and that the KPs who left for Jammu, Delhi and other parts of India would return once the violence subsided. At the same time, news of the terrible conditions of Jammu migrants living in tents reached those who were still in the Valley, further deterring this population from migrating. Although migrations continued happening throughout the 1990s, and still continue to do so, the majority of this population had more time to plan their accommodations in Jammu, Delhi, or the respective location to which they planned to migrate. These later migrations were starkly different from the chaotic and fatal exodus and resettlement of 1990. Many of the non-migrants believe it was part of their destiny or fate to remain in Kashmir. Others, such as Mr. Kumar Wanchoo, who has stayed in the Valley along with his family, believe that a small percentage of a community remaining in the homeland is characteristic of most exoduses. He argues that the choice to leave or stay in Kashmir reflects more upon the circumstances of the family rather than the courage or will of its members (K. Wanchoo, personal communication, June 19, 2006). For a number of individuals it was a matter of chance that they stayed back. Some of these individuals had even packed their bags and were ready to leave, but for one reason or another the plan to leave did not materialize. One Kashmiri Pandit I spoke with said that he and his neighbor decided to leave for Jammu with their families at the beginning of the insurgency, and so after discussing the necessary details, both went back to their respective homes to prepare for leaving. A day or two later, when this man and his family went to their neighbor’s home with their packed bags, they found that the neighbor and his family had already left without giving any notice. The man told me that his family had been so mentally prepared to leave, and so devastated when they were literally left behind, that it took them two years to gradually unpack their belongings and realize that they were staying behind for good. There are numerous similar unfortunate stories throughout Kashmir. Many non-migrants I spoke with said that although there may have been an economic or other practical reason which explains why they stayed in Kashmir, they do not know how they have remained while so many of their brethren have left. It certainly was not that they were spared of the violence and terror. To the contrary, it was they who were in the midst of the conflict during the 1990s following the migration of most of the KPs. Yet somehow the months have turned into years, and sixteen years later they are still living in Kashmir. The Condition of the Non-Migrants The primary problems the KPs in the Valley face today are that of unemployment and inadequate rehabilitation. Approximately 125 Pandit families in Kashmir live below the poverty line. According to a survey taken by the Hindu Welfare Society Kashmir in 2003, there were more than 500 educated youth who were unemployed, and over 200 of these individuals were no longer eligible for government jobs due to their age, circumstances which left them no choice but to migrate from Kashmir in search of better opportunities (S. Tickoo, personal communication, June 14, 2006). Lack of rehabilitation is also a problem faced by many non-migrants. In 1998, following the massacre of seven KPs in Sangrama (Budgam district), the government relocated 23 KP families from far-flung villages around Budgam district into Budgam town. I visited several of these families who had been persuaded by the government to abandon their large homes and farms to live in cramped conditions in the dilapidated houses of migrant KPs. Seventeen of these families have been granted migrant status, which means they receive relief similar to the KP migrants scattered throughout India. Many of these individuals shared with me that although they have received migrant status, nobody from the government has visited them or followed-up with their conditions. They have been relocated but they have certainly not been rehabilitated. A female youth named Poonam shared her thoughts with me regarding her family’s situation: “In 1997, they told us that it wasn’t safe for us in our villages. They said to us that they would make a nice arrangement for us in Budgam town and settle us well. But nobody even comes here to see. Nobody has come here since we were resettled. There are no facilities here. We were fine in our homes; we shouldn’t have been uprooted.” Another female youth, whose family is living below the poverty line and at risk of being evicted from the home that the government relocated them to, shared with me her thoughts about leaving Kashmir and being relocated: “I’m not going to leave Kashmir. Kashmir is ours, why should we leave it?.…We were in our homes. Why were we taken out? Now that we’ve been taken out, we should be taken care of.” In addition to the families in Budgam, there are 64 other families in Kashmir (10 in Mattan and 54 in other districts) who have been relocated without rehabilitation. In fact, these families have yet to receive the migrant relief they were promised by the government upon relocation. What makes matters worse is that while these individuals are fighting for their livelihoods and are living in makeshift homes, the government has built a ‘migrant colony’ in Sheikhpora in Budgam District comprised of 378 flats (S. Tickoo, personal communication, June 10, 2006). None of the migrants who expressed interest in moving back to Kashmir and into these flats have done so yet. Demands made by the KP families in Kashmir who have yet to be rehabilitated to each receive a flat in the Sheikhpora colony on a priority basis have not been answered. Socio-cultural problems are also abundant for the KPs who have stayed back. Every KP adult I met in the Valley spoke at length about the difficulty of maintaining culture and identity after the mass exodus. Marriages in particular have become difficult to arrange with the scattering of the community, and most are not held in Kashmir because guests and family members do not feel safe traveling to the region. Many individuals also shared with me feelings of loneliness as a result of the migration of family and friends. Future of the Non-Migrants Despite the multitude of problems that Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley face today, most families I spoke with are trying their level best to remain in their homes and in Kashmir. They are raising their children in Kashmir and sending them to schools that have at the very most four or five other Kashmiri Pandit children enrolled. In spite of these valiant efforts, the threat of extinction of the KP community in Kashmir looms. Although the non-migrants’ daily security concerns have substantially decreased, especially compared to the early and mid-1990s, sporadic attacks on Pandit and other minority communities living particularly in isolated villages cause not only a degree of apprehension but also result in migrations. Most recently, after the March 23, 2003 massacre of 24 Kashmiri Pandits in Nadimarg, the town’s surviving inhabitants packed their bags and moved to Jammu. This migration happened in spite of pleas from the government to the group to remain in Nadimarg and requests of the HWSK for the Nadimarg survivors to be moved to safer areas in Srinagar. In an interview with a man whose father and sister were killed in the Nadimarg massacre, I learned that the inhabitants of Nadimarg had no desire to stay in Nadimarg following the attack, and were even put off by the idea of moving to Srinagar. He explained to me that leaving had always seemed inevitable for those who had stayed back after 1990: “Leaving was in everybody’s heart. Whether it was in 5 years, 10 years. There was insecurity in Nadimarg because it was farther away—there wasn’t as much security. We did get more disturbed when we heard about selective killings in small towns. But then in these towns [like Nadimarg] were individuals with less exposure, who were restricted to their villages, not as ready to leave their homes. They kept delaying their departure. They kept saying they’d leave the day after tomorrow…after saying ‘day after tomorrow, day after tomorrow,’ eventually this happened. We thought before 2003 too that we should have left as well. But we just happened to have stayed back.” In addition to the Nadimarg survivors, a handful of families from throughout Kashmir migrated to Jammu following the Nadimarg incident. A man I interviewed from Magam (Budgam district), who now lives in Jammu, had the following to say about his reasons for leaving after the Nadimarg massacre: “We had stayed in Magam during the exodus. Our locality was very good. Because of our neighbors, we stayed. But after Wandhama, Sangrama, and then Nadimarg…we had to stop and think that this could happen to us too. It was when they [the neighbors] came to us [after Nadimarg] and said that ‘we don’t know if we ourselves are safe and can in turn keep you safe,’ that we decided that it was time to leave.” This man also shared with me that many KPs he knows who continue to live in the Valley have purchased property in Jammu or other locations, indicative of their desire to move away eventually. Even if conditions do improve in Kashmir, will the KPs come back? Most of the KPs I spoke with in the Valley were not so optimistic. While there was understanding and empathy expressed toward those who left, non-migrants I spoke with said that it was unlikely for those who had left in 1990 to return to Kashmir. In their opinion, most of the population that left is now too settled in their own lives. They did however mention that those who live in the camps and other untenable conditions would be the first to return to Kashmir if it was made possible. Many Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley with whom I spoke made the point that if their own grievances with the government were not being adequately addressed—regarding unemployment and rehabilitation, for example—then what guarantee would the returning KPs have that they would be adequately rehabilitated? Most KPs in the Valley cannot help but see the return of the KPs as more of a political ploy than anything else. As Sanjay Tickoo so aptly put it, “Everybody wants to be the hero who brought the Kashmiri Pandits back.” One could look at the situation more optimistically—that when the conditions are more conducive, KPs will certainly return, if not permanently but at least for five or six months at a time. But will the younger generation feel so compelled? Kashmiri Pandit youth spread out across the world have made commendable efforts to stay connected to their Kashmiri roots with the help of their parents and family. But most youth cannot speak Kashmiri and have only a superficial understanding of Kashmiri customs and traditions. More importantly, they have not spent significant amounts of time in Kashmir, or sadly enough, have never been there. It is this disconnection with the Kashmir Valley that threatens the regeneration of the community. If the Kashmiri Pandits are to regenerate as a community, it is the KPs in the Valley, the non-migrant community, that will have to form the building blocks of any resurgent Pandit population. Vijay Sazawal (2000), two-time president of the Indo-American Kashmir Forum, articulated this sentiment in the Kashmiri periodical, Koshur Samachar: “Like the endless cycle of life and rebirth ordained for the mortals, Kashmiri Pandits too are cursed by the fate to evolve from the valley only to find security and prosperity anywhere but in the valley. This cycle of birth and flight has become a paradigm. (p. 3)” Bhat, A (Ed). (2003). Kashmiri Pandits: Problems and Perspectives. New Delhi: Rupa. Evans, A. (2002, March 1). A Departure from History: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001. Contemporary South Asia, 11(1), 19-37. Pant, K. (1987). The Kashmiri Pandit: Story of a Community in Exile in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Delhi: Allied. Said, E. (1995). The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Self-Determination, 1969-1994. London: Vintage. Sazawal, V. (2000, April). A New Focus, a New Vision. Koshur Samachar, 3.

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The Conflict of the Orders, also referred to as the Struggle of the Orders, was a political struggle between the Plebeians (commoners) and Patricians (aristocrats) of the ancient Roman Republic lasting from 494 BC to 287 BC, in which the Plebeians sought political equality with the Patricians. It played a major role in the development of the Constitution of the Roman Republic. Shortly after the founding of the Republic, this conflict led to a secession from Rome by Plebeians to the Sacred Mount at a time of war. The result of this first secession was the creation of the office of Plebeian Tribune, and with it the first acquisition of real power by the Plebeians. At first only Patricians were allowed to stand for election to political office, but over time these laws were revoked, and eventually all offices were opened to the Plebeians. Since most individuals who were elected to political office were given membership in the Roman Senate, this development helped to transform the senate from a body of Patricians into a body of Plebeian and Patrician aristocrats. This development occurred at the same time that the Plebeian legislative assembly, the Plebeian Council, was acquiring additional power. At first, its acts (“plebiscites”) applied only to Plebeians, although after 339 BC, with the institution of laws by the first Plebeian dictator Q. Publilius Philo, these acts began to apply to both Plebeians and Patricians, with a senatorial veto of all measures approved by the council. It was not until 287 BC that the Patrician senators lost their last check over the Plebeian Council. However, the Patricio-Plebeian aristocracy in the senate still retained other means by which to control the Plebeian Council, in particular the closeness between the Plebeian Tribunes and the senators. While this conflict would end in 287 BC with the Plebeians having acquired political equality with the Patricians, the plight of the average Plebeian had not changed. A small number of aristocratic Plebeian families had emerged, and most Plebeian politicians came from one of these families. Since this new Patricio-Plebeian aristocracy was based on the structure of society, it could only be overthrown through a revolution. That revolution ultimately came in 49 BC, when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River, and began a civil war, which overthrew the Roman Republic, and created the Roman Empire. In 494 BC Rome was at war with three Italic tribes (the Aequi, Sabines and Volsci), but the Plebeian soldiers refused to march against the enemy, and instead seceded to the Sacred Mount outside Rome. A settlement was negotiated and the patricians agreed that the plebs be given the right to elect their own officials. The Plebeians named these new officials Plebeian Tribunes (tribuni plebis). During the early years of the republic, the Plebeians were not allowed to hold magisterial office. Neither Tribunes nor Aediles were technically magistrates, since they were both elected solely by the Plebeians, rather than by both the Plebeians and the Patricians. In 445 BC, the Plebeians demanded the right to stand for election as consul (the chief-magistrate of the Roman Republic), but the Roman senate refused to grant them this right. Ultimately, a compromise was reached, and while the Consulship remained closed to the Plebeians, Consular command authority (imperium) was granted to a select number of Military Tribunes. These individuals, the so-called Consular Tribunes (“Military Tribunes with Consular powers” or tribuni militares consulari potestate) were elected by the Centuriate Assembly (the assembly of soldiers), and the senate had the power to veto any such election. This was the first of many attempts by the Plebeians to achieve political equality with the Patricians. Starting around the year 400 BC, a series of wars were fought against several neighboring tribes (in particular the Aequi, the Volsci, the Latins, and the Veii). The disenfranchised Plebeians fought in the army, while the Patrician aristocracy enjoyed the fruits of the resulting conquests. The Plebeians, by now exhausted and bitter, demanded real concessions, so the Tribunes Gaius Licinius Stolo and Lucius Sextius passed a law in 367 BC (the Licinio-Sextian law), which dealt with the economic plight of the Plebeians. However, the law also required the election of at least one Plebeian Consul each year. The opening of the Consulship to the Plebeians was probably the cause behind the concession of 366 BC, in which the Praetorship and Curule Aedileship were both created, but opened only to Patricians. Shortly after the founding of the republic, the Centuriate Assembly became the principal Roman assembly in which magistrates were elected, laws were passed, and trials occurred. Also around this time, the Plebeians assembled into an informal Plebeian Curiate Assembly, which was the original Plebeian Council. Since they were organized on the basis of the Curia (and thus by clan), they remained dependent on their Patrician patrons. In 471 BC, a law was passed due to the efforts of the Tribune Volero Publilius, which allowed the Plebeians to organize by Tribe, rather than by Curia. Thus, the Plebeian Curiate Assembly became the Plebeian Tribal Assembly, and the Plebeians became politically independent. During the regal period, the king nominated two quaestors to serve as his assistants, and after the overthrow of the monarchy, the Consuls retained this authority. However, in 447 BC, Cicero tells us that the Quaestors began to be elected by a tribal assembly that was presided over by a magistrate. It seems as though this was the first instance of a joint Patricio-Plebeian Tribal Assembly, and thus was probably an enormous gain for the Plebeians. While Patricians were able to vote in a joint assembly, there were never very many Patricians in Rome. Thus, most of the electors were Plebeians, and yet any magistrate elected by a joint assembly had jurisdiction over both Plebeians and Patricians. Therefore, for the first time, the Plebeians seemed to have indirectly acquired authority over Patricians. Most contemporary accounts of an assembly of the Tribes refer specifically to the Plebeian Council. The distinction between the joint Tribal Assembly (composed of both Patricians and Plebeians) and the Plebeian Council (composed only of Plebeians) is not well defined in the contemporary accounts, and because of this, the very existence of a joint Tribal Assembly can only be assumed through indirect evidence. During the 4th century BC, a series of reforms were passed (the leges Valeriae Horatiae or the “laws of the Consul Publius Valerius Publicola and the Dictator Quintus Hortensius”), which ultimately required that any law passed by the Plebeian Council have the full force of law over both Plebeians and Patricians. This gave the Plebeian Tribunes, who presided over the Plebeian Council, a positive character for the first time. Before these laws were passed, Tribunes could only interpose the sacrosanctity of their person (intercessio) to veto acts of the senate, assemblies, or magistrates. It was a modification to the Valerian law in 449 BC which first allowed acts of the Plebeian Council to have the full force of law over both Plebeians and Patricians, but eventually the final law in the series was passed (the “Hortensian Law”), which removed the last check that the Patricians in the senate had over this power. In the decades following the passage of the Licinio-Sextian law of 367 BE, a series of laws were passed which ultimately granted Plebeians political equality with Patricians. The Patrician era came to a complete end in 287 BC, with the passage of the Hortensian law. When the Curule Aedileship had been created, it had only been opened to Patricians. However, an unusual agreement was ultimately secured between the Plebeians and the Patricians. One year, the Curule Aedileship was to be open to Plebeians, and the next year, it was only to be open to Patricians. Eventually, however, this agreement was abandoned and the Plebeians won full admission to the Curule Aedileship. In addition, after the Consulship had been opened to the Plebeians, the Plebeians acquired a de facto right to hold both the Roman Dictatorship and the Roman Censorship since only former Consuls could hold either office. 356 BC saw the appointment of the first Plebeian Dictator, and in 339 BC the Plebeians facilitated the passage of a law (the lex Publilia), which required the election of at least one Plebeian Censor for each five-year term. In 337 BC, the first Plebeian Praetor (Q. Publilius Philo) was elected. In addition, during these years, the Plebeian Tribunes and the senators grew increasingly close. The senate realized the need to use Plebeian officials to accomplish desired goals, and so to win over the Tribunes, the senators gave the Tribunes a great deal of power, and unsurprisingly, the Tribunes began to feel obligated to the senate. As the Tribunes and the senators grew closer, Plebeian senators were often able to secure the Tribunate for members of their own families. In time, the Tribunate became a stepping stone to higher office. During the era of the kingdom, the Roman King appointed new senators through a process called lectio senatus, but after the overthrow of the kingdom, the Consuls acquired this power. Around the middle of the 4th century BC, however, the Plebeian Council enacted the “Ovinian Plebiscite” (plebiscitum Ovinium), which gave the power to appoint new senators to the Roman Censors. It also codified a commonplace practice, which all but required the Censor to appoint any newly elected magistrate to the senate. While this was not an absolute requirement, the language in the law was so strict that the Censors rarely disobeyed it. We don’t know what year this law was passed, although it was probably passed between the opening of the Censorship to Plebeians (in 339 BC) and the first known lectio senatus by a Censor (in 312 BC). By this point, Plebeians were already holding a significant number of magisterial offices, and so the number of Plebeian senators probably increased quickly. It was, in all likelihood, simply a matter of time before the Plebeians came to dominate the senate. Under the new system, newly elected magistrates were awarded with automatic membership in the senate, although it remained difficult for a Plebeian from an unknown family to enter the senate. On the rare occasion that an individual of an unknown family (ignobilis) was elected to high office, it was usually due to the unusual character of that individual, as was the case for both Gaius Marius and Marcus Tullius Cicero. Several factors made it difficult for individuals from unknown families to be elected to high office, in particular the very presence of a long-standing nobility, as this appealed to the deeply rooted Roman respect for the past. In addition, elections were expensive, neither senators nor magistrates were paid, and the senate often did not reimburse magistrates for expenses associated with their official duties. Therefore, an individual usually had to be independently wealthy before seeking high office. Ultimately, a new Patricio-Plebeian aristocracy (nobilitas) emerged, which replaced the old Patrician nobility. It was the dominance of the long-standing Patrician nobility which ultimately forced the Plebeians to wage their long struggle for political power. The new nobility, however, was fundamentally different from the old nobility. The old nobility existed through the force of law, because only Patricians were allowed to stand for high office, and it was ultimately overthrown after those laws were changed. Now, however, the new nobility existed due to the organization of society, and as such, it could only be overthrown through a revolution. The Conflict of the Orders was finally coming to an end, since the Plebeians had achieved political equality with the Patricians. A small number of Plebeian families had achieved the same standing that the old aristocratic Patrician families had always had, but these new Plebeian aristocrats were as uninterested in the plight of the average Plebeian as the old Patrician aristocrats had always been. During this time period, the Plebeian plight had been mitigated due to the constant state of war that Rome was in. These wars provided employment, income, and glory for the average Plebeian, and the sense of patriotism that resulted from these wars also eliminated any real threat of Plebeian unrest. The lex Publilia, which had required the election of at least one Plebeian Censor every five years, contained another provision. Before this time, any bill passed by an assembly (either by the Plebeian Council, the Tribal Assembly, or the Centuriate Assembly) could only become a law after the Patrician senators gave their approval. This approval came in the form of an auctoritas patrum (“authority of the fathers” or “authority of the Patrician senators”). The lex Publilia modified this process, requiring the auctoritas patrum to be passed before a law could be voted on by one of the assemblies, rather than after the law had already been voted on. It is not known why, but this modification seems to have made the auctoritas patrum irrelevant. By 287 BC, the economic condition of the average Plebeian had become poor. The problem appears to have centered around widespread indebtedness, and the Plebeians quickly demanded relief. The senators, most of whom belonged to the creditor class, refused to abide by the demands of the Plebeians, and the result was the final Plebeian secession. The Plebeians seceded to the Janiculum hill, and to end the secession, a Dictator named Quintus Hortensius was appointed. Hortensius, a Plebeian, passed a law called the “Hortensian Law” (lex Hortensia), which ended the requirement that an auctoritas patrum be passed before any bill could be considered by either the Plebeian Council or the Tribal Assembly. The requirement was not changed for the Centuriate Assembly. The Hortensian Law also reaffirmed the principle that an act of the Plebeian Council have the full force of law over both Plebeians and Patricians, which it had originally acquired as early as 449 BC. The importance of the Hortensian Law was in that it removed from the Patrician senators their final check over the Plebeian Council. It should therefore not be viewed as the final triumph of democracy over aristocracy, since, through the Tribunes, the senate could still control the Plebeian Council. Thus, the ultimate significance of this law was in the fact that it robbed the Patricians of their final weapon over the Plebeians. The result was that the ultimate control over the state fell, not onto the shoulders of democracy, but onto the shoulders of the new Patricio-Plebeian aristocracy. The traditional account was long accepted as factual, but it has a number of problems and inconsistencies, and almost every element of the story is controversial today; some scholars, such as Richard E. Mitchell, have even argued that there was no conflict at all, the Romans of the late Republic having interpreted events of their distant past as if they were comparable to the class struggles of their own time. The crux of the problem is that there is no contemporaneous account of the conflict; writers such as Polybius, who might have met persons whose grandparents participated in the conflict, do not mention it (which may not be surprising, since Polybius’ history covered a period after the conflict), while the writers who do speak of the conflict, such as Livy or Cicero, are sometimes thought to have reported fact and fable equally readily, and sometimes assume that there were no fundamental changes in Roman institutions in nearly 500 years. However, there are numerous Roman and Greek authors who record the events which form part of the conflict of the orders, and they each rely on more ancient sources, and if the story were false it could only be because there were some great collusion between them to distort history or some deliberate fabrication of history, which seems unlikely. For instance, the fasti report a number of consuls with plebeian names during the 5th century, when the consulate was supposedly only open to patricians, and explanations to the effect that previously patrician gentes somehow became plebeians later are difficult to prove. Another point of difficulty is the apparent absence of armed revolt; as the history of the late Republic shows, similar types of grievances tended to lead to bloodshed rather quickly, yet Livy’s account seems to entail debate mostly, with the occasional threat of secessio. None of this is helped by our basic uncertainty as to who the plebs actually were; many of them are known to have been wealthy landowners, and the “lower class” label dates from the late Republic. Abbott, Frank Frost (1901). A History and Description of Roman Political Institutions. Elibron Classics (ISBN 0-543-92749-0). Byrd, Robert (1995). The Senate of the Roman Republic. U.S. Government Printing Office, Senate Document 103-23. Cicero, Marcus Tullius (1841). The Political Works of Marcus Tullius Cicero: Comprising his Treatise on the Commonwealth; and his Treatise on the Laws. Translated from the original, with Dissertations and Notes in Two Volumes. By Francis Barham, Esq. London: Edmund Spettigue. Vol. 1. Lintott, Andrew (1999). The Constitution of the Roman Republic. Oxford University Press (ISBN 0-19-926108-3). Polybius (1823). The General History of Polybius: Translated from the Greek. By James Hampton. Oxford: Printed by W. Baxter. Fifth Edition, Vol 2. Taylor, Lily Ross (1966). Roman Voting Assemblies: From the Hannibalic War to the Dictatorship of Caesar. The University of Michigan Press (ISBN 0-472-08125-X). Kurt Raaflaub, ed. Social Struggles in Archaic Rome: New Perspectives on the Conflict of Orders (University of California Press, 1986) ISBN 0-520-05528-4 Shindler, Michael (2014). Patrician and Plebeian Sociopolitical Dynamics in Early Rome. The Apollonian Revolt. Ihne, Wilhelm. Researches Into the History of the Roman Constitution. William Pickering. 1853. Johnston, Harold Whetstone. Orations and Letters of Cicero: With Historical Introduction, An Outline of the Roman Constitution, Notes, Vocabulary and Index. Scott, Foresman and Company. 1891. Mommsen, Theodor. Roman Constitutional Law. 1871-1888 Tighe, Ambrose. The Development of the Roman Constitution. D. Apple & Co. 1886. Von Fritz, Kurt. The Theory of the Mixed Constitution in Antiquity. Columbia University Press, New York. 1975. The Histories by Polybius Cambridge Ancient History, Volumes 9–13. A. Cameron, The Later Roman Empire, (Fontana Press, 1993). M. Crawford, The Roman Republic, (Fontana Press, 1978). E. S. Gruen, "The Last Generation of the Roman Republic" (U California Press, 1974) F. Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World, (Duckworth, 1977, 1992). A. Lintott, "The Constitution of the Roman Republic" (Oxford University Press, 1999)

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AND SAINT BENEDICT: A PARADOX, A PARADIGM f one seriously reads medieval texts and examines their rhetoric, one can find moving revelations about women who seem to be lurking in shadowy parentheses, at the margins of the medieval world. In his Dialogues, Gregory may seem to be saying little about women. So too his ardent disciple, the deacon Peter. But if one takes the time to examine closely the uses of language in what may seem to be a simply anecdote, much can be inferred. In Chapter XXXIII of the second Dialogue Gregory tells a story of Benedict and Scholastica , which story along with a brief allusion to her death in the subsequent chapter, represents the only account we have of her existence. In the story, Benedict and Scholastica disagree about whether or not he should leave her convent after a visit. They do spend the night together in prayer and holy conversation. In the next chapter, we are told that shortly afterwards she dies. The story is simple. But if one examines the context, diction, images, narrative and didactic elements of the story, one finds a rather singular women. In fact, one finds a rather singular parable, illustrative of the lives of Benedict and Scholastica in particular, men and women in general, of earth and heaven, time and eternity, and finally of humanity and God. First, let us examine the context of Chapter XXXIII of the Dialogues. Gregory has just completed a catalogue of Benedict's miracles, those performed at will and those effected by prayer. As his final example, he tells the moving story of a farmer who has carried the body of his dead son to the monastery where Benedict restores him to life, after praying that God consider not his own sins but the faith of the boy's father. Deacon Peter then asks Gregory 'whether holy men can always carry out their wishes, or at least obtain through prayer whatever they desire'. Gregory says not, then tells the story of the visit of Benedict and Scholastica in which Scholastica upstages her brother, in Gregory's words, ' contra hod quod voluit, in virtute omnipotentis Dei ex femina pectore miraculum inventi', 'contrary to what he will, by virtue of a miracle of almighty God, procured by the breast of woman'. In these words Gregory contrasts the request of Scholastica which came from her breast, 'ex pectore feminae ', with Benedict's desire to return to the monastery . 'Se venerabilis viri mentem aspicimus ', 'if we consider the mind of the venerable man' (italics mine). So Gregory is answering Peter's question regarding the possibility that holy men always have their way by telling the story of a holy woman whose heartful prayer once disallows her brothers's having his way, albeit his legitimate way. Peter then responds to Gregory's antidote and interpretation with evident delight. Gregory, however, returns to his narrative in the subsequent chapter, as if the story had not been interrupted by either his explanation or Peter's comment. He simply states that the next morning Benedict and Scholastica return home. In thus bringing his story to closure, in a singular instance he uses the adjective ordinarily reserved for Benedict, venerabilis , to describe Scholastica, who is commonly described, sanctimonialis. He goes on to narrate three stories of death - that of Scholastica, of Germanus, Bishop of Capua, and of Benedict himself - and thus brings his dialogue about Benedict, Dialogue Two, to a close. When I look at the story of Benedict and Scholastica in the context of the Dialogues, taking into account Peter's question which prompts the story and the subsequent narration regarding the deaths of Benedict and Scholastica, I notice that the frame of the story offsets two factors within the story. Peter's question makes us focus on the relationship between Benedict and Scholastica and helps us to see in his weakness her strength, in his defeat her victory. Since these opposites are ultimately apparent, rather than real, they establish paradox, rather than contradiction. Finally, the distinction between brother and sister helps us to realize how close they are to one another, how each complements the other. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of this story and the story of Scholastica's death, leads me to believe that the complementarity we see between brother and sister does not merely characterize this one day in their lives, but makes of that day a metaphor for their entire lives. There is a harmony, deeper than the ties of blood, which bind brother and sister to one another. Gregory acknowledges as much when, after mentioning that Benedict had his sister buried in the tomb he had prepared for himself, he comments, 'quo facto cintingit ut quorum mens uno semper in Deo fuerat, eorum quoque corpora nec sepultura separet ', 'The bodies of these two were now to share one common resting place, just as in life their souls had always been one in God'. The story then ends with explicit emphasis on unity, a unity which is the reconciliation of opposites within the story. As I read the story I find in its diction the poles of opposition which are ultimately reconciled, between the verbs 'volo ' and 'valeo ', and between the various nouns used to identify Benedict and Scholastica, as male and female. The harmony between these poles is discovered in the way one complements the other. Forms of the word volo and valeo appear eleven times in the four hundred and thirty-nine words of Chapter XXXIII. Their occurrence is densely concentrated at the beginning and at the end of Gregory's story - four instances in the first two sentences, seven isntances in the four sentences at the end. In the first sentence of Chapter XXXIII, Gregory introduces the verbal opposition betweenvolo and valeo . He reveals to Peter that it is impossible for the holy man always to obtain what he desires by reminding him that St Paul - and who could be holier than he? - asked three times that the Lord remove the sting from his flesh, ' et tamen quod voluit obtinere non valuit '. Gregory returns to these words at the end of the chapter. In the last four sentences, he uses 'non valens ', 'noluit, ' voluisse,' voluerit', ' voluit' and 'valuit '. In the first instance, both verbs are used in the negative. Benedict, like Paul, cannot have his way: 'Ipse autem exire extra tectum non valens, qui remanere sponte noluit, in loco mansit invitus', 'on the other hand, unable to go out from under the roof, although he did not want to remain of his own accord, he had to stay in the place, unavenged'. Benedict's wish not to remain, noluit, echoes the use of the same verb in the preceding sentence, a beautifully balanced statement of Scholastica in which she explains, ' Ecce te rogavi, et audiri me noluisti; rogavi Dominum meum, et audivit me ', 'I asked you, and you would not hear me: I asked my Lord and he heard me'. Benedict is reprimanded for his unwillingness to hear his sister, not only by Scholastica and God but also by Gregory's style. In the subsequent sentences, after explaining that brother and sister spend the night in sacred colloquy, Gregory comments first in an indirect discourse, ' eum voluisse aliquid, sed minime potuisse ', 'that he wanted something, but could have less'; secondly, ' dubium non est quod eandem serenitatem voluerit ', 'that there is no doubt but that he wanted a clear sky'; and that what ensured was 'contra hoc quod voluit ', 'contrary to that very thing he wanted'. In the last sentence of the narrative, Gregoy explains why everything went amiss for Benedict and for the first time uses 'valeo ' in the affirmative. He says 'Nec mirum quod plus illo femina, quae diu fratrem videre cupiebat, in eodem rempore valuit ', 'it is no wonder that in this instance the woman, more than her brother, was able to have that which she desired'. The concluding sentence thus alerts us to what was allowed to Scholastica. The use of cupio, rather than volo, in this instance seems to imply that Scholastica's request was one of heartfelt desire, quite distinct from Benedict's act of volition. If by following the verbs valeo and volo through the text one can sense the distinction Gregory makes between what one wants and what one is allowed - a distinction which serves to characterize the brother and sister and their God -, by examining the various nouns which identify Benedict and Scholastica, one can see that they are often strategically chosen to name the role the man or woman takes at a given point in the story. Benedict is pater, frater and vir; Scholastica,soror andfemina ; Benedict,venerabilis, Scholastica,sanctimonialis (nun or holy woman). Gregory only once refers to Benedict as pater, and there seems to emphasize his relation as a Benedictine to the founder of his order. Three times he refers to Benedict as frater ; when he comes to visit Scholastica; when Scholastica has heard his refusal to stay; and finally when he compares the effectiveness of their wishes in his concluding comments on the justice of God's resolution of their difference. In these three instances, he emphasizes the close relationship of brother and sister, elucidates Scholastica's sensitivity to Benedict's refusal, and then judges and explains the woman's superiority over her brother. The two times Benedict is referred to simply as vir , 'man' there seems to be a touch of irony in the text. In the first instance, Benedict, vir Dei , 'the man of God' is disturbed and complains bitterly that he cannot return to his monastery. In the second, Gregory is explaining that in the end, the woman's breast wins over the mind, 'venerabilis viri', 'of the venerable man'. The diction identifying Benedict seems to remind us of the importance of relationships, of brother and sister, man and woman. The same can probably be said of the words which identify Scholastica, except that she has the advantages of her victory. Of course, she is introduced as sister to Benedict. When she first asks Benedict to spend the night, she is identified as woman and sister, sanctimonialis femina soror . From that point on, with one noteworthy exception, she is referred to as femina, 'woman'. Which seems appropriate, given that she is thinking and acting in a fashion independent from, even opposed to her brother. The one exception to the choice of the noun ' femina' to identify Scholastica occurs in Benedict's denunciation of her act, 'Parcat tibi omnipotens Deus, soror; quid est quod fecisti ?' 'May almighty God spare you, sister, what is it that you have done?' Where Benedict in a sense demeans his sister, Gregory, and God, exalt the woman by settling in her favour. While Gregory is certainly not describing a 'battle of the sexes' and choosing the female victor, he is describing in a very deep way how man does need woman and the woman indeed deserves the settlement in her favour. While God's settling the debate in the woman's favour is the central resolution of the anecdote, I feel that it may be equally important to look at the narrative elements of the story to determine what the settlement means in symbols that may stretch even the beautiful moral Gregory draws from the outcome of the dispute. Brother and sister, and their brothers and sisters, are at table, sharing food, cibus , and the heavens, coeli , respond to Scholastica's wishes, rather than Benedict's. The alliterating nouns, cibus and coeli, gently remind us of the original harmony between earth and heaven. the table at which the group eats foreshadows the eternal banquet. The altercation alone disturbs the peace. Gregory reminds us that the sisters and brothers have supped together and are at table when Scholastica first invites her brother and his brethren to spend the night. When he resists she puts her hands on the table and her head in her hands. Simultaneously when she lifts her head from the table, the thunderstorm begins. Gregory repeats that the woman's tears and the rain so coincided with one another that the thunder resounded as she was lifting her head from the table. The revelation of and resolution to their disagreement comes from the skies as a kind of Christiandeus ex machina , but also as a symbol which relates this story to those which follow it. In the stories that follow, Benedict reads portents of death in the skies; later his own death is accompanied by a heavenly sign. In the first instance, three days after he has spent the night with his sister, while he is in his room looking up at the sky he sees her soul leave her body and enter heaven in the form of a dove. In the second instance, standing at his window while everyone is sleeping, he sees a flood of light, then the whole world is gathered into a single ray of light , and lastly the soul of the Bishop of Capua is carried by angels to heaven in a ball of fire. Finally, when Benedict himself dies, two monks - one at Monte Cassino, the other at a distance - have the same vision of a richly carpeted road, glittering with light, which stretches to the heavens, on which Benedict walks in majesty. The association between the firmament and the heavenly kingdom is suggested from the first time it is mentioned, in Chapter XXXIII, when Gregory explains that the table conversation is ' de coelestis vitae gaudiis', 'about the joy of the heavenly life'. He immediately asserts that ' vero erat coeli serenitas', 'indeed the sky was clear', and so connects 'heavenly matters', spiritual realities with the blue sky. In Chapter XXV Gregory further explains to Deacon Peter that the vision Benedict has of the world's assumption into heaven indicates not that the world grew small, but that the enlightened spirit is enlarged and can therefore contain the world. This explanation of Gregory in the later chapter elaborates on his didacticism in the story of Benedict and Scholastica. It is indeed a story of spiritual relationship. The prayer of Scholastica is answered because 'Deus charitas est ', 'God is love', and because Scholastica ' amplius amavit', 'loved more'. Love allows the synchronicity between the prayer of Scholastica and the storm which effects the answers to her prayer. She, like Magdalene in Luke's Gospel, is granted her request because she loves more. Scholastica at once desired ( cupiebat) and prevails ( valuit) ' in eodem tempore', because in that point in human time where love as desire and love as act are one in God, the person is open to eternal life. The regularity of the monastic hours, which impels Benedict to say, quite reasonably, that it is time to go, yields to a holy desire which creates its own time for an exchange of thoughts about the secrets of the spiritual life. The unity of earth and heaven, desire and act, time and eternaity, is complete in Chapter XXXIV where Benedict sees Scholastica's soul, 'in columba specie coeli secreta penetrare ', 'in the likeness of a dove penetrate the depths of the heavens'. In conclusion this seeming scrap of information about the life of Scholastica can serve as a paradigm in which what one wishes is allowed, because of the love in the wish; voloand valeoare reconciled. In the same love, heaven conspires against the brother who would chose the law over his sister's loving request, in a way that unites brother and sister, woman and man, in a night long conversation about the interior life. Man and woman are reconciled in God, heaven and earth are so reconciled, because Deus charitas est. e miraculo Scholasticas sororis eius . Caput XXXIII. Gregorius : Quisnam erit, Petre, in hac cita Paulo sublimior, qui de carnis suae stimulo ter Dominus rogavit, & tamen quod voluit obtinere non valuit? Ex qua re necesse est, ut tibi de venerabili patri Benedicto narrem: quia fuit quiddam quod voluit, sed non valuit implere. Soror namquam eius, Scholastica nomine, omnipotenti Domino ab ipso infantiae tempore dedicata, ad eum semel per annum venire consueverat. Ad quam vir Dei non longe extra januam in possessione monasterii descendebat. Quadam vero die venit ex more, atque ad eam cum discipulis venerabilis eius descendit frater: qui totum diem in Dei laudibus sacrisque colloquiis ducentres, incumbentibus jam noctis tenebris simul acceperunt cibos. Cumque adhuc ad mensam sederent, et inter sacra colloquia tardior se hora protraheret, eadem santimonialis femina soror eius eum rogavit, dicens: quaeso te ne ista nocte me deseras, ut usque mane de coelestis vitae gaudiis loquamur. Cur ille respondit: Quid est quod loqueris, soror? Manere extra cellam nullatenus possum. Tanta vero erat coeli serenitas, ut nulla in aere nubes appareret. Sanctimoniales autem femina, cum verba fratris negantis audisset, insertas digitis manus super mensam posuit, et caput in manibus omnipotentem Dominum rogature declinavit. Cumque de mensa levaret caput, tanta coruscationis et tonitrui virtus, tantaque inundatio pulviae erupit, ut neque venerabilis Benedictus, neque fratres qui cum eo aderant, extra loci limen quo consederant, pedem movere potuissent. Sanctimonialis quippe femina capit in manibus declinans, lacrymarum fluvios in mensam suderat, per quas serenitatem aeris ad pluviam traxit. Nec paulo tardius post orationem inundatio illa secuta est, sed tanta fuit convenientia orationis et inundationis, ut de mensa caput jam cum tonitruo levaret: quatenus unum idemque esset momentum, et levare caput, et pluviam deponere. Tunc vir Dei inter coruscos et tonitruos atque ingentis pluviae inundationem videns se ad monasterium non posse remeare, coepit conqueri contristatus, dicens: Parcat tibi omnipotens Deus, soro; quid est quod fecisti? Cui illa respondit: Ecce te rogavit, et audiri me noluisti; rogavi Dominum meum, et audivit me. Modo ergo si potes, egredere, et me dimissa ad monasterium recede. Ipse autem exire extra tectum non valens, qui remanaere sponte noluit, in loco mansit invitus. Sicque factum est ut totam noctem pervigilem ducerant, atque per sacra spiritalis vitae colloquia sese vicaria relatione satiarent. Qua de re dixi eum voluisse aliquid, sed minime potuisse: quia si venerabilis viri mentem aspicimus, dubium non est quod eamdem serenitatem voluerit in qua descenderat permanere; sed contra hod quod voluit, in virtute omnipotentis Dei ex feminae pectore miraculum invenit. Nec mirum quod plus illo femina, quae diu fratrem videre cupiebat, in eodem tempora valuit: quia enim juxta Joannis vocem, Deus charitas est, justo valde judicio illa plus potuit, quae amplius amavit. Petrus . Fateor, multum placet quod dicis. This is a chapter from the E-Book: Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages JULIAN OF NORWICH, HER SHOWING OF LOVE AND ITS CONTEXTS ©1997-2017 JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY || JULIAN OF NORWICH || SHOWING OF LOVE || HER TEXTS || HER SELF || ABOUT HER TEXTS || BEFORE JULIAN || HER CONTEMPORARIES || AFTER JULIAN || JULIAN IN OUR TIME || ST BIRGITTA OF SWEDEN || WOMEN || EQUALLY IN GOD'S IMAGE || MIRROR OF SAINTS || BENEDICTINISM || THE CLOISTER || ITS SCRIPTORIUM || AMHERST MANUSCRIPT || PRAYER || CATALOGUE AND PORTFOLIO (HANDCRAFTS, BOOKS ) || BOOK REVIEWS || BIBLIOGRAPHY ||

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INTRODUCTION TO FEDERAL LEGISLATION Detailed information on the federal legislative process may be found on the website for the Parliament of Canada. An additional and highly recommended resource for information on the legislative process in Canada is Audrey O’Brien and Marc Bosc, House of Commons Procedure and Practice, 2nd ed. (2009) available in print (RESERVE section, call number KE4535 .C32 2009) and online. There are two primary categories of law: Statutory Law and Case Law. Statutory law consists of the statutes created by legislatures. Case law is the process whereby legal disputes are decided by judges. This chapter deals with statutory law and explains the process by which statutes come into force. Another chapter will take an in-depth look at the statutes themselves. THE LEGISLATIVE PROCESS There are two main types of bills: public and private. In general, a public bill is concerned with matters of public policy, while a private bill relates to matters of a particular interest to a person or a corporation. Because the legislative process of a private bill is somewhat different, it is discussed separately at the end of this chapter. Public bills are those that, if passed, affect public policy or amend a public Act. The majority of bills introduced by a cabinet member in the House of Commons are government public bills. They reflect government public policy, and passage of these bills has government priority. House of Commons public bills are numbered Bill C-1 to Bill C-200 for each session: Senate bills are numbered beginning with Bill S-1. Only a minister may introduce a bill for the appropriation of any part of the public revenue or for taxation. Such bills require additional procedures for passage in the House, as discussed below. Private members' public bills are introduced in Parliament by the member of Parliament responsible for the bill. Such bills originating in the House are numbered from C-201 to C-1000 in the order in which they are introduced, and are considered in the order established by a draw and as set forth in the Standing Orders, although this order may be altered by unanimous consent. If passed they become public acts; however, since these bills generally do not reflect government policy, they rarely get beyond first reading. Stages of a Bill - The Traditional Legislative Process Before a bill becomes law, it goes through several stages as detailed below: To introduce a public bill, a Member must give 48 hours' written notice, stating the title of the bill, and then, by motion, obtain leave to introduce the bill. This motion is automatically adopted without debate, amendment or question put. A private Member introducing a bill then will normally make a short speech explaining the purpose of his or her bill. Normally, a minister introducing a government bill does not speak at this time. Notice of introduction is not required in the Senate. The first reading of a bill in the House of Commons consists of the adoption of two motions: one is a motion for leave to introduce the bill, and the second is a motion that the bill be "read" a first time and that it be printed. These motions are purely formal in that there is no debate and the bill is not actually read aloud. Following the motions, the Speaker asks: "When shall the bill be read a second time?", to which the response is generally: "At the next sitting of the House." This formality allows the bill to be placed on the Order Paper for second reading. The bill is then printed overnight by the Queen's Printer for Canada under the authority of the Speaker of the House and distributed to members the next day. At that time it is also available to the public. In the Senate, no motion for first reading is required. A Senator simply presents the bill, stating its title. This presentation, together with the Clerk Assistant's announcement that the bill has been read a first time, constitutes the first reading of the bill. Second reading is the most important stage in the passage of a bill. It is then that the principle and object of the bill are debated and either accepted or rejected. This is frequently a lengthy process that begins with the sponsoring minister explaining the bill and ends when there are no more speakers on the bill, or when the sponsoring minister speaks for a second time on the bill. In the House of Commons, debate at this and other stages may be ended by a time allocation motion, which restricts the amount of time to be spent on the bill. In the House of Commons only, a motion of closure may also end debate. Three types of amendments may be proposed to the motion for second reading. The first is the six months' hoist: "That Bill [number and title] be not now read a second time but that it be read a second time this day six months hence". The second type is the reasoned amendment, which expresses specific reasons for opposing second reading. Finally, an amendment may be introduced to refer the subject-matter to a committee before the principle of the bill is approved. Such an amendment would read: "That the bill be not now read a second time but that the order be discharged, the bill withdrawn and the subject matter referred to the Standing Committee on...". No amendments may be made to the bill itself at this stage. After approval in principle on second reading, a bill is referred to a committee for detailed review. This is normally a legislative committee but can be, on occasion, the Committee of the Whole or a standing or special committee. Standing, special or legislative committees may receive briefs or hear witnesses, including the sponsoring minister, government officials, interest groups, and individuals. Each clause of the bill, its titles and its preamble (if there is one) are then considered, amended if necessary, and adopted by the committee. After consideration of a bill the committee orders that the bill be reported to the House. The committee reports its findings, including proposed amendments, to the chamber in which the bill is being considered. Further amendments may be, and often are, proposed by the sponsoring minister or by any other member of the House at the report stage, subject to a written notice of 24 hours. After the report stage amendments have been voted upon, the bill is ready for a third reading. In the House of Commons, third reading takes place at the next sitting of the House except that, with unanimous consent, it may be given immediately following the report stage. In the Senate, the third reading may take place immediately. If the bill is reported by the committee without amendments, and if none are proposed by members of the House at the report stage, third reading may take place immediately in the House of Commons, but must take place at a later date in the Senate. If several amendments are accepted at the report stage, the House may order that the bill be reprinted once more before third reading. The third and final reading allows for a review of the bill in its final form. Debate on third reading is generally shorter than that on second reading but is essentially a repetition of it. The basic principles governing the acceptability of amendments at third reading are that they be strictly relevant to the bill and do not contradict the principle of the bill as passed at second reading. In addition, an amendment may be proposed to refer the bill back to committee to be further amended in a specific area, or to reconsider a certain clause or clauses. Consideration by the Senate Once a bill has had three readings in one house, it is then sent to the other House to be read, debated, and possibly amended, in a process similar to that which occurred in the first house. If one House amends a bill passed by the other, the first House is asked to concur in the amendments. If the first House cannot concur, reasons must be sent in writing to the second House. If the second House insists on its amendments, a conference may be held between representatives from each house and an attempt made to resolve the conflict. If the conflict is not resolved, the matter is dropped. Royal Assent signifies approval by the Crown and is required for any bill to become law after passage through both houses. Although the Governor General in person may give Royal Assent to major pieces of legislation (on behalf of the Queen), Royal Assent is normally conferred by a Deputy of the Governor General, one of the judges of the Supreme Court of Canada. Immediately upon Royal Assent, the bill becomes an Act of Parliament and has the force of law unless it contains a provision that it, or some of its provisions, should come into force on a specific day or on a day to be fixed by proclamation. The concluding section of a statute normally deals with its coming into force. After a bill has received Royal Assent, it is assigned a statute chapter number (this has no relation to the bill number). Periodically, these new statutes are published throughout the year as issues of the Canada Gazette, Part III, prior to the publication of the annual bound volume of federal statutes for the calendar year. They are also posted on the Department of Justice's Laws website. Where the coming into force of an Act is on a day to be fixed by proclamation, the minister responsible requests the issuance of a proclamation by the Governor-in-Council. This is then sent to the Governor General for signature. Finally, it is published in the Canada Gazette. The process of private legislation as prescribed by the Standing Orders is somewhat different from public bills in that a private bill is introduced by means of a petition signed by the interested parties and presented in the House by a member who has agreed to sponsor it. "Parliamentary agents" are authorized to promote private bills and find sponsors. Members are forbidden to act as parliamentary agents or to accept payment for presenting bills. The sponsor must deposit a printed copy of the bill with the Clerk of the House by the first day of the session. After approval of the petition, private bills are tabled, read a first time, printed, and ordered for second reading. As in the case of a public bill, debate at the second reading is on the general principle and expediency of the bill. Notice of private bills must be posted in the lobbies of the Parliament buildings before consideration in a committee, but the procedures for hearing witnesses and proposing amendments in committee are otherwise virtually identical for public and private bills. However, when an amendment that might harm the parties concerned is moved to a private bill, adequate notice must be given, and both the promoters of the bill and those opposed to it may be represented by counsel. The committee must report to the House on all bills referred to it. Consideration of the report by the House is the same for private and public bills, as are the rules governing third reading. Any further amendments adopted by the Senate are referred to the committee that considered the bill initially. If accepted, the amendments are read in the House a second time and, once agreed to, are returned to the Senate with a message informing that chamber accordingly. If the committee reports unfavourably, the House may continue to insist on its own amendments in its message to the other chamber. If an impasse occurs, a conference between the two chambers may be requested. Status of Current Bills It is crucial to be able to determine the various stages of a bill. Obviously, bills that have received third reading and Royal Assent may have the force of law even though they may not yet be published in the annual volume of statutes. They should, however, be available on the Department of Justice's Laws website within a short time of receiving Royal Assent. The Law Library and Stauffer library have access to various versions of bills, either in print or online. If you are unsure of how to find a bill, please ask a reference librarian for assistance. The full text of federal bills for current and some previous sessions are accessible through the Parliament of Canada's LEGISinfo (2001-). Repeal of Acts Not Declared In Force Within 10 Years Under the Statutes Repeal Act, SC 2008, c 20 (in force since June 18, 2010), any Act or part of an Act that has not been declared in force within ten years of receiving royal assent will be repealed unless either House adopts a resolution that it not be repealed. STATUTES OF CANADA (SC) Statutes are officially published in annual volumes. Each volume is divided into: - Public General Acts: acts which apply to all of Canada - Local and Private Acts: a local act is restricted to a limited area; a private act is restricted to a limited number of individuals or bodies. These are not consolidated in the Revised Statutes of Canada. Revised Statutes of Canada 1985 (RSC 1985) Periodically, the Public General Acts are consolidated into the Revised Statutes of Canada. The most current consolidation is the Revised Statutes of Canada 1985. In practical terms, this consolidates all public statutes still in force as of December 12, 1988. To do this, the Statute Revision Commission took those statutes still in force from the last Revised Statutes (1970), those amendments from 1970-1984, and any new statutes from 1970-1984 and consolidated them into the RSC 1985. The new revision includes a table showing the history and disposal of the acts in the previous revision and the acts in the sessional volumes published in the years between the two revisions. The revision only repeals those acts specifically mentioned in the table and no new laws are added. Certain acts are not consolidated. Once proclaimed, the revision becomes the definitive version of the statutes, subject to any changes made during subsequent sessions of Parliament. The Revised Statutes of Canada 1985 is composed of the following: The main volumes consolidate all public statutes in force to December 31, 1984. Since the RSC 1985 was not proclaimed in force until December 12th, 1988, statutes in the 1985, 1986, 1987 annual volumes, and the 1988 Canada Gazette Part III, had to be reprinted to conform to the new RSC 1985 section numbering. These statutes are reprinted in the First Supplement (1985 acts and 12 pre-1985 acts that were not in force on December 31, 1984); the Second Supplement (1986 Acts); the Third Supplement (1987 acts); and the Fourth Supplement (1988 acts). A Fifth Supplement, comprising the Income Tax Act and the Income Tax Application Rules, was added later. The Appendices volume contains the History and Disposal of Acts tables (to trace the history of acts from RSC 1970 to 1984) and constitutional documents of relevance to Canada. The latter includes 47 documents including the Canada Act 1982, the Constitutional Acts 1867 to 1982, as well as the acts bringing each province into Confederation. At the time of consolidation, the Canadian Law Information Council produced a subject index to the RSC 1985. This was the original index and is now out of date, although the Law Library maintains copies of the 2d edition shelved with the RSC 1985. Copies of statutes are available from the Department of Justice's Laws site. These are now considered official copies (see the Legislation Revision and Consolidation Act, RSC 1985, c S-20, s 31). INTRODUCTION TO ONTARIO LEGISLATION The passage and publication of Ontario statutes and regulations is substantially similar to federal legislation. Detailed information can be found on the website for the Ontario Legislative Assembly. The following concentrates on the specific differences. Public government bills are identified by the heading "Government Bill" on the title page of the bill. Public private members' bills are identified by the heading "Private Member's Bill" on the title page of the bill. Private bills, "petitioned" or solicited by the parties who are interested in promoting it, are passed as Private Acts and published in a separate section in the annual statute volume. They are assigned chapter numbers beginning with the prefix "Pr". They do not get consolidated in the Revised Statutes. The Legislation Act, 2006, SO 2006, c 21, Schedule F, s 91(1), states that private acts do not affect the rights of any person except those specifically mentioned. Ontario's e-laws provides a Table of Private Statutes that lists private acts passed since 1867 with an overview of their legislative history. A Table of Private Acts passed from 1867 to December 31, 1990 is printed in the RSO 1990 Appendix Volume. A Cumulative Supplement to the Table of Private Acts is published in the most recent bound sessional volume of statutes. Ontario Legislative Process The introduction and passage of a bill through the Ontario Legislative Assembly is similar to the passage of a bill through the federal Parliament. The most obvious difference is that provinces have only one legislature. Status of Current Bills Ontario bills are published at first reading, after amendment by committee, and upon individual Royal Assent. You can find out the status of a current bill on the Status of Legislation section of the Ontario Legislative Assembly's website. Bills that have received Royal Assent are available in Canada Law Book's Current Bills Service, shelved with the Ontario statutory material. Various versions of bills are also available in the Government Documents Library (MADGIC) in Stauffer library. The full text of recent Ontario bills are available on the Legislative Assembly of Ontario's website Bills section (1995-). Selected historical bills are available on the Canadian Libraries section of the Internet Archive - searching for "Ontario Bills" will bring up a list of all Ontario bills that have been digitized. Coming Into Force Even though it has Royal Assent, a Ontario act may not necessarily be in force. The concluding section of a statute normally deals with its commencement. Certain sections of the act may be brought into force in different ways and at different times. All or part of the statute may be brought into force by a combination of the following methods: - as soon as it received Royal Assent (the date listed after the long title); - on the date specified in the act; or - upon a day to be named by proclamation of the Lieutenant-Govenor, as published in the Ontario Gazette. - If the act is silent, the Legislation Act, 2006, SO 2006, c 21, Schedule F, s 8(1), provides that the statute comes into force on the day it receives Royal Assent. STATUTES OF ONTARIO (SO) Statutes that received Royal Assent during the year are officially published by chapter number in an annual volume of statutes. Each annual volume is divided into: Part I - Public Acts Part II- Private Acts The latter are published only in the annual volumes and are not consolidated in the Revised Statutes of Ontario. Each annual volume also contains a Table of Public Statutes, a Table of Proclamations, a Table of Private Acts, and a Table of Regulations. Revised Statutes of Ontario (RSO) Periodically, the Public Acts are consolidated into the Revised Statutes of Ontario. A special Statutes Revision Act is passed prior to each revision. The Statutes Revision Act, 1989, SO 1989, c 81, for example, appointed commissioners to consolidate and revise public general statutes. The commissioners may omit any enactment that is not of general application or is obsolete, alter the numbering and arrangement of any act, alter language and punctuation to obtain a uniform mode of expression, or make such amendments as are necessary to bring out more clearly what is deemed to be the intention of the legislature or to reconcile seemingly inconsistent enactments or to correct clerical, grammatical or typographical errors. The commissioners print the acts and their amendments in the form in which they are then in force and omit any acts or parts of acts that have been repealed or have ceased to be in force. Because acts are included at the discretion of the commissioners, the new revision includes a table showing the history and disposal of the acts in the previous revision and the acts in the sessional volumes published in the years between the two revisions. The revision only repeals those acts specifically mentioned in the table, and no new laws are added. The RSOs are generally brought into force by proclamation. Once proclaimed, the revision becomes the definitive version of the statutes, subject to any changes made during the subsequent sessions of the Legislative Assembly. Revised Statutes normally change section numbering. The previous citation for each section of an act is given at the end of the section so that the legislative history of each section can be traced. For example, the Interpretation Act, RSO 1980, c 219 has at the end of s 1 the following citation: RSO 1970, c 225, s 1. This is the citation from which s 1 of the current version of the Interpretation Act is derived. In this way, it is possible to trace the legislative history of a section back in time. Revised Statutes of Ontario 1990 (RSO 1990) The Revised Statutes of Ontario 1990 were proclaimed into force on December 31, 1991 and are composed of: The main volumes consolidate all public statutes in force enacted prior to January 1, 1991. The Appendices volume contains the History and Disposal of Acts tables (to trace the history of acts from RSO 1980 to 1990) and Constitutional Documents of relevance to Ontario. The Index volume contains separate English and French indexes. Statutes of Ontario 1991 The RSO 1990 were proclaimed in force December 31, 1991. Since the 1991 statutes were drafted and passed before the RSO 1990 was published, the original text of this legislation does not reflect changes in numbering or wording which may have resulted from the new compilation. As a result, the Statutes of Ontario 1991 were issued in 2 volumes: contains the statutes in the form in which they were enacted by the Legislature. contains the same statutes but revised to correspond to the RSO 1990. The chapter numbers remain the same, but section numbers differ between the 2 volumes. Also, the statutes in Volume 1 are in English only, while those in Volume 2 are in both English and French. Copies of current statutes are available from the Government of Ontario's e-laws site. These copies are now considered official (see O Reg 413/08). Last Updated: 12 November 2013

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Odoacer (433-493 CE, reigned 476-493 CE) also known as Odovacar, Flavius Odoacer, and Flavius Odovacer, was the first king of Italy. His reign marked the end of the Roman Empire; he deposed the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, on 4 September 476 CE. He was a soldier in the Roman army who ascended through the ranks to general and was then chosen to rule after the mercenary general Orestes refused to grant land in Italy to his soldiers, and they proclaimed Odoacer as their leader. The Roman senate approved Odoacer's leadership and awarded him the honorary status of a patrician. He provided his soldiers with the land he had promised, ruled in accordance with the precepts of the Roman Empire, and governed Italy judiciously until he was defeated in battle and then assassinated by Theodoric the Great of the Ostrogoths (475-526 CE). Although some historians have regarded his reign as uneventful and claim he introduced no innovations, he was successful in maintaining order, culture, and the last vestiges of the civilization of the Roman Empire which, considering the time in which he reigned, was an impressive achievement. Early Life & Rise to Power Nothing is clearly known of Odoacer's early life. His ethnicity is generally regarded as Germanic, but who his parents were, how he was raised, or even where, is a matter of debate among historians. It is generally agreed among scholars, however, that he was the son of Edico the Hun, king of the Germanic Sciri tribe, and trusted advisor to Attila. It was Edico, who had been sent by Attila as an ambassador to Rome, who revealed to Attila the Roman plot to assassinate him and so foiled the plan. After Attila's death, and the dissolution of the Hun Empire, Odoacer is thought to have fought for his father before joining the Roman army, ascending through the ranks, and finally assuming power. While it seems clear enough that Odoacer was Edico's son, the problem historians argue over is `Which Edico?' The 6th century writer Jordanes claims that Odoacer's father was Edica of the Sciri tribe but in no way associates him with Edico of the Huns. Much of Jordanes' work has been questioned by modern scholarship, however, and most historians agree that Edico of the Huns was the father of Odoacer. Historian Hyun Jin Kim describes Odoacer as "Edico's famous son" and notes his military skill as comparable to that of the Huns (96). The historian Peter Heather agrees, writing: What's so exciting about Edeco is that he became king of the Sciri after Attila's death, even though he himself was not one. He probably owed his claim to the throne to having married a high-born Scirian lady, since his children, Odovacar and Onoulphous, are said to have had a Scirian mother. But Edeco himself is dubbed variously a Hun or a Thuringian (228). Still, there are other historians who dispute these claims and suggest that Edico the Hun was not the father of Odoacer and that his father's name was Edica, of the Sciri tribe, who had nothing to do with Edico. As the majority of scholarship sides with historians such as Hyun and Heather, however, Edico has been identified as Odoacer's father, who was married to a noble woman of the Sciri. Odoacer first appears in history in a minor role as a soldier called Odovacrius, fighting the Visigoths in 463 CE. He is also mentioned in the Life of Saint Severinus by Eugippius (5th century CE), where it is stated that he, with a band of followers, stopped by the saint's home to ask his blessing, and Severinus prophesied to Odoacer, "Go on to Italy - though now covered in mean hides, soon you will make rich gifts to many". While this prophecy proved to be true, it is unclear whether Eugippius wrote this anecdote before or after Odoacer had come to power. The story may be a later insertion into the life of the saint, written to lend him the gift of prophecy. However that may be, by the year 470 CE Odoacer was an officer in the dwindling Roman army stationed in Italy. Julius Nepos (430-480 CE) had been appointed emperor of the west by the eastern Byzantine emperor Leo I (401-474 CE). Nepos appointed a general named Orestes as head of the army against the wishes and advice of the Roman senate. The senate did not trust Orestes because he was not of patrician stock and had fought for the armies of Attila against Rome. He was also, they felt, far too popular with the troops he had come to lead. The historian Gibbon writes: These troops had been long accustomed to reverence the character and authority of Orestes, who affected their manners, conversed with them in their own language, and was intimately connected with their national chieftains by long habits of familiarity and friendship (547). As soon as Orestes was elevated to commander-in-chief of the army in 475 CE, he marched them against Nepos who fled into exile. The troops then encouraged Orestes to declare himself emperor, but he declined and instead had his teenage son Romulus Augustulus (c. 460-500 CE) declared emperor. For their service to Orestes in deposing Nepos, and to augment the back pay they felt they deserved, the soldiers requested that a third of the lands of Italy should be given to them as homesteads. The problem with this request was that there were already people living on those lands who would have had to be re-located, and many of them were Roman citizens. Gibbon writes: Orestes, with a spirit which, in another situation, might be entitled to our esteem, chose rather to encounter the rage of an armed multitude than to subscribe to the ruin of an innocent people. He rejected the audacious demand and his refusal was favourable to the ambition of Odoacer, a bold barbarian, who assured his fellow soldiers that, if they dared to associate under his command, they might soon extort the justice which had been denied to their dutiful petitions (547). The soldiers went over to Odoacer's camp, and Orestes fled to the city of Pavia and mounted a defense. Odoacer marched on the city and, when it seemed it would fall, Orestes escaped and re-formed an army at Piacenza. Odoacer pursued him there, defeated him in battle, and had him executed. He was then declared king of Italy on 23 August 476 CE. The remnants of the Roman army, however, refused to accept him, and a final engagement, known as the Battle of Ravenna, was fought on 2 September 476 CE from which Odoacer emerged victorious. Two days later, on 4 September 476 CE, Romulus Augustulus was deposed and the Roman Empire in the west was finished. He was sent away to Campania under a kind of house arrest with a fixed annual allowance and disappears from history. The Roman senate, which was still a functioning entity, approved of Odoacer and wrote to the emperor in the east (who, at this time, was Zeno) that they no longer felt a western emperor was necessary in Rome, and the empire could easily be ruled from Constantinople in the east and by a king in the west. Regarding this situation, historian Guy Halsall writes: Zeno's response was sharp. He reprimanded the Roman senate for having killed one emperor sent by the east (Anthemius) and exiled another (Julius Nepos) and urged them to accept Julius back. If Julius wished to bestow the patriciate upon Odoacer, that was for him to decide. Odoacer had no wish to see Julius return and so, rebuked by the imperial court and left with no other means of legitimation, he did what more than one military commander had done before in that situation: he declared himself king (281). Although he had already been declared king by his troops, and his position approved by the Roman senate, Odoacer's personal declaration was made as an acceptance of this honor and, also perhaps, to send the message that he felt himself worthy to be king on equal standing with any other monarch. This may have been especially directed toward Zeno in order to make clear that Odoacer intended to rule as he pleased in accordance with the precepts of the Western Empire and was not seeking Zeno's explicit approval. Though initially displeased with what appeared to him to be lawlessness, Zeno recognized that having a barbarian king in the west, instead of a co-emperor, would greatly increase his prestige as sole ruler of the Roman Empire and so approved Odoacer's reign (no doubt with the thought in mind that he could always find a way to rid himself of Odoacer later). Odoacer, at around the age of 42, was now the most powerful man in Italy. Throughout his reign he is thought to have called himself "King of Italy" only once in correspondence and was referred to by his subjects as simply Dominus Noster ("our lord") and by others as king of whatever tribe or region was under discussion at that moment. His relationship with the troops, whom he had established with land and homes throughout the country, continued to be one of mutual respect and admiration, and he was noted for his humility. Even so, his first act as king was to destroy those who might oppose him and establish himself as a monarch to be feared and obeyed. In October 476 CE he acquired Sicily through a treaty with the Vandals, and throughout 477 CE he consolidated his rule and strengthened the borders of the new Kingdom of Italy. When Julius Nepos was assassinated in his villa in Dalmatia in 480 CE, Odoacer marched to subdue the assassins, killed them, and then annexed Dalmatia (the modern-day eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea) into his kingdom. Although modern historians are rightly suspicious of Edward Gibbon's 18th century CE work (as Gibbon tends to take those sources which suit his view of history at face value and reject others, no matter how substantial, that contradict him), his evaluation of Odoacer's reign is accurate. Gibbon writes how Odoacer received his position from the Roman senate and how he enjoyed their continuous support throughout his reign. Instead of deviating from the model of Rome, Odoacer embraced it and conducted himself as a Roman ruler, even adopting the prefix "Flavius". Gibbon writes: The laws of the emperors were strictly enforced, and the civil administration of Italy was still exercised by the Praetorian prefect and his subordinate officers. Odoacer devolved on the Roman magistrates the odious and oppressive task of collecting public revenue; but he reserved for himself the merit of seasonable and popular indulgence. Like the rest of the barbarians, he had been instructed in the Arian heresy; but he revered the monastic and episcopal characters; and the silence of the catholics attests to the toleration which they enjoyed (549). That Odoacer, who was raised as an Arian, should allow Trinitarianism to be practiced throughout his kingdom without problems is a testament to the wisdom and tolerance of his reign. The Arian heresy was the belief that Jesus was a created being, not equal to God, and therefore Arians did not believe in the trinity. Constantine the Great had so hated the Arian heresy that he ordered all the Arian works burned. Troubles between Arian Christians and Trinitarian Christians (Catholics) had erupted into public disturbances in the past, as they would also later on. Odoacer's tolerance of Trinitarianism and his continuation of other practices and policies of Rome show his prudence in that, ultimately, he only ruled by the senate's approval and by their intercession on his behalf with Zeno in Constantinople. Theodoric & the Death of Odoacer The consent of the senate notwithstanding, it was ultimately Zeno who held the greatest power over Odoacer's rule and fate. In 487 CE, Odoacer invaded the Danube Valley (which was under his control) to curtail the power of the Rugii tribe who had been increasingly gaining influence there. He defeated the Rugii and took their king Feletheus and his wife Gisa as prisoners to Ravenna, where they were executed. Frederick, Feletheus' son, raised an army to win the kingdom back but was defeated in battle by Odoacer's brother Onoulphous. Frederick survived the battle and took refuge with the king of the Ostrogoths, Theodoric. Odoacer, no doubt, felt secure in his kingdom after the Rugian War, but it would provide Zeno with the justification he was looking for to depose the king of Italy. Since the only reason Odoacer could give for attacking the Rugii was their increasing influence (not a rebellion) Zeno could say that Odoacer was acting like a tyrant who needed to be removed and so justify military action against him. Zeno had agreed to the Roman senate's request only with the understanding that Odoacer was more or less a stand-in for Julius Nepos and that he would step aside should Nepos return. With Nepos dead, Odoacer's reign was uncontested, and his campaigns in Dalmatia troubled Zeno because he took them as evidence of Odoacer's growing power and independence from Rome. Further irritating Zeno was Odoacer's support of the general Illus, who had revolted against Zeno's rule and caused him multiple problems. The historian Herwig Wolfram comments on this, writing, "The precarious relations between Constantinople and the Italian kingdom deteriorated further when [Odoacer] prepared for an intervention in the East on the side of the anti-Zeno party" (278). After the Rugian War, Zeno saw his opportunity to rid himself of Odoacer and entered into a treaty with Theodoric of the Goths, which stated that "after the defeat of Odovacar, Theodoric, in return for his efforts was to rule Italy for the emperor until he arrived in person" (Wolfram, 279). Whether the initial suggestion to invade Italy and depose Odoacer came from Zeno or Theodoric is debated but most scholars believe it was Zeno who suggested it and the evidence concerning their relationship seems to confirm this. Theodoric had also been causing problems for Zeno. Raised and educated at the court in Constantinople, Theodoric understood how military might translated to political power. After Zeno had employed him and his Goths to defeat Illus, Theodoric wanted more power and, as Halsall relates, "the Goths threatened Constantinople and ravaged the Balkans but could not take the capital, whilst Zeno, secure behind the city's famous triple line of walls, was unlikely to drive the latter completely from his territories. A solution was required, agreeable to both parties, and found: for Theodoric's Ostrogoths to move to Italy and dispose of the "tyrant" Odoacer" (287). Theodoric marshalled his forces and marched on Italy and Zeno was rid of his problem with the Goths. Whether Odoacer killed Theodoric or Theodoric deposed Odoacer did not seem to matter much to Zeno; whichever one emerged from the war could be dealt with later. Theodoric ravaged the countryside and encountered his first resistance from the Gepid people at the Vuka River in 488 CE. It is unknown whether they were allied with Odoacer or simply protecting their lands from invasion, but they were quickly defeated and slaughtered by Theodoric's forces. Theodoric marched on and met Odoacer's forces in battle at the Isonzo Bridge 28 August 489 CE, where Odoacer was defeated. He retreated to Verona with Theodoric in pursuit, and they clashed again on 29 September 489 CE; Odoacer was again defeated. He then fled to Ravenna and prepared the city's defenses, while Theodoric continued his conquest of the country. Wolfram writes: Theodoric's march to Italy seemed destined for a fast and decisive victory. In Milan, which Theodoric captured after Verona, secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries welcomed him as the emperor's representative. Even Odovacar's commander-in-chief, Tufa, and large numbers of the defeated army joined the victor (281). Trusting Tufa's gesture of submission and allegiance, Theodoric sent him in command of his elite troops to Ravenna to capture Odoacer. Tufa had only been feigning loyalty to the conqueror, however, and betrayed the troops to Odoacer's soldiers; the elite force was destroyed and "Theodoric suffered his first serious defeat on Italian soil" (Wolfram, 281). Odoacer left Ravenna and took the battle to the enemy who repeatedly repelled him. Tufa met Frederick of the Rugii in battle in August of 491 CE in which both were killed. Hostilities continued until 25 February 493 CE at which time John, the bishop of Ravenna, brokered a treaty by which Odoacer and Theodoric would rule jointly. Theodoric rode into Ravenna 5 March 493 CE and, on 15 March, at a formal dinner held to celebrate the treaty, Odoacer was murdered by Theodoric who stabbed him to death. His last words were, "Where is God?" to which Theodoric replied, "This is what you have done to my people" in reference to Odoacer's alleged tyranny and his destruction of the Rugii tribe, a people related to Theodoric's Goths. Wolfram describes the aftermath of Odoacer's death: The deliberate and methodical nature of Theodoric's act is clearly revealed by the subsequent events: Odovacar was not allowed to receive a Christian burial and his wife Sunigilda was starved to death. Odovacar's brother Hunulf sought refuge in a church and was used as a target by Gothic archers...On the day of Odovacar's murder his followers and their families were attacked. Wherever the Goths could lay hands on them they met their deaths. In the course of the year 493 Theodoric had become the unchallenged master of Italy (284). Odoacer's reign was then largely eclipsed by that of Theodoric (who would come to be known as Theodoric the Great) and his accomplishments forgotten. Under Odoacer, however, the country was secured during an extremely chaotic time in its history. He guided the country through famine, defended it against foreign invasions, and enlarged it through military conquest. His last words, "Where is God?" have been interpreted by scholars for centuries as questioning the justice of his murder after leading such an illustrious and pious life. The historian Will Durant once wrote, "It is easier to explain Rome's fall than to account for her long survival" (670). A part of her survival, in so far as the culture she gave rise to, is due to Odoacer and his preservation of Roman civilization and values throughout his reign. About the Author published by Oxford University Press (04 March 2010)Price: $21.94 published by Palgrave Macmillan (15 August 2010)Price: $33.95 published by Kessinger Publishing, LLC (10 September 2010)Price: $18.36 published by University of California Press (01 May 1987)Currently unavailable - Durant, W, Caesar and Christ (Simon & Schuster, 1980). - Gibbon, E, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Everyman's Library, 1994). - Halsall, G, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376 - 568 (Cambridge University Press, 2008). - Heather, P, Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2012). - Hyun Jin Kim, The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2013). - Kelly, C, The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010). - Wolfram, H, History of the Goths (University of California Press, 1987). Cite This Work Chicago Style Citation 1. Joshua J. Mark, “Odoacer,” Ancient History Encyclopedia, last modified September 20, 2014, http://www.ancient.eu /Odoacer/.As Bibliography Entry: Joshua J. Mark. “Odoacer,” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Last modified September 20, 2014. http://www.ancient.eu /Odoacer/. 433 CE - 493 CELife of Odoacer. 463 CEOdoacer fights as solder in Roman army against Visigoths. 470 CEOdoacer is an officer in the Roman Army. 476 CEOdoacer defeats Orestes for control of the armies of Italy. 476 CE - 493 CEReign of Odoacer as King of Italy. 480 CEOdoacer invades Dalmatia. 487 CEOdoacer invades the Danube Valley, Rugii Wars. 488 CE - 493 CETheodoric the Goth's invasion of Italy and battles with Odoacer. 493 CEOdoacer is assassinated by Theodoric; Theodoric now becomes King of Italy.

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For about a century, economic inequality has been measured on a scale, from zero to one, known as the Gini index and named after an Italian statistician, Corrado Gini, who devised it in 1912, when he was twenty-eight and the chair of statistics at the University of Cagliari. If all the income in the world were earned by one person and everyone else earned nothing, the world would have a Gini index of one. If everyone in the world earned exactly the same income, the world would have a Gini index of zero. The United States Census Bureau has been using Gini’s measurement to calculate income inequality in America since 1947. Between 1947 and 1968, the U.S. Gini index dropped to .386, the lowest ever recorded. Then it began to climb. Income inequality is greater in the United States than in any other democracy in the developed world. Between 1975 and 1985, when the Gini index for U.S. households rose from .397 to .419, as calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Gini indices of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden, and Finland ranged roughly between .200 and .300, according to national data analyzed by Andrea Brandolini and Timothy Smeeding. But historical cross-country comparisons are difficult to make; the data are patchy, and different countries measure differently. The Luxembourg Income Study, begun in 1983, harmonizes data collected from more than forty countries on six continents. According to the L.I.S.’s adjusted data, the United States has regularly had the highest Gini index of any affluent democracy. In 2013, the U.S. Census Bureau reported a Gini index of .476. The evidence that income inequality in the United States has been growing for decades and is greater than in any other developed democracy is not much disputed. It is widely known and widely studied. Economic inequality has been an academic specialty at least since Gini first put chalk to chalkboard. In the nineteen-fifties, Simon Kuznets, who went on to win a Nobel Prize, used tax data to study the shares of income among groups, an approach that was further developed by the British economist Anthony Atkinson, beginning with his 1969 paper “On the Measurement of Inequality,” in the Journal of Economic Theory. Last year’s unexpected popular success of the English translation of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” drew the public’s attention to measurements of inequality, but Piketty’s work had long since reached American social scientists, especially through a 2003 paper that he published with the Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, in The Quarterly Journal of Economics. Believing that the Gini index underestimates inequality, Piketty and Saez favor Kuznets’s approach. (Atkinson, Piketty, Saez, and Facundo Alvaredo are also the creators of the World Top Incomes Database, which collects income-share data from more than twenty countries.) In “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998,” Piketty and Saez used tax data to calculate what percentage of income goes to the top one per cent and to the top ten per cent. In 1928, the top one per cent earned twenty-four per cent of all income; in 1944, they earned eleven per cent, a rate that began to rise in the nineteen-eighties. By 2012, according to Saez’s updated data, the top one per cent were earning twenty-three per cent of the nation’s income, almost the same ratio as in 1928, although it has since dropped slightly. Political scientists are nearly as likely to study economic inequality as economists are, though they’re less interested in how much inequality a market can bear than in how much a democracy can bear, and here the general thinking is that the United States is nearing its breaking point. In 2001, the American Political Science Association formed a Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy; a few years later, it concluded that growing economic inequality was threatening fundamental American political institutions. In 2009, Oxford University Press published both a seven-hundred-page “Handbook of Economic Inequality” and a collection of essays about the political consequences of economic inequality whose argument is its title: “The Unsustainable American State.” There’s a global version of this argument, too. “Inequality Matters,” a 2013 report by the United Nations, took the view—advanced by the economist Joseph Stiglitz in his book “The Price of Inequality”—that growing income inequality is responsible for all manner of political instability, as well as for the slowing of economic growth worldwide. Last year, when the Pew Research Center conducted a survey about which of five dangers people in forty-four countries consider to be the “greatest threat to the world,” many of the countries polled put religious and ethnic hatred at the top of their lists, but Americans and many Europeans chose inequality. What’s new about the chasm between the rich and the poor in the United States, then, isn’t that it’s growing or that scholars are studying it or that people are worried about it. What’s new is that American politicians of all spots and stripes are talking about it, if feebly: inequality this, inequality that. In January, at a forum sponsored by Freedom Partners (a free-market advocacy group with ties to the Koch brothers), the G.O.P. Presidential swains Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio battled over which of them disliked inequality more, agreeing only that its existence wasn’t their fault. “The top one per cent earn a higher share of our income, nationally, than any year since 1928,” Cruz said, drawing on the work of Saez and Piketty. Cruz went on, “I chuckle every time I hear Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton talk about income inequality, because it’s increased dramatically under their policies.” No doubt there has been a lot of talk. “Let’s close the loopholes that lead to inequality by allowing the top one per cent to avoid paying taxes on their accumulated wealth,” Obama said during his State of the Union address. Speaker of the House John Boehner countered that “the President’s policies have made income inequality worse.” The reason Democrats and Republicans are fighting over who’s to blame for growing economic inequality is that, aside from a certain amount of squabbling, it’s no longer possible to deny that it exists—a development that’s not to be sneezed at, given the state of the debate on climate change. That’s not to say the agreement runs deep; in fact, it couldn’t be shallower. The causes of income inequality are much disputed; so are its costs. And knowing the numbers doesn’t appear to be changing anyone’s mind about what, if anything, should be done about it. Robert Putnam’s new book, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis” (Simon & Schuster), is an attempt to set the statistics aside and, instead, tell a story. “Our Kids” begins with the story of the town where Putnam grew up, Port Clinton, Ohio. Putnam is a political scientist, but his argument is historical—it’s about change over time—and fuelled, in part, by nostalgia. “My hometown was, in the 1950s, a passable embodiment of the American Dream,” he writes, “a place that offered decent opportunity for all the kids in town, whatever their background.” Sixty years later, Putnam says, Port Clinton “is a split-screen American nightmare, a community in which kids from the wrong side of the tracks that bisect the town can barely imagine the future that awaits the kids from the right side of the tracks.” Inequality-wise, Port Clinton makes a reasonable Middletown. According to the American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, Port Clinton’s congressional district, Ohio’s ninth, has a Gini index of .467, which is somewhat lower than the A.C.S.’s estimate of the national average. But “Our Kids” isn’t a book about the Gini index. “Some of us learn from numbers, but more of us learn from stories,” according to an appendix that Putnam co-wrote with Jennifer M. Silva. Putnam, the author of “Bowling Alone,” is the director of the Saguaro Seminar for civic engagement at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; Silva, a sociologist, has been a postdoctoral fellow there. In her 2013 book “Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty” (Oxford), Silva reported the results of interviews she conducted with a hundred working-class adults in Lowell, Massachusetts and Richmond, Virginia, described her account of the structural inequalities that shape their lives as “a story of institutions—not individuals or their families,” and argued that those inequalities are the consequence of the past half century’s “massive effort to roll back social protections from the market.” For “Our Kids,” Silva visited Robert Putnam’s home town and interviewed young people and their parents. Putnam graduated from Port Clinton High School in 1959. The surviving members of his class are now in their mid-seventies. Putnam and Silva sent them questionnaires; seventy-five people returned them. Silva also spent two years interviewing more than a hundred young adults in nine other cities and counties across the nation. As Putnam and Silva note, Silva conducted nearly all of the interviews Putnam uses in his book. “Our Kids” is a heartfelt portrait of four generations: Putnam’s fellow 1959 graduates and their children, and the kids in Port Clinton and those nine other communities today and their parents. The book tells more or less the same story that the numbers tell; it’s just got people in it. Specifically, it’s got kids: the kids Putnam used to know, and, above all, the kids Silva interviewed. The book proceeds from the depressing assumption that presenting the harrowing lives of poor young people is the best way to get Americans to care about poverty. Putnam has changed the names of all his subjects and removed certain identifying details. He writes about them as characters. First, there’s Don. He went to Port Clinton High School with Putnam. His father worked two jobs: an eight-hour shift at Port Clinton Manufacturing, followed by seven and a half hours at a local canning plant. A minister in town helped Don apply to university. “I didn’t know I was poor until I went to college,” Don says. He graduated from college, became a minister, and married a high-school teacher; they had one child, who became a high-school librarian. Libby, another member of Putnam’s graduating class, was the sixth of ten children. Like Don’s parents, neither of Libby’s parents finished high school. Her father worked at Standard Products, a factory on Maple Street that made many different things out of rubber, from weather stripping to tank treads. Libby won a scholarship to the University of Toledo, but dropped out to get married and have kids. Twenty years later, after a divorce, she got a job as a clerk in a lumberyard, worked her way up to becoming a writer for a local newspaper, and eventually ran for countywide office and won. All but two of the members of Putnam’s graduating class were white. Putnam’s wistfulness toward his childhood home town is at times painful to read. The whiteness of Port Clinton in the nineteen-fifties was not mere happenstance but the consequence of discriminatory housing and employment practices. I glanced through the records of the Ohio chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., which included a branch in Port Clinton. The Ohio chapter’s report for 1957 chronicles, among other things, its failed attempt to gain passage of statewide Fair Housing legislation; describes how “cross burnings occurred in many cities in Ohio”; recounts instances of police brutality, including in Columbus, where a patrolman beat a woman “with the butt of his pistol all over her face and body”; and states that in Toledo, Columbus, “and in a number of other communities, the Association intervened in situations where violence flared up or was threatened when Negro families moved into formerly ‘all-white neighborhoods.’ ” Thurgood Marshall, the director of the N.A.A.C.P.’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, spoke in Ohio in 1958, after which a sympathetic Cleveland newspaper wrote that Marshall “will never be named to the Supreme Court.” In 1960, the Ohio N.A.A.C.P. launched a statewide voter-registration drive. One pamphlet asked, “Are you permitted to live wherever you please in any Ohio City?” Putnam acknowledges that there was a lot of racism in Port Clinton, but he suggests that, whatever hardships the two black kids in his class faced because they were black, the American dream was nevertheless theirs. This fails to convince. As one of those two kids, now grown, tells Putnam, “Your then was not my then, and your now isn’t even my now.” In any case, the world changed, and Port Clinton changed with it. “Most of the downtown shops of my youth stand empty and derelict,” Putnam writes. In the late nineteen-sixties, the heyday of the Great Society, when income inequality in the United States was as low as it has ever been, the same was probably true of Port Clinton. But in the nineteen-seventies the town’s manufacturing base collapsed. Standard Products laid off more than half of its workers. In 1993, the plant closed. Since then, unemployment has continued to rise and wages to fall. Between 1999 and 2013, the percentage of children in Port Clinton living in poverty rose from ten to forty. Silva found David hanging out in a park. His father, currently in prison, never had a steady job. David’s parents separated when he was a little boy. He bounced around, attending seven elementary schools. When he was thirteen, he was arrested for robbery. He graduated from high school only because he was given course credit for hours he’d worked at Big Boppers Diner (from which he was fired after graduation). In 2012, when David was eighteen, he got his girlfriend pregnant. “I’ll never get ahead,” he posted on his Facebook page last year, after his girlfriend left him. “I’m FUCKING DONE.” Wealthy newcomers began arriving in the nineteen-nineties. On the shores of Lake Erie, just a few miles past Port Clinton’s trailer parks, they built mansions and golf courses and gated communities. “Chelsea and her family live in a large white home with a wide porch overlooking the lake,” Putnam writes, introducing another of his younger characters. Chelsea was the president of her high school’s student body and editor of the yearbook. Her mother, Wendy, works part time; her father, Dick, is a businessman. In the basement of their house, Wendy and Dick had a “1950s-style diner” built so that Chelsea and her brother would have a place to hang out with their friends. When Chelsea’s brother got a bad grade in school, Wendy went all the way to the school board to get it changed. Chelsea and her brother are now in college. Wendy does not appear to believe in welfare. “You have to work if you want to get rich,” she says. “If my kids are going to be successful, I don’t think they should have to pay other people who are sitting around doing nothing for their success.” Aside from the anecdotes, the bulk of “Our Kids” is an omnibus of social-science scholarship. The book’s chief and authoritative contribution is its careful presentation for a popular audience of important work on the erosion, in the past half century, of so many forms of social, economic, and political support for families, schools, and communities—with consequences that amount to what Silva and others have called the “privatization of risk.” The social-science literature includes a complicated debate about the relationship between inequality of outcome (differences of income and of wealth) and inequality of opportunity (differences in education and employment). To most readers, these issues are more familiar as a political disagreement. In American politics, Democrats are more likely to talk about both kinds of inequality, while Republicans tend to confine their concern to inequality of opportunity. According to Putnam, “All sides in this debate agree on one thing, however: as income inequality expands, kids from more privileged backgrounds start and probably finish further and further ahead of their less privileged peers, even if the rate of socioeconomic mobility is unchanged.” He also takes the position, again relying on a considerable body of scholarship, that, “quite apart from the danger that the opportunity gap poses to American prosperity, it also undermines our democracy.” Chelsea is interested in politics. David has never voted. The American dream is in crisis, Putnam argues, because Americans used to care about other people’s kids and now they only care about their own kids. But, he writes, “America’s poor kids do belong to us and we to them. They are our kids.” This is a lot like his argument in “Bowling Alone.” In high school in Port Clinton, Putnam was in a bowling league; he regards bowling leagues as a marker of community and civic engagement; bowling leagues are in decline; hence, Americans don’t take care of one another anymore. “Bowling Alone” and “Our Kids” also have the same homey just-folksiness. And they have the same shortcomings. If you don’t miss bowling leagues or all-white suburbs where women wear aprons—if Putnam’s then was not your then and his now isn’t your now—his well-intentioned “we” can be remarkably grating. In story form, the argument of “Our Kids” is that while Wendy and Dick were building a fifties-style diner for their kids in the basement of their lakefront mansion, grade-grubbing with their son’s teachers, and glue-gunning the decorations for their daughter’s prom, every decent place to hang out in Port Clinton closed its doors, David was fired from his job at Big Boppers, and he got his girlfriend pregnant because, by the time David and Chelsea were born, in the nineteen-nineties, not only was Standard Products out of business but gone, too, was the sense of civic obligation and commonweal—everyone caring about everyone else’s kids—that had made it possible for Don and Libby to climb out of poverty in the nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-sixties. “Nobody gave a shit,” David says. And he’s not wrong. “Our Kids” is a passionate, urgent book. It also has a sad helplessness. Putnam tells a story teeming with characters and full of misery but without a single villain. This is deliberate. “This is a book without upper-class villains,” he insists in the book’s final chapter. In January, Putnam tweeted, “My new book ‘Our Kids’ shows a growing gap between rich kids and poor kids. We’ll work with all sides on solutions.” It’s easier to work with all sides if no side is to blame. But Putnam’s eagerness to influence Congress has narrative consequences. If you’re going to tell a story about bad things happening to good people, you’ve got to offer an explanation, and, when you make your arguments through characters, your reader will expect that explanation in the form of characters. I feel bad for Chelsea. But I feel worse for David. Am I supposed to hate Wendy? Some people make arguments by telling stories; other people make arguments by counting things. Charles Dickens was a story man. In “Hard Times” (1854), a novel written when statistics was on the rise, Dickens’s villain, Thomas Gradgrind, was a numbers man, “a man of facts and calculations,” who named one of his sons Adam Smith and another Malthus. “With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, Sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.” Numbers men are remote and cold of heart, Dickens thought. But, of course, the appeal of numbers lies in their remoteness and coldness. Numbers depersonalize; that remains one of their chief claims to authority, and to a different explanatory force than can be found in, say, a poem. “Quantification is a technology of distance,” as the historian of science Theodore Porter has pointed out. “Reliance on numbers and quantitative manipulation minimizes the need for intimate knowledge and personal trust.” It’s difficult to understand something like income inequality across large populations and to communicate your understanding of it across vast distances without counting. But quantification’s lack of intimacy is also its weakness; it represents not only a gain but also a loss of knowledge. Corrado Gini, he of the Gini index, was a numbers man, at a time when statistics had become a modern science. In 1925, four years after Gini wrote “Measurement of Inequality of Incomes,” he signed the “Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals” (he was the only statistician to do so) and was soon running the Presidential Commission for the Study of Constitutional Reforms. As Jean-Guy Prévost reported in “A Total Science: Statistics in Liberal and Fascist Italy” (2009), Gini’s work was so closely tied to the Fascist state that, in 1944, after the regime fell, he was tried for being an apologist for Fascism. In the shadow of his trial, he joined the Movimento Unionista Italiano, a political party whose objective was to annex Italy to the United States. “This would solve all of Italy’s problems,” the movement’s founder, Santi Paladino, told a reporter for Time. (“Paladino has never visited the U.S., though his wife Francesca lived 24 years in The Bronx,” the magazine noted.) But, for Gini, the movement’s purpose was to provide him with some anti-Fascist credentials. The story of Gini is a good illustration of the problem with stories, which is that they personalize (which is also their power). His support for Fascism doesn’t mean that the Gini index isn’t valuable. It is valuable. The life of Corrado Gini can’t be used to undermine all of statistical science. Still, if you wanted to write an indictment of statistics as an instrument of authoritarian states, and if you had a great deal of other evidence to support that indictment—including other stories and, ideally, numbers—why yes, Gini would be an excellent character to introduce in Chapter 1. Because stories contain one kind of truth and numbers another, many writers mix and match, telling representative stories and backing them up with aggregate data. Putnam, though, doesn’t so much mix and match as split the difference. He tells stories about kids but presents data about the economy. That’s why “Our Kids” has heaps of victims but not a single villain. “We encounter Elijah in a dingy shopping mall on the north side of Atlanta, during his lunch break from a job packing groceries,” Putnam writes. “Elijah is thin and small in stature, perhaps five foot seven, and wears baggy clothes that bulk his frame: jeans belted low around his upper thighs, a pair of Jordans on his feet.” As for why Elijah is packing groceries, the book offers not characters—there are no interviews, for instance, with members of the Georgia legislature or the heads of national corporations whose businesses have left Atlanta—but numbers, citing statistics about the city (“Large swaths of southern and western Atlanta itself are over 95 percent black, with child poverty rates ranging from 50 percent to 80 percent”) and providing a series of charts reporting the results of studies about things like class differences in parenting styles and in the frequency of the family dinner. In “The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power” (Little, Brown), Steve Fraser fumes that what’s gone wrong with political discourse in America is that the left isn’t willing to blame anyone for anything anymore. There used to be battle cries. No more kings! Down with fat cats! Damn the moneycrats! Like Putnam’s argument, Fraser’s is both historical and nostalgic. Fraser longs for the passion and force with which Americans of earlier generations attacked aggregated power. Think of the way Frederick Douglass wrote about slavery, Ida B. Wells wrote about lynching, Ida Tarbell wrote about Standard Oil, Upton Sinclair wrote about the meatpacking industry, and Louis Brandeis wrote about the money trust. These people weren’t squeamish about villains. To chronicle the rise of acquiescence, Fraser examines two differences between the long nineteenth century and today. “The first Gilded Age, despite its glaring inequities, was accompanied by a gradual rise in the standard of living; the second by a gradual erosion,” he writes. In the first Gilded Age, everyone from reporters to politicians apparently felt comfortable painting plutocrats as villains; in the second, this is, somehow, forbidden. “If the first Gilded Age was full of sound and fury,” he writes, “the second seemed to take place in a padded cell.” Fraser argues that while Progressive Era muckrakers ended the first Gilded Age by drawing on an age-old tradition of dissent to criticize prevailing economic, social, and political arrangements, today’s left doesn’t engage in dissent; it engages in consent, urging solutions that align with neoliberalism, technological determinism, and global capitalism: “Environmental despoiling arouses righteous eating; cultural decay inspires charter schools; rebellion against work becomes work as a form of rebellion; old-form anticlericalism morphs into the piety of the secular; the break with convention ends up as the politics of style; the cri de coeur against alienation surrenders to the triumph of the solitary; the marriage of political and cultural radicalism ends in divorce.” Why not blame the financial industry? Why not blame the Congress that deregulated it? Why not blame the system itself? Because, Fraser argues, the left has been cowed into silence on the main subject at hand: “What we could not do, what was not even speakable, was to tamper with the basic institutions of financial capitalism.” Putnam closes “Our Kids” with a chapter called “What Is to Be Done?” Tampering with the basic institutions of financial capitalism is not on his to-do list. The chapter includes one table, one chart, many stories, and this statement: “The absence of personal villains in our stories does not mean that no one is at fault.” At fault are “social policies that reflect collective decisions,” and, “insofar as we have some responsibility for those collective decisions, we are implicated by our failure to address removable barriers to others’ success.” What can Putnam’s “we” do? He proposes changes in four realms: family structure, parenting, school, and community. His policy recommendations include expanding the earned-income tax credit and protecting existing anti-poverty programs; implementing more generous parental leaves, better child-care programs, and state-funded preschool; equalizing the funding of public schools, providing more community-based neighborhood schools, and increasing support for vocational high-school programs and for community colleges; ending pay-to-play extracurricular activities in public schools and developing mentorship programs that tie schools to communities and community organizations. All of these ideas are admirable, many are excellent, none are new, and, at least at the federal level, few are achievable. The American political imagination has become as narrow as the gap between rich and poor is wide. “Inequality: What Can Be Done?,” by Anthony Atkinson, will be published this spring (Harvard). Atkinson is a renowned expert on the measurement of economic inequality, but in “Inequality” he hides his math. “There are a number of graphs, and a small number of tables,” he writes, by way of apology, and he paraphrases Stephen Hawking: “Every equation halves the number of readers.” Much of the book is a discussion of specific proposals. Atkinson believes that solutions like Putnam’s, which focus on inequality of opportunity, mainly through reforms having to do with public education, are inadequate. Atkinson thinks that the division between inequality of outcome and inequality of opportunity is largely false. He believes that tackling inequality of outcome is a very good way to tackle inequality of opportunity. (If you help a grownup get a job, her kids will have a better chance of climbing out of poverty, too.) Above all, he disagrees with the widespread assumption that technological progress and globalization are responsible for growing inequality. That assumption, he argues, is wrong and also dangerous, because it encourages the belief that growing inequality is inevitable. Atkinson points out that neither globalization nor rapid technological advance is new and there are, therefore, lessons to be learned from history. Those lessons do not involve nostalgia. (Atkinson is actually an optimistic sort, and he spends time appreciating rising standards of living, worldwide.) One of those lessons is that globalizing economies aren’t like hurricanes or other acts of God or nature. Instead, they’re governed by laws regulating things like unions and trusts and banks and wages and taxes; laws are passed by legislators; in democracies, legislators are elected. So, too, new technologies don’t simply fall out of the sky, like meteors or little miracles. “The direction of technological change is the product of decisions by firms, researchers, and governments,” Atkinson writes. The iPhone exists, as Mariana Mazzucato demonstrated in her 2013 book “The Entrepreneurial State,” because various branches of the U.S. government provided research assistance that resulted in several key technological developments, including G.P.S., multi-touch screens, L.C.D. displays, lithium-ion batteries, and cellular networks. Atkinson isn’t interested in stories the way Putnam is interested in stories. And he isn’t interested in villains the way Fraser is interested in villains. But he is interested in responsible parties, and in demanding government action. “It is not enough to say that rising inequality is due to technological forces outside our control,” Atkinson writes. “The government can influence the path taken.” In “Inequality: What Can Be Done?,” he offers fifteen proposals, from the familiar (unemployment programs, national savings bonds, and a more progressive tax structure) to the novel (a governmental role in the direction of technological development, a capital endowment or “minimum inheritance” paid to everyone on reaching adulthood), along with five “ideas to pursue,” which is where things get Piketty (a global tax on wealth, a minimum tax on corporations). In Port Clinton, Ohio, a barbed-wire fence surrounds the abandoned Standard Products factory; the E.P.A. has posted signs warning that the site is hazardous. There’s no work there anymore, only poison. Robert Putnam finds that heartbreaking. Steve Fraser wishes people were angrier about it. Anthony Atkinson thinks something can be done. Atkinson’s specific policy recommendations are for the United Kingdom. In the United States, most of his proposals are nonstarters, no matter how many times you hear the word “inequality” on “Meet the Press” this year. It might be that people have been studying inequality in all the wrong places. A few years ago, two scholars of comparative politics, Alfred Stepan, at Columbia, and the late Juan J. Linz—numbers men—tried to figure out why the United States has for so long had much greater income inequality than any other developed democracy. Because this disparity has been more or less constant, the question doesn’t lend itself very well to historical analysis. Nor is it easily subject to the distortions of nostalgia. But it does lend itself very well to comparative analysis. Stepan and Linz identified twenty-three long-standing democracies with advanced economies. Then they counted the number of veto players in each of those twenty-three governments. (A veto player is a person or body that can block a policy decision. Stepan and Linz explain, “For example, in the United States, the Senate and the House of Representatives are veto players because without their consent, no bill can become a law.”) More than half of the twenty-three countries Stepan and Linz studied have only one veto player; most of these countries have unicameral parliaments. A few countries have two veto players; Switzerland and Australia have three. Only the United States has four. Then they made a chart, comparing Gini indices with veto-player numbers: the more veto players in a government, the greater the nation’s economic inequality. This is only a correlation, of course, and cross-country economic comparisons are fraught, but it’s interesting. Then they observed something more. Their twenty-three democracies included eight federal governments with both upper and lower legislative bodies. Using the number of seats and the size of the population to calculate malapportionment, they assigned a “Gini Index of Inequality of Representation” to those eight upper houses, and found that the United States had the highest score: it has the most malapportioned and the least representative upper house. These scores, too, correlated with the countries’ Gini scores for income inequality: the less representative the upper body of a national legislature, the greater the gap between the rich and the poor. The growth of inequality isn’t inevitable. But, insofar as Americans have been unable to adopt measures to reduce it, the numbers might seem to suggest that the problem doesn’t lie with how Americans treat one another’s kids, as lousy as that is. It lies with Congress. ♦

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8/16/2006 08:46:00 AM Psycho-analysis of Sesame Street Taken from http://www.psychology.sbc.edu/bellan.htm The children’s television program Sesame Street has been a staple of households worldwide for nearly thirty years. It was originally conceived as a way to bring educational programming to disadvantaged households, by making it apart of regular public broadcast television. The creators made a lovable cast of muppet characters they believed children would relate to, and learn from. Over time these characters have evolved to better fit these goals, but also have characteristics that are often overlooked. When examined from a psychological perspective, the characters of Sesame Street have many disturbing and serious disorders. Big Bird is known as "The Friendliest Fowl on Sesame Street," and is described by the creators of the show as a very curious six-year old creature, who makes friends easily, and shares his nest with Radar, his teddy bear (The Children’s Television Network Interactive Site). Big Bird sees his world through rose colored glasses and likes to be a part of everything and everyone’s lives. Big Bird has the most serious and, as leader of Sesame Street, the disorder that has actually come to be a part of the rest of the cast, crew and guests. Schizophrenia, of the undifferentiated type, is a disturbance that lasts for at least six months and includes at least one month of active-phase symptoms (DSM-IV, 273). In the case of Big Bird, his delusions and hallucinations have lasted for twenty-nine television seasons. The essential features of Schizophrenia are a mixture of characteristic signs and symptoms (both positive and negative). A diagnosis must include two or more of the following: 1. Delusions (A large part of Big Bird’s affliction) 2. Hallucinations (The other manifestation for Big Bird) 3. Disorganized speech 4. Grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior 5. Negative symptoms These signs, or symptoms, are associated with marked social or occupational dysfunction. For Big Bird the disruption in his social behavior has decreased over time with the gradual acceptance of his main hallucination by the populace of Sesame Street. The disturbance is not accounted for by other disorders, and it is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance or a general medical condition (DSM-IV, 274-285). (It is assumed by this researcher that Big Bird and the rest of the Sesame Street cast have not been partaking in illicit and hallucinatory drug use for the last twenty-nine years). As defined in the DSM-IV, delusions are erroneous beliefs that usually involve a misinterpretation of perceptions or experiences (DSM-IV, 275). The original delusions of Big Bird centered on the idea that he/she (the gender issue will be discussed later; Big Bird will subsequently be referred to as he) thought he was being ridiculed by others for speaking to his hallucination. Hallucinations may occur in any of the five senses, but auditory hallucinations are the most common form for schizophrenia (DSM-IV, 276). For Big Bird, the hallucination has taken on characteristics of all five senses. Snuffaluphagus, thought by some to be the less dangerous imaginary friend type, is actually a schizophrenic hallucination. He did not exist outside of Big Bird’s brain for the majority of his time on Sesame Street. Schizophrenia involves dysfunction in one or more major areas of functioning such as inter-personal relationships. Big Bird responded in this dysfunctional way when his hallucination became his best friend, and also when he could not relate to others because they insisted that they could not see Snuffaluphagus. Development may also be impaired through schizophrenia, which may explain why Big Bird has never progressed beyond his six-year-old mentality. Perhaps the most disturbing part of Big Bird’s power over Sesame Street is that he has made Snuffaluphagus real to others. Shared Psychotic Disorder (Folie a Deux) involves the transference of a delusion (in this case a large brown creature) from one, who already has a psychotic disorder (the primary case), to others who are involved in a close relationship with the delusional person (DSM-IV, 305). Usually the primary case in Shared Psychotic Disorder is dominant in the relationship and gradually imposes the delusional system on the more passive and initially healthy second person(s). Big Bird is the undisputed ringleader of the "Street", and thus, has convinced the rest of the cast that Snuffaluphagus does indeed exist. They can now see, hear, and interact with this character that was originally only a part of Big Bird’s imagination (The Children’s Television Network Interactive Site). Big Bird, as alluded to earlier, also has gender issues and possibly Gender Identity Disorder. There are two components that must be meet in order for a diagnosis of gender identity disorder to be made. First, there must be "evidence of a strong and persistent cross-gender identification, which is the desire to be, or the insistence that one is, of the other sex." Secondly, there must be evidence of "persistent discomfort about one’s assigned sex role or a sense of inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex" (DSM-IV, 532-533). The main problem in diagnosing Big Bird with gender identity disorder is that his/her original gender is undetermined. The Children’s Television Workshop has begun referring to Big Bird as a he for simplicity, but the original conception of the character was not gendered. Big Bird performs many acts stereotypical of both genders, which makes a reliable diagnosis impossible. If he is indeed a he, he performs female behaviors such as sitting on a nest. The conclusion here that Big Bird has some gender issues, mostly that he/she does not clearly identify with either gender, and therefore may be better described as "nonconformity to stereotypical sex role behavior" (DSM-IV, 536). The DSM-IV also points out that in schizophrenia there may be delusions of belonging to the opposite sex (DSM-IV, 537). Big Bird’s gender issues possibly stem from the schizophrenia that is controlling and altering his life. Overall, Big Bird has the most serious and dangerous disorders of the Sesame Street characters largely because his disorders have come to effect so many others around him. Beyond being a shared hallucination, Big Bird’s imaginary friend "Snuffy" has problems of his own. This figment of Big Bird’s creation is at first glance, severely depressed, but through careful examination, Snuffy’s diagnosis is more accurately Dysthymic Disorder. He is often quoted saying "Oh, dear" in a very slow and deliberate way, and his greatest dislike is listed as: "When nobody believes I exist" (The Children’s Television Network Interactive Site). The essential feature of Dysthymic Disorder is a chronically depressed mood that occurs for most of the day, more days than not, for at least two years. During the period of depression, at least two of the following criteria must be present: 1. Poor appetite or overeating (look at the size of Snuffy!) 2. Insomnia or hypersomnia (In the beginning Snuffy had a form of narcolepsy and would fall asleep as soon as someone other than Big Bird would appear) 3. Low energy or fatigue (Snuffy is a slow mover and often complains about being tired) 4. Low self-esteem (Her self esteem has improved over the years, but still becomes concerned when others claim that she is not real) 5. Poor concentration or trouble making decisions (Not a characteristic for Snuffy) 6. Feelings of hopelessness (This was a past characteristic, but has been phased out over the years, could be considered a recovery or remission) The associated feature of dysthymic disorder are similar to those of a major depressive episode, but those with dysthymic disorder can still carry on their everyday activities, and their symptoms are often thought of as "the way I have always been" or just "part of their personality." In Snuffy’s case, Big Bird seems to be at blame for Snuffy’s problems, since he created him. Over the years, Snuffaluphagus has exhibited narcoleptic behavior as a manifestation of being Big Bird’s hallucinations. Originally, whenever another cast member would approach Big Bird and Snuffaluphagus, he would simply fall asleep. This conveniently explained his absence to others, but frustrated Big Bird. If another cast member claimed that they could not see Big Bird’s enormous friend, he would ask Snuffaluphagus to say something. Unfortunately, he would be so asleep that Big Bird could never get him to wake up and prove that he was real. As Snuffaluphagus slowly became apart of the other character’s belief system, his narcolepsy receded, and he no longer falls suddenly asleep in public. Oscar the Grouch Oscar is known for being disagreeable, and for loving rainy days and arguing. He dislikes everything, and lives by the philosophy "Leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone" (The Children’s Television Network Interactive Site). The DSM-IV defines the essential feature of Oppositional Defiant Disorder as " a recurrent pattern of negativistic, defiant, disobedient, and hostile behavior toward authority figures that persists for at least six months" (DSM-IV, 91). Oscar the Grouch displays this sort of behavior toward authority figures, the experts and guest stars of Sesame Street, and his fellow cast-mates. Over the show’s twenty-nine years, his anger and outbursts have been tempered considerably, but The Grouch is still a grouch. The DSM-IV also outlines further characteristics of Oppositional Defiant Disorder as having at least four of the following behaviors with regular and frequent occurrence: (1) Losing temper (the essence of Oscar), (2) Arguing with adults (he argues with everyone), (3) Actively defying or refusing to comply with the requests or rules of adults (Oscar generally complies with request, but only after receiving what he considers a "good reason"), (4) Deliberately doing things that will annoy other people (The original Oscar pulled many practical jokes and still likes to push the other characters’ buttons), (5) Blaming others for his or her own mistakes or misbehaviors (This criteria is not typical of Oscar, who is usually very willing to take credit for his misdeeds), (6) Being touchy or easily annoyed by others (Again, an Oscar-esque description) (7) Being angry or resentful, Or (8) being spiteful or resentful (Like criteria 3 and 5, this is not typical of Oscar the Grouch) (DSM-IV, 91-94 & The Children’s Television Network Interactive Site) Further, these behaviors must occur more frequently than is typical for others of comparable age and developmental level, and must lead to significant impairment in social (Oscar’s downfall), academic, or occupational function. A diagnosis of Operational Defiant Disorder is not made if these behaviors occur exclusively during the course of a Psychotic or Mood Disorder, or if the individual meets the criteria for Conduct Disorder or Antisocial Personality Disorder (DSM-IV 91). Fortunately Oscar does not meet the criteria for any of these disorders. Although the layman use of the term "Antisocial" has been used to describe Oscar, he does not meet correct use of the diagnostic. Oppositional Defiant Disorder is associated with low self-esteem, mood liability, low frustration tolerance, swearing, and the precocious use of alcohol, tobacco, or illicit drugs. ADHD, Learning Disorders, and Communication Disorders also tend to be associated co-morbidities. In a significant proportion of cases, the disorder is a precursor to the more severe Conduct Disorder (DSM-IV, 92). In conjunction with operational defiant disorder, schizoid personality disorder involves a pervasive pattern of detachment in social relationships and a restricted range of emotions in interpersonal settings (DSM-IV, 638). For Oscar, he exhibits one emotion, that of grouchiness, the majority of the time. Individuals with schizoid personality disorder do not seem to desire intimacy, are indifferent to most social situations, have few if any close relationships, and do not appear to find satisfaction from family or social groups. Most people (or Muppets) with this disorder, like Oscar, are socially isolated, may be termed "loners," and almost always choose to live in isolation (hence the can: DSM-IV, 638 & The Sesame Street Interactive Network). Those with schizoid personality disorder often seem indifferent to the approval or criticism of others, and do not appear to be bothered by what others think of them. This may result from the fact that they are oblivious to such criticism, and they often have trouble reading cues from others (DSM-IV, 639). Oscar somewhat differs from the classic definition of schizoid personality disorder, in that those with the disorder are often described as having particular difficulty expressing anger. Oscar's grouchiness is a form of anger, but is not, per say, pure anger. Oscar also has a rather severe case of Agoraphobia, and has not left his house (can) for an extended period of time in 29 years. He has at times, attempted to deal with this phobia, by taking short excursions, but it is clear that he is more comfortable and prefers to be in the can at all times. Additionally Oscar has some of the characteristics of social phobia, most specifically hypersensitivity to criticism, negative evaluation, irritableness, and lack of a social support network (DSM-IV, 413). Individuals with these disorders are more likely to develop major depressive disorder, which often co-occurs with schizotypal, paranoid, and avoidant personality disorders (DSM-IV, 639). Oscar the Grouch meets some, but not enough, of the criteria for each of these disorders. It seems unlikely that after twenty-nine years of stability within his disorders that he would now begin to develop new ones. It is probable that Oscar will keep his current "issues," continue to express them, but not develop any new ones. The Count manifests the most obvious affliction of all the Sesame Street characters. This caped creature will count anything at any time, which sometimes tries the patients of others. He dislikes calculators and the concept of zeros, and according to his creators, "tries to maintain the perfect balance between obsession and sanity" (The Children’s Television Network Interactive Cite). The essential feature of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (not to be confused with Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder) are recurrent obsessions or compulsions that are severe enough to be time consuming, cause marked distress or significant impairment. At some point, the person has recognized that the obsessions or compulsions are excessive (DSM-IV, 417). The Count seems to realize this each time he begins counting, his maniacal laugher is an admission, but also a dismissal of these feelings. Obsessions are "persistent ideas, thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced as intrusive and inappropriate and that cause marked anxiety or distress" (DSM-IV, 418). The Count’s specific obsession has not been revealed. We do not know if he counts to rid things of contamination (a common obsession), or that he doubts his own ability and therefore must continue to count everything, or if there is some other self-created reason. An individual attempts to ignore or suppress these obsessions with some sort of compulsory ritual; for The Count it is by counting everything he encounters. Compulsions are "repetitive behaviors or mental act (counting is considered a mental act), the goal of which is to prevent or reduce anxiety or distress (DSM-IV, 419). The obsession or compulsions must be time consuming, or interfere with the individual’s normal routine. Because the counting behavior has come do define his routine, it is hard to determine if it actually interferes, or if the behavior is The Count’s routine. One deviation from the classic definition of obsessive compulsive disorder that The Count has is that he seems to get true pleasure out of the activity. Bert, more famously of the duo Bert and Ernie, is very serious when it comes to some things, especially keeping control and order in his life. He dislikes being asked what he considers to be silly questions, and hates being bugged or having practical jokes played on him (The Children’s Television Network Interactive Site). Bert displays the essential features of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. This disorder is marked by a preoccupation with orderliness, perfection, mental and interpersonal control, and neatness, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency (DSM-IV, 669). Bert is a compulsive cleaner and organizer, is dominant in his relationship with Ernie, and has very set patterns of behavior. He becomes agitated when his (and Ernie's) bedroom or bathroom's usual order is disturbed, and often becomes upset until Ernie cleans it up (The Sesame Street Interactive Network). Individuals with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder attempt to maintain a sense of control through painstaking attention to rules, trivial details, procedures, lists, schedules, or form to the extent that the major point of the activity is lost (DSM-IV, 669). In Bert's case it is usually the fun that is lost, at least according to Ernie. He is oblivious to the fact that other people tend to become annoyed at the delays and inconveniences that result from this behavior. Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder individuals may also be excessively conscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values. They may force themselves and others (possibly Ernie) to follow rigid moral principles defined by the society, and to meet very strict standards of performance (DSM-IV, 670). This criterion, if met by Bert, would bring about Ego-like tendencies in the Freudian sense, and could also discount the much-repeated theory about an intimate relationship between Bert and Ernie. Cookie Monster quite obviously has an appetite for everything in sight. He prefers to be eating at all times, and his creators list his hobbies/obsession as "eating lunch, eating dinner, eating snacks, eating telephones, eating Ws, eating umbrellas, and of course, eating cookies (The Sesame Street Interactive Network). The essential features of binge eating are recurrent episodes associated with subjective and behavioral indicators of impaired control over, and significant distress about, the binge eating and the absence of the regular use of inappropriate compensatory behaviors (such as self-induced vomiting, misuse of laxatives and other medications, fasting, and excessive exercising) that are characteristic of Bulimia Nervosa (DSM-IV, 729). Indicators include impaired control include eating very rapidly, eating until feeling uncomfortable full, and eating large amounts of food while not hungry. It is quite clear that Cookie is not eating for the purpose of nutrition. His habits, including eating foods and non-foods with no nutritional value (Telephones, umbrella, etc.), demonstrate his inability to control the binge impulses. The diagnosis of binge eating is contingent on whether further evidence about Cookie’s disorder is learned. Thus far there is not evidence of purging or methods to remove the food from his system after he binges. However, no Sesame Street character has ever been shown using or even mentioning a bathroom, so this lack of evidence may not be telling the entire story. These beloved characters of Sesame Street are not the fun loving teaching aids that the public is lead to believe they are. These Muppets obviously have some severe and far-reaching disorders that have changed the chemistry of the show and its cast. This trend suggests that other characters will also be found to have disorders, based on the seriousness of the disorders explored. The influence these main characters of an educational children’s program may be having on children must also be examined in future research. Sesame Street and its characters are a staple of households worldwide, but its influence may be greater than previously thought. The proper diagnosis of the characters is essential to further understanding of the phenomenon, and will lend itself to the examination of other children’s programming. david did sey... i always felt something was slightly off with some of them. luckily there's medication 4 that sort of stuff now Bashmentbasses did sey... Is true! I always knew something was wrong with the lot of them. I figured Bert and Big Bird, but hadn't diagnosed Snuffy and cookie although cookie eats everything he doesn't actually swallow.... Bulemia is spot on for that. Too bad they didn't do Ernie .... elmo is too young to get any proper diagnosis. His would be purely behavioural until adolescence (them there is the rules...kids don't get adult diagnoses). bassChocolate did sey... I cannot believe what seems to be your longest post ever,, is about SESAME STREET! What tha hell! I can't even read it right now. laroper18 did sey... Never really thought of the characters having severe issues...just thought them weird. And as such, I have not read the entire blog, because sometimes ignorance is bliss! 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1752: Benjamin Franklin –Philadelphia Contributionship of the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire The Philadelphia Contributionship is the first mutual insurance company in the U.S., modeled after the Amicable Contributorship of London. Policyholders elected a board of directors to issue policies. The contributionship is still in operation today. From the history section of their website: “Contribution” was defined in Sheridan’s 1793 dictionary as “ that which is given by several hands for some common purpose,” symbolized by the company’s clasped hands logo. (Angevine, pg. 19) 1787: The Free African Society is founded in Philadelphia by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones It was the second African American mutual-aid society to open in the United States. Mutual-aid societies are considered the precursors to formal cooperatives. (See page 21 of W.E.B. DuBois’ Economic co-operation among Negro Americans for the articles of incorporation of the Free African Society) 1791: Journeyman carpenters on strike in Philadelphia form a cooperative “Two years before the U.S. Constitution was ratified, a year before the first full-fledged trade union in America was organized, a group of carpenters in Philadelphia walked out. To help support themselves during their strike, they formed a cooperative and tried to undercut their boss by charging 25% less, announcing that they were eliminating his profit. They were striking for the ten hour day and gave it to themselves, a great advance over the prevailing sun-to-sun system, and the 75 hour work week. But the cooperative was planned to last only as long as the strike.” (Curl, see below for citation) 1806: Philadelphia shoemakers form a cooperative boot and shoe factory “In 1806, Philadelphia journeymen shoemakers, with the leadership of Peter Polin and Undriel Backes, unionized and struck for higher wages. The boss had them arrested for conspiracy. The judge instructed the jury to find them guilty, which they proceeded to do. Beaten but unbowed, the shoemakers refused to slink back to a boss and organized a cooperative boot and shoe factory instead.” (Curl, see below for citation) 1826: Langdon Byllesby, a Philadelphia printer, writes Observations on the Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth “Byllesby advocated that wage-earners withdraw their labor from the capitalist system and join into cooperatives in every industry and trade, which could then federate, grow large enough to draw in the entire working population, and so create a new economic system in America free of poverty and inequality. This laid the base for the National Trades’ Union’s cooperative movement of the mid-1830s, and for the union cooperative movements that were to follow.” (Curl, see below for citation) Some of Byllesby’s text is available online here, starting on page 117. 1829: Workers in Philadelphia open the first cooperative store on record in the United States “The store sold just to members at cost, charging 20 cents per month dues. Later that year another was started in New York City. The separation of producers from consumers by ever-larger distances was resulting in the domination by middlemen; working people turned to buying-cooperative to eliminate middleman profits as much as possible, reducing their cost of living.” (Curl, see below for citation) (also cited in Angevine, pg. 20) 1831: The earliest “building and loan” cooperative on record opens in Philadelphia “The 1830s saw the first cooperative building, banking, and credit association. Some of these made it through the depression of the late 1830s and 1840s, only to be wiped out, along with almost every cooperative in the U.S., by the Civil War.” (Curl, see below for citation) 1834: The Philadelphia cabinetmakers union opens a cooperative warehouse “By 1836, the warehouse was one of the largest in the city. Soon much of the Philadelphia trade union movement swung to cooperation: the handloom weavers opened five shops in 1836, soon followed by the tailors, hatters, and saddlers.” (Curl, see below for citation) 1836: Philadelphia Trades’ Union resolves to support the growth of cooperatives “The Philadelphia Trades’ Union adopted a resolution to ‘place in the Constitution a clause allowing the funds of the Union to be loaned to the Societies (individual unions) for the purpose of Cooperation.’ Its official newspaper urged each union to raise a fund through regular member contributions to get capital to begin. At the same time each union was to contribute monthly to the Trades’ Union fund to help start cooperatives. A conference of nearly two hundred union delegates in 1837 resolved that each union work out an estimate for setting up a cooperative to support ten members. But in the middle of this conference, the capitalist financiers panicked, beginning a new depression that temporarily wiped out not only the cooperatives but almost the entire union movement.” (Curl, see below for citation) 1844: Co-operative grocery store opens in Rochdale, England The Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society opened their co-op store to sell food at fair prices and honest weights and measures. This is often cited as the birth of the modern cooperative movement because they established the 7 cooperative principles that are used internationally today. 1849: Philadelphia Seamstresses’ Union forms a cooperative 1862: Union Cooperative Association Number 1 Labor reformers in Philadelphia formed a cooperative grocery store modeled after the Rochdale Pioneers store in England. This was the first U.S. co-op to follow the Rochdale principles (Angevine, pg. 20).The store provided its members with the necessities of life at fair prices. Its initial location was 917 Federal Street in South Philly. Their constitution and bylaws are digitized and available here. 1868: Pennsylvania becomes the 3rd state to pass a co-op law The law was modeled on one passed in Massachusetts in 1866 and it permitted the formation of mechanical, manufacturing, and agricultural cooperatives. 1869: Knights of Labor is born in Philadelphia “The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor was organized in 1869 in sworn secrecy by members of a Philadelphia tailoring cutters local who were being blacklisted after striking. They aimed ‘to secure to workers the full enjoyment of the wealth they create,…to harmonize the interests of labor and capital.’ One of their First Principles was Cooperation. When they were forced out into the open nine years later, they made their goals public: ‘to establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a cooperative industrial system.’ The Knights of Labor was among the first to organize white and black into the same union. At their peak they had over 50,000 women members, including many “housewives,” who were recognized by them as workers.” (Curl, see below for citation) Read more about the Knights of Labor on the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. 1874: Cooperative Barrel Works is formed in Philadelphia 1888: Frankford Wholesale Grocery Co-op is formed in Philadelphia 1899: See below for a snapshot of economic cooperation among Black people in Philadelphia in 1899 written by W.E.B. DuBois Philadelphia, Pa., 1899 (60,000 Negroes) From early times the precarious economic condition of the free Negroes led to many mutual aid organizations. They were very simple in form : an initiation fee of small amount was required and small regular payments ; in case of sickness, a weekly stipend was paid, and *n case of death the members were assessed to pay for the funeral and help the widow. Confined to a few mem bers, all personally known to each other, such societies were successful from the beginning. We hear of them in the eighteenth century, and by 1838 there were 100 such small groups, with 7,448 members, in the city. They paid in .$18,851, gave $14,172 in benefits, and had $10,023 on hand. Ten years later about 8,000 members belonged to 106 such societies. Seventy-six of these had a total membership of 5,187. They contributed usually 25 cents to37X cents a mouth ; the sick received $1.50 to $3.00 per week, and death benefits of $10 to $20 were allowed. The income of these seventy-six societies was $16,814.23 ; 681 families were assisted. These societies have since been superceded to some extent by other organizations; they are still so numerous, however, that it is impractical to catalogue them ; there are probably several hundred of various kinds in the city. From general observation and the available figures, it seems fairly certain that at least 4,000 Negroes belong to secret orders, and that these orders annually collect at least $25,000, part of which is paid out in sick and death benefits and part invested. The real estate, personal property and funds of these, orders amount to no less than $125,000. The function of the secret society is partly social intercourse and partly insurance. They furnish pastime from the monotony of work, a field for ambition and intrigue, a chance for parade, and insurance against misfortune. Next to the church they are the most popular organizations among Negroes. Of the beneficial societies… The Quaker City Association is a sick and death benefit society, seven years old, which confines its membership to native Philadelphians. It has 280 members and distributes $1,400 to $1,500 annually. The Sons and Daughters of Delaware is over fifty years old. It has 106 members and owns $3,000 worth of real estate. The Fraternal Association was founded in 1861 ; it has 86 members and distributes about $300 a year. It “was formed for the purpose of relieving the wants and distresses of each other in the time of affliction and death, and for the furtherance of such benevolent views and objects as would tend to establish and maintain a permanent and friendly intercourse among them in their social relations in life.” The Sons of St. Thomas was founded in 1823 and was originally confined to members of St. Thomas Church. It was formerly a large organization, but now has 80 members, and paid out in 1896, $416 in relief. It has $1,500 invested in government bonds. In addition to these there is the Sons and Daughters of Moses, and a large number of other small societies. There is a rising also a considerable number of insurance societies, differing from the beneficial in being conducted by directors. The best of these are the Crucifixion, connected with the Church of the Crucifixion, and the Avery, connected with Wesley A. M. E. Z. Church ; both have a large membership and are well conducted. Nearly every church is beginning to organize one or more such societies, some of which in times past have met disaster by bad management. The True Reformers of Virginia, the most remarkable Negro beneficial organization yet started,has several branches here. Beside these there are numberless minor societies, as the Alpha Relief, Knights and Ladies of St. Paul, the National Co-operative Society, Colored Women s Protective Association, Loyal Beneficial, etc. Some of these are honest efforts and some are swindling imitations of the pernicious, white, petty insurance societies. 1931-1934: Philadelphia’s United Consumers’ Co-operative Association calls itself “the grocery store owned by its customers.” 1932: The Young Negroes’ Co-operative League establishes a council in Philadelphia 1934: Pennsylvania Credit Union Association is formed The Association is owned by its member credit unions and still exists today. Here’s a link to their website. Viriva Community Credit Union was chartered in 1936. Trumark Financial Credit Union was founded in 1939 by Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania employees. Read more of their history here. Philadelphia Federal Credit Union was founded in 1951 to serve the financial needs of Philadelphia municipal employees. 1937: Swarthmore Food Co-op opens Currently the 3rd oldest food co-op in the nation, Swarthmore Food Co-op was started as a buying club by the wives of Swarthmore professors in 1932. 1940s- early 1950s : Philadelphia Area Cooperative Federation “Mary Arnold [(a co-op organizer)] moved to Philadelphia and became director of the Philadelphia Area Co-operative Federation in 1942. Prior to that, she organized credit unions and other co-ops for Maine lobster fisherman and produced a documentary film about their lives.” (Knupfer, see below for citation) 1952: Friends Housing Cooperative opens in Northern Liberties The interracial housing cooperative opened at 703 North 8th Street in 1952 and still exists today. Read more about its history here. 1971: Movement for a New Society is created; Mariposa Food Co-op opens; Life Center Association founded “One group combining personal and political struggle was the Movement for a New Society, a network of small autonomous living collectives in seven cities, working for non-violent radical social change. They came out of the anti-war movement in 1971 and were active in the anti-nuclear movement. The largest MNS center was Philadelphia, with about a hundred members in twenty communal houses in 1979.” (Curl, see below for citation) This center became the Life Center Association and still exists today. Read more about the history of the LCA on their website. There’s a great book by Andrew Cornell called Oppose and Propose: Lessons from Movement for a New Society. Check it out here. In the video below, Philadelphia cooperator Esteban Kelly talks about Movement for a New Society. 1973: Weaver’s Way Co-op opens in Mt. Airy 1970s: Delaware Valley Federation for Economic Democracy “Besides Mariposa & then Weavers Way there were at least three other co-op stores- Ecology, Penn Co-op, and Germantown Ecology. Plus there were 8-12 buying clubs, I was part of one at Temple on Norris St near 15th, and there were 2 in Germantown (Calvary Church on Pulaski and People’s Co-op at church at Greene & Tulpehocken). Plus there were 3 or 4 in West Philly. Tying them all together was “The Federation”, I don’t remember the formal name, but it was a warehouse run by Ed and Peggy Place, I think it may have been on Baring St. in W. Philly (building is no longer there). The Federation had a truck & warehouse and bought produce and dry goods and cheese for the member co-oops. Next door was a co-op bakery, which I think was called Grateful Grains Bakery.” -Norman Weiss, Weaver’s Way Co-op (personal email, October 2013) 1976 – 1987: Philadelphia Association of Cooperative Enterprise (PACE) PACE promoted worker ownership through worker cooperatives and democratic ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans) in the Philadelphia area. According to Andrew Lamas, PACE was originally a local chapter of a “short-lived national organization, the Federation for Economic Democracy.” At that time, PACE was called the Delaware Valley Federation for Economic Democracy. (Lamas, see below for citation) Lamas’ 1992 article “PACE of Philadelphia: The Enduring Legacy of Franklin and the Striking Carpenters” in the anthology cited at the bottom of this page gives a good overview of PACE’s evolution and activities. People involved in PACE included Sherman Kreiner, (Executive Director), Dr. Virginia Vanderslice (PACE organizational development staff), James Steiker (PACE attorney), Joel Steiker (financial consultant to PACE), and Ruth Green (PACE office manager). (Lamas, see below for citation) Carla Dickstein wrote a dissertation in 1986 called “The Role of Support Organizations in Worker Cooperative Systems: A Comparative Case Study” that focused on PACE and the O&O Investment Fund. The abstract is available here. To download a 28-page article she wrote based on her dissertation, click here. 1982: O&O Supermarkets are created The Philadelphia Area A&P grocery stores closed, laying off 2,000 employees. Two were converted into worker-owned and operated cooperatives, called the O&O Supermarkets (Owned and Operated). The New York Times did a magazine piece focusing on the O&O Supermarkets in 1983. Learn more about the O&O story at american.coop. They also have a great annotated bibliography on the subject. 1985 Philadelphia City Council creates a Cooperative Advisory and Development Council City Council passed Bill No. 312-A, entitled “An Ordinance establishing a Cooperative Advisory and Development Council (‘CADC’) within the Commerce Department for the purpose of assisting the development and expansion of worker, housing and consumer cooperatives, setting forth its composition, the process for appointing its members, and its duties; establishing a Cooperative Enterprise Revolving Fund under the jurisdiction of the CADC for the purpose of providing loan assistance, under certain terms and conditions, to finance cooperative enterprise feasibility studies, and professional and technical services; and establishing certain reporting requirements for the CADC and Commerce Department with respect to the programs established herein.” 1988: Pennsylvania Workers Cooperative Corporation Law is passed If you’re really into it, you can download the text of the law here. 1988: Childspace, a daycare center owned by the workers, opens in Mt. Airy Childspace was started by Teresa Mansell, Karen Guyton, and Cindy Coker. “Cindy and Teresa were both inspired by their work for the Philadelphia Association for Cooperative Enterprise, (where they helped set up worker-owned supermarkets), to use the cooperative model for their daycare.” Read more about their story here. 1993: Home Care Associates of Philadelphia is established American.coop has a good history of Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx. Home Care Associates in Philadelphia was a replication of CHCA in the Bronx. Home Care Associates is now the third largest women-owned business in the Philadelphia region. 2011: Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance is formed That’s us! PACA was formed to improve the Philadelphia region by growing the cooperative economy. We are proud of our city’s rich history of cooperation. 2012: Philadelphia City Council passes a resolution about the role of cooperative business in our city The resolution recognized the contributions of cooperatives’ to economic and social development during the International Year of the Cooperative. Read more about the resolution on our International Year of the Cooperative page. 2013: Philadelphia Congressman Chaka Fattah introduces the Creating Jobs Through Cooperatives Act The Creating Jobs Through Cooperatives Act, H.R. 2437, seeks federal funding to support cooperative development. The bill is an updated version of the National Cooperative Development Act which was introduced by Representative Fattah in 2011. Get involved in the campaign to pass H.R. 2437 at campaign.coop. We are probably missing pieces of Philadelphia’s cooperative history. If you have something to add, please email firstname.lastname@example.org. To read more about the history of the American cooperative movement, visit the University of Wisconsin’s page. Angevine, E., ed. (1982)National Consumers Committee for Research and Education (U.S.), & Consumers Union Foundation. Consumer activists: They made a difference : a history of consumer action related by leaders in the consumer movement. Mount Vernon, N.Y: Consumers Union Foundation. Curl, J. (1980). History of work cooperation in America: Cooperatives, cooperative movements, collectivity, and communalism from early America to the present. Berkeley, CA: Homeward Press. Available here: http://www.red-coral.net/WorkCoops.html DuBois, W.E.B (1907). Economic co-operation among Negro Americans. Available here: https://archive.org/stream/economiccooper00duborich#page/96/mode/1up/search/philadelphia Gordon, N. J. (2014). Collective courage: A history of African American cooperative economic thought and practice. Knupfer, A. M. (2013). Food co-ops in America: Communities, consumption, and economic democracy. Lamas, Andrew. “PACE of Philadelphia: The Enduring Legacy of Franklin and the Striking Carpenters.” In When Workers Decide: Workplace Democracy Takes Root in North America, edited by Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld, 193-199. New Society Publishers 1992. National Consumers Committee for Research and Education (U.S.), & Consumers Union Foundation. (1982). Consumer activists: They made a difference : a history of consumer action related by leaders in the consumer movement. Mount Vernon, N.Y: Consumers Union Foundation. Roy, E. P. (1969). Cooperatives: today and tomorrow. Danville, Ill: Interstate Printers & Publishers.

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Kephart made this assertion even as thousands of immigrants and African Americans were flocking to the central Appalachian region in search of jobs with the coal mines and railroads. In describing the population as “more English in speech than Britain itself, more American by blood than any other part of America,”2 Kephart echoed other commentators who portrayed the people of Appalachia as relics of an earlier age with a common race, ancestry, and culture. The reality is that even before the time of the first European settlement in the 18th century, Appalachia contained a mix of cultural, ethnic, and racialized identities. By the turn of the 20th century, this cultural mosaic was plain to see in the coal camps of eastern Kentucky. Between 1880 and 1940, new immigrants and established minorities in the Appalachian coalfields shifted with changes in the coal industry and national population trends, representing one of the most diverse periods in the history of the region. Bantering a Tennessee wife on her choice, she replied with a toss and a sparkle, "I-uns couldn't get shet of un less'n I-uns married un." "Have you'uns seed any stray shoats?" asked a passer: "I-uns's uses about here." "Critter" means an animal—"cretur," a fellow-creature. "Longsweet-'nin'" and "short sweet'nin'" are respectively syrup and sugar. The use of the indefinite substantive pronoun un (the French on), modified by the personals, used demonstratively, and of "done" and "gwine" as auxiliaries, is peculiar to the mountains, as well on the Wabash and Alleghany, I am told, as in Tennessee. The practice of dipping—by which is meant not baptism, but chewing snuff—prevails to a like extent. William Wallace Harney, “A Strange Land and Peculiar People” (October 1873)4 America's post-Civil War fascination with the rural white inhabitants of the southern Appalachian mountains is exemplified in William Wallace Harney's 1873 article, "A Strange Land and Peculiar People," in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. The piece popularized Appalachia as a distinct region separate and isolated from the rest of the country, its people untouched by the problems of the modern industrial age. This idea of Appalachia as a "place where time stood still" remained fashionable through the mid-20th century as evidenced by the title of Jack Weller's book, Yesterday's People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia (1965). Following Harney's lead, writers and journalists produced a multitude of stories, articles, and travel reports about Appalachia to amuse and enlighten readers. Few Americans at the turn of the 20th century had visited the region. Their information about Appalachia was limited to the writings of outsiders, all of whom had their own agendas. For most of these individuals, it was a chance to capitalize on the public's desire for entertainment and education. Berea College President William Goodell Frost recognized a different opportunity through marketing Appalachia as a homogeneous, backward culture. To-day there are in the Southern mountains approximately the same number of people - Americans for four and five generations - who are living to all intents and purposes in the conditions of the colonial times! These people form an element unaccounted for by the census, unreckoned with in all our inventories of national resources. And their remoteness is by no means measured by the mere distance in miles. It is a longer journey from northern Ohio to eastern Kentucky than from America to Europe; for one day's ride brings us into the eighteenth century. Naturally, then, these eighteenth-century neighbors and fellow countrymen of ours are in need of a friendly interpreter; for modern life has little patience with those who, are "behind the times. William Goodell Frost, "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains" (March 1899)5 In "Our Contemporary Ancestors," Frost made the first reference to the people of the region as Appalachian Americans. He portrayed the population as descendants of American revolutionary era colonists with observable Anglo-Saxonist characteristics, such as dialect, arts and crafts, tools. Their patriotism and heritage made them true Americans, he reasoned, and so it was the duty of other Americans to improve and educate them. Frost made this appeal to potential donors to Berea College, knowing that it would strike a chord with those who were anxious about the flood of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. In Frost's case, therefore, writing about Appalachia served as another way to raise money for his college. It also added to the evolving stereotypes about the region. Other notable examples of writings about Appalachia include Mary Noailles Murfree's In the Tennessee Mountains (1884), John Fox Jr.'s novels The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1913), Julian Ralph's article “Our Appalachian Americans” (The Harper’s Monthly, 1903), and John C. Campbell's book The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921). Missionaries, social workers, and academics also added their voices to the mix, contributing to the idea of Appalachia as a mysterious, forgotten land whose people were relics of an earlier, better time in American history. Even as popular culture mythologized Appalachia as a place whose people were just waking up from what Frost called "a long Rip van Winkle sleep",6 the region was being transformed by the railroads, coal industry, and the arrival of a new immigrant population. As immigration to the United States increased at the turn of the 20th century, many Americans became uneasy about how so-called undesirable immigrants could change the country's national identity. Nativist movements such as the Immigration Restriction League, founded in 1894, argued that immigrants who failed to assimilate threatened American culture and values. This issue was the basis for the League's existence as shown in the first lines of its constitution: "The objects of this League shall be to advocate and work for the further judicious restriction or stricter regulation of immigration ... to arouse public opinion to the necessity of a further exclusion of elements undesirable for citizenship or injurious to our national character."7 Opponents of immigration campaigned for tighter regulations on immigrants, including literacy tests and the establishment of immigration commissions. Their influence can be seen in the various anti-immigration laws and acts passed by the U.S. Congress in the years between 1880 and 1940. For some people, the “rediscovered” Appalachian population represented what they believed the United States had once been. In this idea, there was no room for diversity. In these isolated communities … we find the purest Anglo-Saxon stock in all the United States. They are direct descendants of the early Virginia and North Carolina immigrants, and bear about them in their speech and ideas the marks of their ancestry as plainly as if they had disembarked from their eighteenth-century vessel but yesterday. The stock is chiefly English and Scotch-Irish, which is largely Teutonic in origin. There is scarcely a trace of foreign admixture. Ellen Churchill Semple, The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography (1910)8 It is true that there were relatively few immigrants and minorities in Appalachia and especially eastern Kentucky at the turn of the 20th century. Yet evidence does exist for their presence in the region. Census data from 1880 to 1940 for the eastern Kentucky coalfields demonstrates that immigrants of many nationalities came into and out of the area over the course of 60 years. For all the decades in this period, the recorded foreign-born population in the coalfield counties fluctuated between 1,819 and 8,533 persons. Most of these people presumably migrated to eastern Kentucky to work with the railroads and coal mines. The largest foreign-born population was recorded in 1880 (8,533) in the same period as the expansion of the railroads into the region and the opening of large coal mines. Over the next three decades as the anti-immigrant movement strengthened and Congress enacted legislation restricting immigration, the foreign-born population steadily declined: 1890 (2,396), 1900 (1,831), and 1910 (1,891). Between 1910 and 1920, the coal industry boomed with business from the war and the mines needed more laborers, which corresponds with the dramatic increase in the foreign-born population: 1920 (4,329). During the period from 1920 to 1930, new legislation established quotas that limited the number of new immigrants entering the country. Census data show a matching decline in the foreign-born population in 1930 (2,994). The population continued to decline during the Great Depression (1929-1941): 1940 (2,142). Census data for 1880-1940 also notes place of birth for the foreign-born population. These records are a goldmine of information about the various immigrant groups that were present (and not) in eastern Kentucky during this time. For example, the number of foreign-born persons in the coalfields in 1880 totaled 8,533. Out of this population, 3,898 individuals came from Ireland. Ten years later in 1890, the number of Irish immigrants fell to 387. Why did the Irish immigrant population decline so much in a decade? Was this an outcome of immigration legislation? Can the decline be attributed to the hiring practices of different coal companies? Without further research, it is difficult to come up with a verifiable answer. The correlation between the rise and fall of the foreign-born population in the eastern Kentucky coalfields and larger national trends shows that the region was not isolated from the rest of the country, as commentators at the time suggested. Kentucky Railroad Map, 1890 Preliminary Map of Kentucky, prepared for the Kentucky Railroad Commissioners by the Kentucky Geological Society, University of Kentucky Libraries, Sciece Library, Map Collection. Starting in the 1870s, the expansion of railroads in eastern Kentucky brought significant social and economic changes to the region. While there had always been outsiders willing to make the hard journey into the area before the railroads, the extension of lines into the coalfields opened travel to more people. The railroads also improved transportation of goods. Consequently industrialists saw a new opportunity to tap into eastern Kentucky’s rich coal deposits, which were often located in remote, rugged terrain too far from road or river access. The construction of major arteries and spur lines over the next six decades made it possible to open mines on large scale, import labor, and convey coal to distant markets. Workmen on a railroad bridge, Samuel M. Wilson Photographic Collection, PA79W1, Special Collections, University of Kentucky. Railroad construction camps were usually the first settlements near the coal mines.9 These temporary camps contained mostly single men of various ethnicities, races, and backgrounds, including native-born whites, African Americans, convicts, and many Italian immigrants. Women and children were almost always absent. Crews endured rough conditions in laying track and living in the camps. Exposed to the weather, the men had to build lines across rivers and valleys and through mountains.10 Their work paved the way for the opening of new mines, eventually launching a coal boom that attracted diverse groups of immigrants to the region. As mines opened in the 1880s, coal companies hired local men and used labor agents to recruit additional workers from southern states and immigration points of entry like New York City, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.11 The early miners were mountain farmers, native-born whites, African Americans, and immigrants, all of whom were drawn to the jobs offered by the mines. In searching for immigrant workers, coal companies often preferred certain nationalities. Carl Shifflett writes in Coal Towns (1991) that "in spite of the difficulty of acquiring workers, coal operators developed preferences in some cases for specific ethnic groups over others. These biases might grow out of a previous experience, good or bad; sometimes the bases of their choices were not clear. Employment agencies, anxious to win contracts, accomodated these biases."12 He notes that Italian, Polish, Hungarian, and Slavic immigrants were considered the most desirable foreign-born workers.13 Coal companies avoided other immigrant groups who seemed more prone to labor activism and political radicalism, such as Irish workers and their association with the Molly Maguires.14 Due to these biases, the combination of native-born whites, African Americans, and immigrants was different for every mine. Immigrant workers traveled to the coal camps on trains. Some of the men came with families, but most of the early miners were single or alone. Separated from their families and home communities, single and solitary men lived in cramped, crowded quarters in boardinghouses. Every day, the miners worked until the point of exhaustion in dangerous underground mines. They never knew when they might die from rock falls, gas explosions, or other accidents. The prejudices against minorities and immigrants that were common in society at the turn of the 20th century often led to confrontations between the residents of coal towns. Coal companies encouraged this division through the separation of different races and ethnicities, and discrimination of miners based on the kinds of jobs available to each group. Crandall Shifflett in Coal Towns notes that all phases in the development of coal towns involved segregation, a common practice in the United States at the time.15 Most coal companies divided towns into areas set aside for different groups. The town of Wheelwright, for example, separated residents with three boardinghouses to house immigrants, African Americans, and native-born whites. IMAGE: Typewritten label on back of photograph: "Street in colored section of company housing project."; children stand on porch of house while two men walk down street, Russell Lee: Wheelwright, KY Photographic Collection, 1946, 88PA1,Special Collections, University of Kentucky. In the coalfields, native whites, African Americans, and foreign immigrants lived and worked in company towns where they usually were segregated into sections designated as “Colored Town,” “Hunky Hollow,” or “Little Italy.” Generally, there was discrimination in the kinds of jobs available to each group in the mine as well, with natives or British immigrants serving as bosses or in the technical positions, and blacks and immigrants in the harder, more dangerous, and most unsteady jobs. Still, blacks and immigrants were attracted by relatively high wages. Underground the men worked together, but even on the surface the rigid segregation often became blurred in company towns, and without other employment opportunities, the workers came to focus on their common economic interests in the United Mine Workers of America, the one organization in the coalfields they could control. Ronald Lewis, "Beyond Isolation and Homogeneity: Diversity and the History of Appalachia"16 Severe discrimination did exist in the coal towns and mines. On the other hand, the coal towns were multicultural communities in an otherwise segregated landscape. There was cooperation across the divide through the labor unions, in which miners of different races and ethnicities came together to bargain with coal companies for better wages and working conditions. Harlan County Mine Strike, 1939 A crowd of miners confroting soldiers, Harlan County Mine Strike Photographic Collection, 81PA109,Special Collections, University of Kentucky. In view of the harsh living and working conditions around the camps, why did immigrants choose to work in the eastern Kentucky mines? These men and their families were willing to contend with the dangers of the work, the prejudices of their employers and neighbors, forced isolation, and the bleak conditions in the coal towns in order to improve the future for themselves. As the coal industry changed and legislation restricted immigration to the United States, foreign-born miners started leaving the coalfields in droves to seek better opportunities. With the economic depression of the 1930s, few of these workers found a reason to return to the coal mines. Today our knowledge about their experiences and lives in the coal camps of eastern Kentucky is limited mainly to company records, oral histories, photographs, and other archival materials. Stereotypes about Appalachia continue to persist in popular culture, spread largely through the media and entertainment industry. Just as the writings of William Goodell Frost and John Fox, Jr. were published to inform and amuse the American public at the turn of the 20th century, much of today’s media about Appalachia exploits the region for attention and money. This treatment has consequences beyond humiliation. As Katherine Ledford, Dwight Billings, and Gurney Norman write in the introduction to Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes, “the “idea of Appalachia” … not only masks the exploitation of land and people in the region, but it obscures the diversity of conditions, relationships, and cultures within Appalachian society itself – diversity of race, gender and class as well as diversity in religion, education and history.”16 Appalachian scholars and activists are now pushing back against the stereotypes and refusing to accept their continuation into the future. Many artists, writers, and musicians in Kentucky have challenged the idea that Appalachia is a homogeneous region with one race, one ethnicity, and one culture. The Affrilachian Poets are one notable example. Kentucky's Poet Laureate Frank X Walker, a founding member of the group and University of Kentucky assistant professor of English, invented the terms “Affrilachia” and “Affrilachian” to demonstrate the role of African Americans in Appalachian history and culture. According to the group’s website, “since 1991, the Affrilachian Poets have been writing together, defying the persistent stereotype of a racially homogenized rural region.” Another example is Appalatin, whose sound combines Appalachian folk and Latin music.18 These individuals and others counter the idea that immigrants and minorities in Appalachian culture have been silenced by the stereotypes. There is still much work to be done in documenting the multicultural history of the Appalachian region and redefining the identity of Appalachians. With further research and increased awareness of the various groups who have lived in Appalachia, perhaps the stereotypes that have plagued the region for the past 100 years will finally disappear into the history books. We would like to thank the following people at the University of Kentucky for their contributions to this exhibit: Dr. Ann Kingsolver, Dr. Dwight Billings, and the Appalachian Studies Center; Jan Carver and Gwen Curtis with the Science Library; the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History; the Digital Library Services Department; the University Archives and Records Program; and the staff of Special Collections. 1. Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life Among the Mountaineers. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, c1976), 452-453. 2. Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life Among the Mountaineers. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, c1976), 454. 3. Wilma A. Dunaway, “Speculators and Settler Capitalists: Unthinking the Mythology about Appalachian Landholding, 1790-1860,” in Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L. Waller (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c1995), 50-51. 4. William Wallace Harney, “A Strange Land and a Peculiar People,” Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science 12, no. 31 (1873): 431, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13964/13964-h/13964-h.htm#strange. 5. William Goodell Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” Atlantic Monthly Company, March 1899: 1. http://cdm272901.cdmhost.com/cdm/ref/collection/p15131coll3/id/38 6. William Goodell Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” Atlantic Monthly Company, March 1899: 1. http://cdm272901.cdmhost.com/cdm/ref/collection/p15131coll3/id/38 7. Immigration Restriction League (U.S.). Constitution of the Immigration Restriction League. Collection Development Department, Widener Library, Harvard University (189-?): 1. http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/5233215. 8. Ellen Churchill Semple, “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography,” The Geographical Journal 17, no. 6 (1901): 6, http://www.archive.org/details/anglosaxonsofken00semp. 9. Crandall Shifflett, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 34. 10. “Railroads in the Late 19th Century.” Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/riseind/railroad/. 11. Crandall Shifflett, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 68. 12. Crandall Shifflett, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 71. 13. Crandall Shifflett, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 72. 14. Dwight Billings, e-mail to authors, February 24, 2014. 15. Crandall Shifflett, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 60. 16. Ronald Lewis, “Beyond Isolation and Homogeneity: Diversity and the History of Appalachia” in Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes, ed. Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, Katherine Ledford (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 1999), 36-37. 17. Katherine Ledford, Dwight B. Billings, and Gurney Norman, Introduction to Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes. (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), x. 18. “Welcome,” The Affrilachian Poets, accessed February 24, 2014, http://www.affrilachianpoets.org/. 19. “Bio,” Appalatin, last modified 2014, http://www.appalatin.com/. Abramson, Rudy, and Jean Haskell. Encyclopedia of Appalachia. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, c2006. Advamgeg, Inc. “Countries and Their Cultures.” Every Culture. http://www.everyculture.com/multi/A-Br/African-Americans.html#ixzz2mKK7odmc. Algeo, Kate. “Locals on Local Color: Imagining Identity in Appalachia.” Southern Cultures 4, no. 4 (2003). Accessed February 11, 2014. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/southern_cultures/v009/9.4algeo.html. Appalachian Regional Commission. “Subregions in Appalachia.” Appalachian Regional Commission. http://www.arc.gov/research/MapsofAppalachia.asp?MAP_ID=31. “Bio.”Appalatin. Last modified 2014. http://www.appalatin.com/. Campbell, John C. The Southern Highlander and His Homeland. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1921. http://books.google.com/books?id=EA0SAAAAYAAJ&oe=UTF-8. Clark, Thomas D. Introduction to The Kentucky Encyclopedia. Dunaway, Wilma A. “Articles Available Online.” Professor Wilma A. Dunaway. http://filebox.vt.edu/users/wdunaway/publications/articles.htm. Dunaway, Wilma A. “Speculators and Settler Capitalists: Unthinking the Mythology about Appalachian Landholding, 1790-1860.” In Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L. Walker, 50-75. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Edwards, Grace Toney, JoAnn Asbury, and Ricky L. Cox. A Handbook to Appalachia: An Introduction to the Region. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, c2006. Eller, Ron D. Uneven Ground: Appalachia since 1945. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. Fisher, Stephen L. “The Grass Roots Speak Back.” In Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes, edited by Katherine Ledford, Dwight B. Billings, and Gurney Norman, xx-xx. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Fox, John. The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1909. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2059. Fox, John. The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. New York: Scribner’s, 1908. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5122. Frost, William Goodell. “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains.” Atlantic Monthly Company, March 1899. http://cdm272901.cdmhost.com/cdm/ref/collection/p15131coll3/id/38. Giardina, Denise. “Appalachian Images: A Personal History.” In Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes, edited by Katherine Ledford, Dwight B. Billings, and Gurney Norman, xx-xx. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Guyette, Elise A. “Gathering and Interactions of Peoples, Cultures, and Ideas: Overview: Immigration to the Americas, Some Overall Themes.” The Flow of History. http://www.flowofhistory.org/themes/movement_settlement/overview.php. Guyette, Elise, Fern Tavalin, and Sarah Rooker. “Gathering and Interactions of Peoples, Cultures, and Ideas: A Brief Timeline of U.S. Policy on Immigration and Naturalization.” The Flow of History. http://www.flowofhistory.org/themes/movement_settlement/uspolicytimeline.php. Harney, William Wallace. “A Strange Land and a Peculiar People.” Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science 12, no. 31 (1873): 429-437. Accessed December 4, 2013. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13964/13964-h/13964-h.htm#strange. Hartman, Ian C. “Appalachian Anxiety: Race, Gender, and the Paradox of “Purity” in an Age of Empire, 1873-1901.” Appalachian Nineteenth Century History 13, no. 2 (2012): 229-255. Accessed October 28, 2013. doi: 10.1080/14664658.2012.712782. Harvard University Library. “Timeline: Key Dates and Landmarks in United States Immigration History.” Aspiration, Acculturation, and Impact: Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930. http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/immigration/timeline.html. Herringshaw, Thomas William. Local and National Poets of America: With Biographical Sketches and Choice Selections From Over One Thousand Living American Poets. (New York: American Publisher’s Association, 1890). http://books.google.com/books?id=QQ5aAAAAMAAJ&dq=%22hester+L.+merrill%22&source=gbs_navlinks_s. Hollingsworth, Lynne. “Comings and Goings: Kentucky’s Immigration and Emigration History.” Louisville Free Public Library. http://www.lfpl.org/pdf/Hollingsworth.pdf. Immigration Restriction League (U.S.). Constitution of the Immigration Restriction League. Collection Development Department, Widener Library, Harvard University. http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/5233215. “Kentucky’s Geographic Regions.” National Digital Newspaper Program: The Kentucky Edition. http://www.uky.edu/Libraries/ndnp/regions.html. Kephart, Horace. Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life Among the Mountaineers. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, c1976. Kleber, John E. The Kentucky Encyclopedia. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, c1992. Ledford, Katherine, Dwight B. Billings, and Gurney Norman. Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Lewis, Ronald L. “Beyond Isolation and Homogeneity: Diversity and the History of Appalachia.” In Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes, edited by Katherine Ledford, Dwight B. Billings, and Gurney Norman, xx-xx. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Lichter, Daniel T., Jillian Garratt, Mary L. MarshalL, and Michael Cardella. “Emerging Patterns of Population Redistribution and Migration in Appalachia.” Appalachian Regional Commission. http://www.arc.gov/research/researchreportdetails.asp?REPORT_ID=26. Murfree, Mary Noailles. In the Tennessee Mountains. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022150613. National Geographic. “Human Migration: The Story of the Cultural Landscape.” National Geographic Education. http://education.nationalgeographic.com/archive/xpeditions/lessons/09/g68/humanmigration.html?ar_a=1. Oxford University Press. Oxford Dictionaries. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/. Pollard, Kelvin M. “A “New Diversity”: Race and Ethnicity in the Appalachian Region.” Appalachian Regional Commission. http://www.arc.gov/research/researchreportdetails.asp?REPORT_ID=34. Pudup, Mary Beth, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L. Waller. Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c1995. Ralph, Julian. “Our Appalachian Americans.” Harper’s Magazine 1903. http://www.unz.org/Pub/Harpers-1903jun-00032. Semple, Ellen Churchill. “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography.” The Geographical Journal 17, no. 6 (1901): 588-623. Accessed March 4, 2014. http://www.archive.org/details/anglosaxonsofken00semp. Shifflett, Crandall A. Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Social Explorer. Social Explorer. http://www.socialexplorer.com/. Special Collections at Belk Library. “Eastern European Immigration in Appalachian Industry.” Appalachian State University. http://www.collections.library.appstate.edu/research-aids/eastern-european-immigration-appalachian-industry. University of Kentucky. ExploreUK. http://exploreuk.uky.edu/. Weiner, Deborah. Coalfield Jews: An Appalachian History. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. “Welcome.” The Affrilachian Poets, accessed February 24, 2014. http://www.affrilachianpoets.org/. Weller, Jack E. Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1965. Bessie Funich, interviewed by Doug Cantrell, Immigrants in the Coal Fields Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries, July 25, 1986, 1986OH264 App 075, http://kentuckyoralhistory.org/interviews/18026. Andrew A. Keleman, interviewed by Doug Cantrell, Immigrants in the Coal Fields Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries, June 24, 1986, 1986OH197 App 064, http://kentuckyoralhistory.org/interviews/18437. Vincent J. Mongiardo, interviewed by Doug Cantrell, Immigrants in the Coal Fields Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries, June 17, 1986, 1986OH195 App 062, http://kentuckyoralhistory.org/interviews/18435. Joseph E. Phipps, interviewed by Doug Cantrell, Immigrants in the Coal Fields Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries, August 15, 1986, 1986OH268 App 077, http://kentuckyoralhistory.org/interviews/18028. Joseph A. Scopa, interviewed by Doug Cantrell, Immigrants in the Coal Fields Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries, July 24, 1986, 1986OH263 App 074, http://kentuckyoralhistory.org/interviews/18025. Ann Tiabian, interviewed by Doug Cantrell, Immigrants in the Coal Fields Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries, June 27, 1986, 1986OH201 App 066, http://kentuckyoralhistory.org/interviews/18439.

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Cultural Shifts in England/The Class Society< Cultural Shifts in England Chapter I: The Class SocietyEdit All animals have a home, not just any old place, but a particular spot, which is familiar and well known, where the animal feels safe and can have its young… The nest or den is a refuge from attack – somewhere to lie up, and rest. Humans are equally drawn to such a place which they defend cherish and consider their own. This place is called home; it is cared for, protected and maintained. As with all human behaviour some people are particularly drawn to their home - their space, and busy themselves cleaning it, working in it; feeling most happy and relaxed when at home…, safe from the maddening world outside. In twentieth century, British society, prior to the First World War, ‘a women’s place was in the home’. This was expected and applied to all females, whatever their age, whether married or unmarried… This also applied to the handicapped, the old and infirm. Those women who could find domestic labour – as a servant - in another person’s home, did so. This was done to relieve the financial burden of the parents. The ‘home’ was not just associated with, ‘where one laid one’s head’; or keeping safe or lowering the drawbridge - to keep out the enemy, but with raising a family, feeding it and nurturing the young. The birth-rate in 1876 was 36 per thousand. This figure declined in the next fifty years to 15. The death-rate in the thirties was just eleven per thousand per year. It was very noticeable between the wars that these figures were very different from the turn of the century. All estimates, rounded up figures, comparisons, actual quotes and trends, have been made, using the Gateway to UK National statistic guidance figures. I am grateful for their work and particular form of display. John Stevenson's: British Society 1914 - 45, and Arthur Marwick's: British Society since 1945, both my continual reference points, thankfully are kept close by... Just before the Second World War nearly half of the population was aged between fifteen and forty-five. There was a worry then, as now - seventy years later, that there is a shortage of workers to support the elderly – as the death-rate declines. The relevance of marriage is being challenged by the consumer society and women’s liberation. Men have lost their power and gained a competitive partner… now we will see ‘who’s worth it!’ The population in 1900 was around thirty-eight million when around five million women worked. A century later the population was nearly sixty million of who thirteen million were working women. In Edwardian times, single men and women were introduced to each other - for them to become acquaintances. For this friendship to be carried further, it was normal behaviour for them to be introduced to each other’s parents… The most important consideration for the parents - if the friendship was a serious attempt by the suitor - to advance his desire, was for the parents to be assured he could maintain their daughter – at least at the same social level. This courting etiquette continued up to WW1. Thereafter, working class young people took it upon themselves to decide for themselves. The middle and upper classes continued the previous courting behaviour. By the 1920s when land, farms, estates, and large houses were split up and sold off. This form of social courtship gradually died out, even for the aristocracy. There have been over the years changes in the vows the couple make to each other when getting married. However, all religious and secular ceremonies uphold certain declarations. The main one being that they both promise to love each other forever… a Christian view would be that Christ died to save us all which is the greatest form of love. I am equally sure that all religions and civil authorities would be based on a similar promise. From a social point of view this creates stability… instills discipline, helps maintain cultural moral standards. Life expectancy at the time of The Great Exhibition was just over forty years of age… this had increased by ten years by 1900… a further fifty years saw the increase to eighty. The average number of children in any one family in the second half of the twentieth century was two. The most significant factor for this reduction is the age of the mother, which has risen to twenty-nine… Until 1857 divorce was allowed only by private Act of Parliament. By 1872, is recorded there were about two hundred divorces granted annually. Nearly one hundred and fifty years later the trend has been upwards, to about 180,000 per annum… about 70% were first marriages affecting couples aged about forty years… granted to women for unreasonable behaviour, to the man, two years separation with consent. The reasons given for this continuing trend include: marrying at a young age, having pre-marital sex, and previous divorce. These depressing figures are pretty general - throughout the western world and English speaking countries. The British society is solidly behind a heterosexual monogamous marriage, accepting sex before marriage. Living with one’s partner is a growing trend, previously called ‘a trial marriage’ now increasingly referred to as ‘cohabitation’. Sexual behaviour, procreation and family life now part of the school’s curriculum, and within the syllabus, a reference to homosexuality. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, just a shade before our period, 1910-2010, the relationship between parents and their children was one of intolerance. The ‘man of the household’, after his wife’s child bearing period, had numerous children – fifteen not being uncommon. The brake on even larger families was the early death of many babies and young children. The father was frequently held in awe; what he said was believed and what he ordered obeyed. Wives addressed their husbands not by using their Christian first names but by their title of Mr. The houses of the many were small and the families large. The only way life could be made bearable was by discipline… this being the main difference between the decades, during this hundred year period. Ridged rules and laws - social, religious and household, were laid down for every facet of life… This was not to inhibit thought, which it did, but linked to behaviour – keeping one’s place, this being a method of suppression…; social behaviour was channeled and funneled, down a narrow path, which all social classes proudly maintained. Each social class, sect and division knew what to: eat, wear, play, perform, and worship. It was possible to move within this structure, both up and down, and within each layer. This was generally brought about by a change affecting the family’s income. As soon as this change occurred the standard of living followed suit. An increase in income could be achieved by: entrepreneurship, education or inherited wealth. One or either of these projected the family upwards. Some of the causes why there was a fall of income: a split-up of the family’s estate, decline in the estates value, a poor marriage, resulting in a divorce, reduction in stock market values, bad investments, government taxes, gamboling, drinking, poor health, war and loss of job. This directed the person downwards – to a lower social level. At the end of the nineteenth century opportunities became open for women working in cloth making factories, as secretaries, and as shop assistants. The liberalization of education enlarged the teaching profession. It was a slow business gaining political and social emancipation. The first country to offer women the vote was New Zealand in 1893 and the last, France, Italy and Japan in 1945. By 1903 women’s suffrage became a force to be reckoned with… By direct action demonstrations were arranged and campaigns held; the result: arrests were made and fines imposed. Gradually by keeping the campaign alive – in the news, the matter became a topic of conversation. In Britain women had to leave the teaching profession and civil service when they became married. This gave women the choice of career or raising a family. In 1912 nurse Margaret Sanger began raising the issue of many adverse health effects caused by too frequent childbirths, abortions and miscarriages. After WWI Marie Stopes, 1880 – 1958, published ‘Married Love’ in 1918 and three years later, ‘Wise Parenthood’. The campaign for women’s rights and ‘Family Planning’ was an enormous success eventually gathering momentum till Lady Sear’s draft, sex anti-discrimination bill in 1973 which itself lead to the 1975 British Sex Discrimination Act, ‘Equal Pay for Equal Work’. However, the First World War did more for the liberation of women that any other factor. It was their work during the war – which made their contribution indispensable, which gained the support of the country. There was no chance of the breach being plugged. Women became independent and liked it. No longer did they have to put up with dominance and derision. As their wages supported their husbands so the increase became indispensable. Standards began to raise expectations climbed and horizons broadened. Large families became a thing of the past and certain sectors of society became women’s preserves. As the First World War got into its stride automation, and the conveyor belt system of mass production, became the norm. Every part of the armed services needed more materials and fighting machines. New trucks, tanks, guns, merchant ships and aero planes were invented and built. Women were an essential part of their production. After the war transportation – the movement of freight became an indispensable part of an industrial society. The production lines that had turned out war materials were now converted to turning out the latest gadgets and household goods. There was more to buy and more money circulated by the increased working population. To cope with the new machines, peacetime activities and the manufacture of consumer goods further and higher education had to keep pace - businesses had to engage new skills and handle new equipment. Colleges and Polytechnics devised courses for the new burgeoning technology. New materials had to be discovered and invented to build the latest machines. As mechanization developed cheaper products became available, as all aspects of society advanced so did the cause of women’s liberation. As the men returned from the war they naturally wanted their old jobs back. The unions assisted this to take place forcing women out of the factories and workshops. Heavy industry and factory workings now became preserves of the men. Building and construction work employed no women. It was in white collar office jobs that women ousted men. Personal assistants, stenographers, secretaries, shorthand typists – typists of all descriptions, roneo-copyists, filing clerks and office juniors gave women employment, even in hard times. Hospitals claimed another vast section of female workers as did shops and department stores. It was these women’s wages that boosted their husband’s earnings. It was this additional money which gave many families extra cash to invest in housing. Gradually, where at onetime, families rented these new-build houses a different group of owner occupiers took possession. New housing estates were developed. All these new homes needed furnishing and household goods. Women not at work had to deal with childrearing and running the home. Shopping and cooking, both required forward planning… tasks that were slotted in-between cleaning the home, washing the clothes, and ironing. Young children were taken to school and picked up; this started and finished every schooldays. Organizing children’s play, extra curricular experiences, and out of school experiences had to be arranged, and paid for. Having a property of one’s own made household chores more bearable giving a sense of positive feedback - doing something for oneself. But it never fully compensated for being paid, an action that demonstrated worthwhileness, and being wanted - having a purpose. House building enjoyed a great boom at the turn of the century. Owner occupation was a complete change from the expectations of previous generations. Building Societies blossomed extending the loan period to twenty years. The housing boom just after the construction of the railway network in the late eighteen hundreds was now extended. New garden suburbs linked towns together filling in the spaces between the railway stations. Mass owner occupations quickly change the previous renting market. Smaller families allowed greater savings. The ten percent deposit on house purchase was now achievable - for the many. Working women peaked at three and a half million – a third of the figure for men. Women were a quarter of the workforce and rising, as more became trained. The employment of women in full and part-time work did not alter the preconceived role of women – having their place within the home looking after the children. The numbers of men ‘domesticated’ were few and far between – men expected to be waited on - their meals ‘ready’ on time. Once again it took another war, and the even greater necessity for women to go out to work, to administer and provide for ‘all out war’. This finally gave them a chance to say, ‘I can choose my own lifestyle’ something they could not do beforehand! A husband and wife began to share household chores. It was still a long way off before they could both focus on their careers. The fifties families turned their backs on the old social order; they wanted a freer more libertarian world where women had the same opportunity as men - with equal pay and conditions. Men, who helped in the home, stayed close to the home and were happy maintaining the fabric of the home, were considered domesticated. Those men who preferred to stay away from the home: to find work, take part in a hobby or sport, join associations and institutions, occupations that drew them away from the home, were considered, undomesticated. Men who found joy in raising children, teaching home economics, attending those who were ill, remained close during confinement and birth, were considered ‘civilly domesticated’. To be domesticated is more to do with a feeling, rather than employment. It is also concerned with all those things which go on inside a house or dwelling – about the furnishings and contents – decoration and layout. In many respects it’s to do with man’s evolution, aestheticism and level of taste. For a man to be domesticated removes him from those that hunt, go to war or seek adventure. It can be said that society is becoming more domesticated as an evolutionary trend – becoming more civilized: the sexes, sharing responsibility, helping raise the children in a safe environment whilst engaging in ‘household activity!’ According to National Statistics there were obvious changes in the number of births from the 1950s to 80s. This was attributed to the changes in the ages of mothers at childbirth. Women born in the 1940s had the lowest - they were those who contributed to the 60s baby boom. The graph shows that it was these women who had more children than those born in the 50s climbing back to 1920s levels. The decline of family size averages in this century is due as much too many women not having children as to smaller sized families. Since 1963 there has been a decline in the number of children born, although since 2003 there has been a slight increase. What has happened is that there are more births to older women – aged 40 and over. The average age of women giving birth is just over 29. The Kinsey Report, [Dr Alfred Kinsey 1894-1956, Sexual Behaviour, Revised 1998], was controversial, eventually became an accepted record of human behaviour; treating the taboo subject with the correct statistical procedures. Dr Spock, [Dr Benjamin Spock, 1903-1998, Children and Child Care, Revised 1992] wrote these two best sellers which have not been bettered, elucidate on all aspects of Marriage and Children. Both these books are essential reading for all couples. Little has changed over the last few years to make his original thoughts irrelevant or out of date. All couples should be aware of the Kinsey Report and its finding’s - particularly those of frequency - of intercourse. They point the finger at normal/average behaviour. It was not only a ground breaking statistical report but highly necessary - to form a basis in understanding. The figures may shock, excite, or fill you with fear, but whatever feeling they do generate, they are statistically proven. The fertility rate for couples in 2008 was 1.97 a rise over the last seven years from 1.63. The last time it registered two was in 1973. The average age for women having a first child remains at 29.3. It can be expected that the fertility rate, long-term, suggest that it will continue to drop, including those of immigrant couples. It might be considered rather mechanical and unromantic to agree to a written statement of intent before marriage. A list of expectations and goals to question each other on understandings and considerations. This seems to me to be a satisfactory way of covering all aspects of life together making sure there are no misconceptions and expectations, for we can all live in a romantic haze, but bills and children have to be considered. This list of topics covered makes sure that each person knows what the other wants and needs and can highlight areas that need explanation and dissecting which may reveal hidden hopes and fears. All answers show a train of thought - indicate an individuals state of mind. It is then up to those who are involved to question themselves, to explore and expose differences. To find areas of agreement - to become more compatible - give a firmer footing for future decisions. The sooner these things are talked through the easier it is. Being open and frank is not being silly but sensible and saves embarrassment later when issues become almost too big to enter into discussion about. Being ‘set in one’s ways’ is after all to be avoided - it limits advancement and discovery. I do understand that some individuals, even if they are disappointed by their intended partner’s answers, will continue with the marriage as an act of defiance. That does not predicate that the answered questionnaire is not valid, it remains a joint effort - made at a particular time and place in the relationship. If one or other changes their opinion - wishes to alter their answer, a revised agreement should be discussed and agreed upon. This ensures the altered position has been aired and it is then up to the couple to find an agreed compromise. There are those who may believe they can alter their partner’s opinions, hopes and desires over a period of time – by stealth, continually pressing the point or raising the issue. This may be achieved if the issue is relatively unimportant, but in the case of sexual matters and children this should never be done – will cause resentment and unhappiness. This may all sound rather cold and clinical taking little regard for continuity and momentary desire. But that is the point, on the spot decisions are rarely good, or long lasting. There is a positive side to ‘talking things through’ and setting them down – to form an agreement. ‘Janet and John met at university – they were on the same course, reading Sociology. After living in hall for their first year they set up camp together – in a shared flat. Their relationship blossomed… spending their vacation’s together - including Christmas’, in each other’s family home. Both sets of parents viewed the situation as ‘the new way’, recognizing that their child was in a stable relationship, which was proving beneficial - each young adult knuckling down to work - supporting each other. Both graduates were expected to obtain a good pass mark and go on to find suitable employment. In their final year they decided to get married, putting off the day until they had each found a secure job and obtain an acceptable employment contract... They explained all this to their parents. They were not alarmed, expecting this to happen, happy that their child was treating the matter seriously. The parents were sufficiently interested to contact each other introducing each other over the phone. They learned that the other’s child had explained the matter, wishing to plan the big occasion, with their parent’s approval. Wanting their child to do as well as possible and not be diverted both sets of parents said that they would help to make a down payment on a car if they succeeded in obtaining a good mark, knowing that being mobile helps when job hunting. The parents decided to speak to their child separately to offer help where they could with the arrangements, and to set out some of the details all couples are faced with when contemplating marriage. Fortunately the parents were happy with their child's choice of partners and keen to ensure their child got off to a good start in married life. Both sets of parents owned their own home, through mortgage repayments – loan and interest. Knowing how hard it was financially, when they first started - keeping up the Direct Debit payments, they were sufficiently concerned to explain how important it was to provide as large a deposit as possible. The parents explained that running a car and saving for a deposit was going to be very difficult… that there would be times when cut backs might have to be made… putting some of their more elaborate plans on the back burner. The parents explained that some jobs are not as secure as others - make mortgage repayments difficult to guarantee. They painted a gruesome picture of the Debt Collector’s or Bailiff’s man calling, removing furniture to the tune of the sum owned. They went on to say that having a good name at the bank by keeping up regular savings, is important for future security… seeking deferred payments requires a good past record. In the future when time needs to be taken off work to have a child or to get over some illness having a sympathetic Bank Manager is a relief. The parents emphasized, that they should become ‘credit worthy’ by keeping their bank accounts free from becoming overdrawn. They went on to explain that it is not always possible to be a member of a health club, golf club or have an overseas holiday, as well as provide extras for a family. Eating out and giving parties might stretch the bank account too far. Their overdrawn accounts cause stress making you short tempered and snappy towards your children - who do not understand. After all, Janet and John hope to be dedicated parents and work hard - there must be some enjoyment… and life after all cannot be perfect all the time! Not all couples want to have children or a large family. The state of marriage is a commitment which is there to provide security for children. If you believe that private education is necessary for your child the fees are a big drain on the family’s account. Not all children are blessed with good health and the possibility of having a child disfigured or disabled should be considered. Perhaps life insurance is a good thing after all? Many consider children necessary for a good marriage although having more than the average number may force you to move house to provide each with a bedroom. Both Janet and John are adamant that they would not allow their children to eat meals in front of the television but to sit up properly at the dining room table, insisting too that mobile phones and recorders are switched off. They believe that children should have their tasks to do and to help with the clearing away and washing up. Before bed each child is questioned about their day making sure there are no unhappy incidents spoiling a happy environment. They both consider it important to listen to their children and to show affection and praise whenever possible. Do you believe it is better to own your own home or to rent? Is it important for you to have children? Do you believe children make a marriage or would it be a disappointment if you only had children of one sex? Is sexual satisfaction important to you? How soon would you like children? Do you believe that it is right to spank your child if they perform badly, misbehave or do not stop shouting? Would you allow swearing in your house? Is your partner’s happiness more important than possessions? If you prefer house purchase rather than renting should the property be in your name, your partners, or jointly owned… will you make that commitment in a will. Would you live in an old farmhouse or modern villa, built in the country or in a town? If you insist on natural food cultivation without chemicals would you be prepared to grow your own? If children are sought are you prepared to relocate to a larger home, close to a school, or near a baby minder? Would you extend into the attic? Do you believe in selection for grammar schools or are comprehensive schools good for all. Perhaps you believe secondary modern schools are only fitting for a certain group in society. If your child requires special medical treatment, needing its own room, would you be prepared to move? Would you rather furnish the home before starting a family? If you can only afford to furnish the kitchen and bedroom how long would you wait to do the remainder - before starting a family? Would you have your parent live with you rather than rely upon the state to provide a home. If the house needs redecoration are you going to do it or would you call in someone else. How good are you at replacing a fuse? What style of furniture and décor do you prefer? Are your partner’s tastes similar to your own? Would you say you and your partner are in the same social class? Do you and your partner enjoy similar music and film subjects or have a hobby, or sport preference. Which television programmers do you enjoy and are they compatible with your partners. It is said that having ‘A Belief’ leads to a more fulfilled life. Do you agree? Is it important to you to be married in church? If you lose a game does that make you keen to improve your skill or do you tend to give up. The … Monarchy increases tourism Are you happy to provide the taxes to maintain the status quo? Do you believe a pet gives the home a comfortable feel? Do you think of the world’s sustainability when you fill you car with petrol or diesel, or when you put out the rubbish? Do you know about the Kingsley Report, or have read Dr Spock on Child Care. Do you pay your bills promptly or do you wait until the last moment. What do you think is more important, ‘to keep to your word or give in to doubts’? Now we have explored each others thoughts - hopes and fears, discovering hidden feelings, concerns, and attitudes, we are in a better position to openly discuss many other issues. There are some who believe they know their own minds - are sure in their opinions and feelings. Some are not so sure. There are those who believe they know what they want but cannot give voice to them – perhaps they are shy or retiring; and there are others who can never make a decision – because they can see so many conflicting issues – each problem a stumbling block to be overcome. How infinitely more difficult it is to ask people about their sexual needs, and how those needs are going to be satisfied, especially considering such matters as physical, emotional and social variations in an changing environment. It’s a wonder that any marriage remains constant. It is an answer to all these variables, that make having some sort of contract or statement, of prime purpose.

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Should I use 'traveled' or 'travelled'? The words ‘traveled’ and ‘travelled’ are the same word, the world simply cannot reach an agreement on the spelling. The Associated Press Stylebook dictates that 'traveled' should be used in American and Canadian publications, while 'travelled' is better suited for publications in other English-speaking regions. One should follow the same guidelines when spelling 'traveling and 'travelling'. Both the Oxford dictionary and the Collins dictionary prefer word ‘travelled’ (with two L’s). Associated Press Stylebook Use of ‘traveled’ and ‘travelled’ in American EnglishThis Ngram indicates the use of ‘traveled’ and ‘travelled’ in American books, journals, and magazines published from 1800 to 2000. As you can see, ‘travelled’ (with two L’s) was used exclusively in the early 1880s. Its use has declined continuously so that ‘traveled’ (with one L) is predominantly used by writers today. The APA Style Guide Use of ‘traveled’ and ‘travelled’ in British EnglishThis Ngram indicates the use of ‘traveled’ and ‘travelled’ in British books, journals, and magazines published from 1800 to 2000. In the United Kingdom, ‘travelled’ (with two L’s) was used exclusively until the 1900s and remains the preferred spelling today. Which is correct, ‘traveled’ or ‘travelled’?Whether you use ‘traveled’ or ‘travelled’ when writing will depend upon your intended audience. The word ‘travelled’ (with two L’s) should be used when writing for British publications while ‘traveled’ (with one L) is preferred by American publishers. The MLA Style Guide Example sentences using ‘traveled’ - Heat from the fire passed into the poker, traveled along it, and warmed it. - In that day, all explorers traveled with an outfit of priests. - One does not appreciate the sight of earth until he has traveled through a flood. - The snow was on the ground, and they traveled all night, lest others should follow them. - They traveled from southwest Missouri to St. - During the years of his education he traveled to Switzerland, to London and Paris. - After the war, he traveled and went on numerous safaris. - After her graduation Regina traveled even more extensively. - Viezca was arrested as he traveled to San Antonio. - Some Texans traveled to the United States seeking aid. - He also traveled widely in Europe and the Mediterranean. - McCormick based the village Lakshmi lives on those she traveled to. - In July 2011, he traveled but not compete with the team when they toured Europe. - From the mouth of the Quinault they traveled to Aberdeen and then to Seattle. - In 2010, about 80,000 passengers traveled via the airport. - He has traveled around the country speaking at hundreds of Presbyterian Churches. - They then traveled to Iroquois Falls, Ontario for the Dudley Hewitt Cup. - At Hampton, he sang with the Hampton Quartet and traveled extensively. - Blackstone and his daughter traveled to the Holy Land in 1888. - Walter Chappell traveled extensively during his career. - In 1937, he traveled with his brother and wife Alicia to the United States. - In 1942, Weil traveled to the United States of America with her family. - Zip also traveled extensively with the Ringling Brothers circus. - The Mohawks that traveled this trail were said to be friendly to white settlers. - They traveled to the State Hermitage Museum. - In 2000, he traveled to Washington D.C. on a goodwill mission. - Taking a break from Salem, Celeste traveled the world. Example sentences using ‘travelled’ - Do you seriously believe that that machine has travelled into time? - You mean to say that that machine has travelled into the future? - They were put into my pocket by Weena, when I travelled into Time. - I travelled here and there, but I found no one, and I travelled home. - They travelled to Italy, where John died in. - Allan travelled to Rome, where he studied with Hamilton. - The hearse then travelled to the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks, London. - In the following year they travelled to France. - It is estimated that Smith Sr. travelled at over during the flight. - From 1993, he travelled to several Central European countries. - He also travelled to Italy and Yugoslavia. - The British had travelled thousands of miles to arrive in India. - In 2003 he was selected for the India A team which travelled to England. - Benson has travelled extensively and has had no settled career. - In the interview, he mentioned that he has travelled to more than 90 countries. - His family also travelled around the world during these trips. - For 32 days, "U-30" travelled up the west coast of Norway. - During his 36-year career he has widely travelled to over fifty countries. - After the Bolshevik revolution, Ouspensky travelled to London by way of Istanbul. - In these years, he often travelled to Iran and Central Asia. - He travelled widely, including to Petrograd and Moscow. - In the late 1950s, he travelled to New York City to settle down. - In 1838 Maximilian Joseph travelled to Egypt and Palestine. - As prebendary he also travelled through Europe on official matters. Trends in the use of ‘traveled’ and ‘travelled’This graph shows the trends in the use of ‘traveled’ by country. You can compare with this graph which indicates the trends in the use of ‘travelled’ by country. Example sentences using ‘traveled’He first traveled in 1780, to Lapland in the company of several other botanists. She subsequently traveled to the United States for medical treatment. He traveled extensively in Europe, Australia, Asia and Africa. He traveled to the United States in 1923, surveying business conditions there. Lois is a housewife, and traveled around on fundraisers. From 2003 to 2004, she traveled around Italy. He traveled to Canada and California in 1886. She traveled in the Racing Fair Circuit along with her family in the summers. He was also unaware that he had traveled through time. Certainly, it is elemental understanding how people traveled and traded. This is the most traveled route into the field of forensics. He traveled to India and saw combat during engagements with the French Navy. They then left him in Kefalonia and traveled to Greece. Gray has traveled throughout the United States to make presentations. Later, he traveled to Mexico and studied at the "Academy of San Carlos". Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day. At the end of January 1925 he traveled to the French Riviera with his wife. When he was 15 he traveled to Lima to work as a photographer apprentice. From 1817 to 1823 Mazloum traveled in France and in Vienna. In 2003 the group traveled to England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. They traveled around France, playing at weddings, festivals, and in the streets. Prices increase if multiple zones are traveled. He then traveled to Egypt before returning to Damascus, where he taught students of his own. Example sentences using ‘travelled’He travelled to Haripur where he was joined by Akbar Qureshi and both reached Kabul. However, in 1691 he travelled to Flanders to fight as a "gentleman volunteer". The highway is heavily travelled within St. He travelled extensively, toured Europe and lingered in Italy. The following spring, he travelled to Antler Creek in the Cariboo. He also had travelled on a holy journey to India with Dr. Somvir. Here Shackleton, who had travelled on a faster ship, rejoined the expedition. He was accorded a warm welcome in Colombo and he travelled all over Sri Lanka. After the war he travelled to Paris where Maud Gonne lived. Owing to impaired health, he travelled in Europe in 1860-1862. For this purpose, he travelled to Concord, Massachusetts, and visited Walden Pond. Later that month, Carlton travelled to Japan to promote the album there. It travelled to Ceylon (nowadays called Sri Lanka). William was not ready to be tied down, and travelled about the State in a multitude of occupations. In 1923 he travelled to Europe with Luis Bayón Herrera. Women travelled to Singapore only from the 1860s, and even then in small numbers. While serving on the "Woolwich" he travelled to the Cape of Good Hope and to St. While serving aboard the "Cornelia" he travelled to Bombay. After initially staying with a shepherd after they arrived in Greece, they travelled to Tripoli. He then travelled to New York in early summer. He then travelled to Saratoga, New Haven, New York, and Philadelphia. He later claimed to have travelled to California in 1833. He travelled to Philadelphia again by autumn 1834. In 1960 Anderson travelled to London, England where his father was living. Having missed his ship, Bole changed his plans and travelled to Victoria. In the rematch on March 12, the Vamps travelled to Victoria. Starting off with just a few accusations regarding the doctrine of the merits of saints, the group grew considerably and size and later targeted more practices. From the school’s humble beginnings which sort to educate the black community to its now being ranked among the nation’s top universities. Since stakeholders are expecting the handbooks, a chain of command flow-chart could be inserted into it. The entire process will be created for identifying the potential key roles of the company by taking their performance and leadership behaviour into account. Africa has witnessed around seventy-three civil wars in which more than one thousand people have died, and more than ninety prevent of the casualties are civilians. This is why Geers borrows ideologies from many different cultures in order to show that regardless of our religious, and cultural differences, we are connected to politically wether we take part actively, or allow it to be absorbed passively. Traveled vs. travelledWhile some may simply view networks for the economic benefits they provide, others see them as a extended family and they represent something hugely important and influential in many aspects of their lives. In the beginning of the 1990s, vehicle wraps suddenly went viral, and began to revolutionize the outdoor advertising industry, increasing the popularity of fleet graphics design and mobile advertising. Remuneration is the total compensation that an employee receives in exchange for the service performed for their employer. Clinical practise often lags behind laboratory research, but screening for common genetic mutations known to have prognostic significance appears to be growing in importance as a method for risk stratifying patients with normal cytogenetics (thus aiding difficult clinical transplantation decisions). Therefore if you have not believed,the devil has trapped you and it is deceiving you that there is no heaven so that you do not believe and get baptised and go to heaven. Once again, prior to graduate school, I had never utilized video conferencing tools for professional collaboration. What is the meaning of traveled?Working with an experienced real estate company like Boston City Properties is an important part of successful real estate investing in Beacon Hill. The mainstream Nazi conception of women owed its flexibility to this principle, for the ideal Nazi woman owed service to the state above all else. This career was brought to sudden halt when he was seriously injured by enemy mortar fire. Even though it is not clear on the exact number of patents Woodman has, it is evident that he has the knowledge, and he can achieve what he wants. Any changes in the characteristics of the product or system, user, task or environment may produce a change in usability. Again, assuming that the expected dividend of the stock does not change, the only factor that can cause an increase in the expected return of the stock, according to (Eq. Despite of her respectable position, she still managed to convince and trick Bob into marrying her daughter by using social stigma and arrangement that will benefit her and her daughter’s future. However, given there is no set standard in managing fever, caution should be warranted when extrapolating these results. The following are the key factors that help getting an early diagnosis of depression and better treatment. For other developing countries, English might have some negative impacts to their cultures and native languages, but it still has positive effects, such as allowing the rest of world to access your country’s culture and hearing your opinions. Yumuşak güç stratejisinde dikkat edilmesi gereken etkenler: mesajın kaynağı, mesajın içeriği ve alıcı tarafı gibi etkenlerdir (Çavuş, 2012:26). Wilson, a 30 year veteran in the oil and gas industry, Petrohawk grew rapidly through various acquisitions and mergers. The shooting at Kent state in May of 1970 was one of the most influential moment of the Vietnam era and cause widespread political dissent throughout college campuses and in many parts of the country. The facilities and services about maritime are expand in Third Malaysian Plan .This is also related or including service in Malaysia’s own shipping line. What is the meaning of travelled?As loosely interpreted in Twain's notices, to seek meaning or to analyze this text is punishable by death...of your free time (Clemens, 130). Results indicated that the stress levels of both parents were connected with their child’s age, intelligence level, autism severity, and adaptive behaviors. The last subdivision of the city contained citizens of lower classes such as merchants, shop keepers and farmers. However, in order to address those issues from their core it is essential that we either introduce a new convention or alter various aspects of CEDAW to accommodate older women’s rights. The union of these principles is said to be the root and womb of all creation. The fire and burning as described in the tyger, painting an image of anger and power within the poem represents both a gift to mankind but also a burden, it provides warmth and light, yet left untamed or put in the wrong hands it will spread and cause havoc. Mayer’s reagent reacts with lone pairs of nitrogen that present in alkaloids to form creamy precipitate, which known as mercury salt (El-Sakka 2010). When should I use traveled?Once media begins to cover a story about racial tensions and criminal activities most reporters report on the crime because of the race, and not so much as the crime itself. During the first ever live television debate, Kennedy was able to pull ahead in the polls because of the way that he appeared when compared to Nixon. At first glance a leaf may look very different from the root system of a plant or the stem of a plant but in reality, when you take a closer look to its structure it’s the same. The automotive exhaust emission is one of the significant reasons of the haze, it contain many particulate matters and toxic gas. To ignore or deny the existence of female misogyny would be to ignore its potential to damage the prospects of women in the workplace, and the fact that all misogyny stands in the way of advancement towards gender equality. The courses include field exposures and classroom practices to give the students some kind of idea about the real job market. The before and after graphs are very similar with almost no change done to the water quality of the canals and river. When should I use travelled?In this way, one can argue, the author has created a narrative as an extension of himself not only by portraying his own experiences in the novel, but also by discussing and bringing forth issues that were important to him and that needed to be addressed at the time. Rituals and beliefs surrounding death and dying Death is a natural process and Amish do not believe in interfering with God’s will. Her personality is unsavoury reputed by the young residents who spoke of her as The Madam (James 38). Selain itu pendekatan filologis dan sosiologis seperti yang dilakukan Ota Atsushi juga akan digunakan penulis untuk mempertajam analisis data. The fifth factor is that there are many people stating their opinion out in the open such as politicians, journalists, editors and reporters. There has also been an increase in the number of HIV/AIDs infected people who have been the recipients of ARVs, which has helped a great deal in keeping their lives longer. Whereas in a Chinese context, social networks provide primarily economic benefits, for Filipinos social networks are important in terms of emotional stability and friendship connections. Who holds, an office to which some public duty in attached and which he may be called upon to perform, Consequently, an unpaid apprentice in the office of a Sub-Registrar in Bengal is not a public servant even though his services, be reimbursed by the Sub-Registrar out of his allowance. Finally, trucks had to be called in to pick up these dead bodies, lying around on the roadside, and transported to mass graves far from the area. Fakat yumuşak güç kullanırken ne askeri güce harcanan kadar ne de ekonomik güce harcanan kadar bir maliyet oluşmaz. Role ambiguity is the perception that one lacks information necessary to perform a work or assignment, leading the perceiver to feel abandoned. Step IX: Recommendation for Action: Based on the ranks, as interpreted in the Interpretive Ranking Model, the decision about the preferred alternative(s) is to be made. And the virtual groups are the workforces who are involve workers from different elements of any association, these representatives can be circulated crosswise over different areas and between different organizations. By utilising this property of light we can monitor interactions in real time between proteins or small compounds and other substances by observing the shift in the resonance angle and therefore the minimum of the reflected light intensity (Figure 1.28) . The book itself is divided into two parts, the first explaining three models of determining how we can know which books belong in the canon and the second defending the model. During ischemia, which usually triggers oxidative stress and cell injury/death, DNA in cardiac cells are protected when EndoG is suppressed by shRNA knockdown . Firstly, this study shows that a correlative relationship exists between the amount and type of social capital an immigrant possess and the quality of their social integration. Note 2:There is a sudden change of expression from apparent boredom to glee between the time 4479 shoots the first hostage and Batman’s arrival. How do I use traveled?In future, they will contribute in universities business a lot, due to high demand of online education (virtual). This allowed the more independent and “not-so famous” individuals a chance to create a name and get their work on the big screen without limitations. We will examine the limit of Treasury bills when there is a credible prospect for an agreement and a disbursement of an installment. On the contrary Uganda also have a culture and religion that is man-dominated but, however, they used their belief to solve the crisis of AIDS. In Siva Purana, Brahma had inadequate power to create women until Siva appeared in his androgynous form of Ardhanarishvara. This is because Sabah receives one of the highest irradiation levels which is about 6100 Wh/m2/day. Over the years, several attempts have been made to separate patients in terms of their disease characteristics to help in accurate prognostication, treatment algorithms and to guide research. Renault does not release financial details of the Dacia brand, but Morgan Stanley Research calculates it posted a 9 per cent operating profit margin in 2012, against a negative 2 per cent margin for the core Renault brand. How do I use travelled?The OSH Act consists of different duties of care for health and safety at workplace for staff, managers, contractors, people involved in hiring employees, importers and so on. Although any of these modifications could be used alone, incorporating these combined recommendations is suggested to achieve the greatest positive impact for the organization. Successful integration of immigrants into a new society is dependent on certain conditions on the part of the immigrant themselves and the host society – something that could perhaps be described as “openness”. Managers should note that all changes should be implemented as part of a strategy in order to accomplish an overall goal; these transformations should not take place just for the sake of change. In the same vein, Choe et al (1993) obtain that firms are more likely use seasoned equity issues to finance the takeover if debt financing no longer has advantages. Considering the bugs of present accounting standards, accounting regulators examine the impacts of these accounting bugs and seek the solution to amend and improve the accounting standards.

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is the Leier of Germany, Lira of Italy, and Lyre of France, and anciently represented the fabled instrument invented by Hermes and given to his half-brother Apollo, who in turn transferred it to his son Orpheus, the musician of the Argonauts, of whom Shakespeare wrote: While Manilius said that its service in its last owner's hands, in the release of Eurydice from Hades, Gain'd it Heaven, and still its force appears, As then the Rocks it now draws on the Stars. From its ownership by these divinities came various adjectival titles: Ἑρμαίη and Κυλλεναίη, referring to Hermes and his birthplace; Cicero's Clara Fides Cyllenea and Mercurialis, that Varro also used;a and the Cithara, or Lyra, Apollinis, Orphei, Orphica, and Mercurii. It also was Lyra Arionis and Amphionis, from those skilful players; but usually it was plain Lyra and, later on, Cithara; Fides, — the Fidis of Columella, who, with Pliny, also used Fidicula; Decachordum; and Tympanum. In this same connection we see Fidicen, the Lyrist; Deferens Psalterium; and Canticum, a Song. The occasional early title Aquilaris was from the fact that the instrument was often shown hanging from the claws of the Eagle also imagined in its stars. In Greece it was Κιθάρα; the ancient Φόρμιγξ, the first stringed instrument of the Greek bards; and Λύρα or Λύρη, and Λύρα κατοφερής, the Pendent Lyre. Ovid mentioned its seven strings as equaling the number of the Pleiades; Longfellow confirming this number in his Occultation of Orion: with its celestial keys, Its chords of air, its frets of fire, The Samian's great Aeolian Lyre, Rising through all its sevenfold bars, From earth unto the fixéd stars. Still it has been shown with but six, and a vacant space for the seventh, which Spence, in the Polymetis, referred to the Lost Pleiad. Manilius seems to have made two distinct constellations of this, — Lyra and Fides, — although we do not know their boundaries, and the subject is somewhat confused in his allusions to it. The Persian Hafiz called it the Lyre of Zurah, and his countrymen translated Κιθάρα by Ṣanj Rūmi; the Arabians turning this into Al Ṣanj, from which Hyde and others derived Asange, Asenger, Asanges, Asangue, Sangue, and Mesanguo, all titles for Lyra in Europe centuries ago. But Assemani thought that these were from Schickard's Azzango, a Cymbal. The reproduced p282Alfonsine Tables of 1863‑67 give Alsanja; while Ṣanj was again turned into Arnig and Aznig in the translation of Reduan's Commentary, and into the still more unlikely Brinek, as has been explained by Ideler. In Bohemia our Lyre was Hauslicky na Nebi, the Fiddle in the Sky; but the Teutons knew it as Harapha, and the Anglo-Saxons as Hearpe, which Fortunatus of the 6th century, the poet-bishop of Poitiers, called the barbarians' Harpa. With the early Britons it was Talyn Arthur, that hero's Harp. Novidius said that it was King David's Harp; but Julius Schiller, that it was the Manger of the Infant Saviour, Praesepe Salvatoris. Jugum has been wrongly applied to it, from the Ζυγόν of Homer, but this was for the Yoke, or Cross-bar, of the instrument, with no reference to the constellation, which Homer probably did not know; still the equivalent Ζύγωμα was in frequent use for it by Hipparchos. Sundry other fancied figures have been current for these stars. Acosta mentioned them as Urcuchillay, the parti-colored Ram in charge of the heavenly flocks of the ancient Peruvians; Albegala and Albegalo occur with Bayer and Riccioli, like the Arabic Al Baghl, a Mule, although their appropriateness is not obvious; and Naṣrº al Dīn wrote of α, ε, and ζ collectively as Dik Paye among the common people of Persia; this was the Χυτρό-πους, or Greek tripod, and the Uthfiyyah of the nomad Arabs. Chirka, also attributed to Naṣr al Dīn, was, by some scribe's error for Ḣazaf, figured in this location on the Dresden globe as a circular vessel with a flat bottom and two handles; but on the Borgian it is a Scroll, commonly known, according to Assemani, as Rabesco. The association of Lyra's stars with a bird perhaps originated from a conception of the figure current for millenniums in ancient India, — that of an Eagle or Vulture; and, in Akkadia, of the great storm-bird Urakhga before this was there identified with Corvus. But the Arabs' title, Al Naṣr al Wāḳiʽ,1a — Chilmead's Alvaka, — referring to the swooping Stone Eagle of the Desert, generally has been attributed to the configuration of the group α, ε, ζ, which shows the bird with half-closed wings, in contrast to Al Naṣr al Ṭā᾽ir,1b the Flying Eagle, our Aquila, whose smaller stars, β and γ, on either side of α, indicate the outspread wings. Scaliger cited the synonymous Al Naṣr al Sākiṭ, from which came the Nessrusakat of Bayer and Nessrusakito of Assemani. Al Sufi, alone of extant Arabian authors, called it Al Iwazz, the Goose. Chrysococca wrote of it as Γυψ καθήμενος, the Sitting Vulture, and it has been Aquila marina, the Osprey, and Falco sylvestris, the Wood Falcon. p283Its common title two centuries ago was Aquila cadens, or Vultur cadens, the Swooping Vulture, popularly translated the Falling Grype, and figured with upturned head bearing a lyre in its beak. Bartsch's map has the outline of a lyre on the front of an eagle or vulture. Aratos called it Χέλυς ὀλίγη, the Little Tortoise or Shell, thus going back to the legendary origin of the instrument from the empty covering of the creature cast upon the shore with the dried tendons stretched across it. Lowell thus described its discovery and use by Hermes: So there it lay through wet and dry, As empty as the last new sonnet. Till by and by came Mercury, And, having mused upon it, "Why, here," cried he, "the thing of things In shape, material and dimension! Give it but strings and, lo! it sings — A wonderful invention." The equivalent Latin word Chelys does not seem to have been often applied to the constellation, but the occasional adjectival titles Lutaria, Mud-inhabiting, and Marina were, and are, appropriate, while Testudo has been known from classical times. Horace thus alluded to it [Carm. I.32]: Decus Phoebi, et dapibus supremi Grata testudo Jovis; O laborum the poet doubtless having in mind the current story that the Tortoise-Lyre was placed in the sky near Hercules for the alleviation of his toil. The Alfonsine illustration is of a Turtle, Galapago in the original Spanish, which Caesius turned into the indefinite Belua aquatica, and La Lande into Mus and Musculus, some marine creature, not the little rodent. Other names were Testa, the creature's Upper Shell; and Pupilla, which, by a roundabout process of continued blundering explained by Ideler, was derived from Testa, or, as seems more likely, from Aquila. Bayer's Βάσανος is probably a mistranslation of Testa that also signified a Test. Smyth said that another Testudo was at one time proposed as a constellation title for some of the outside stars of Cetus, between the latter's tail and the cord of Pisces. When the influence of Greek astronomy made itself felt in Arabia, many of the foregoing designations, or adaptations thereof, became current; among them Nablon, from Νάβλα, or Nablium, the Phoenician Harp; Al Lurā, which degenerated into Allore, Alloure, Alohore, Alchoro, etc., found p284in the Alfonsine Tables and other bygone lists; Shalyāḳ and Sulaḥfāt, words for the Tortoise, Ulug Beg's translator having the former as Shelyāk, which Piazzi repeated in his catalogue; Salibāḳ, which heads Kazwini's chapter on the Lyre; — Ideler tracing these Arabic words to Χέλυς. They were turned into Azulafe and Zuliaca in the original Alfonsine Tables, and Schaliaf in Chilmead's Treatise. The Almagest of 1515 combines all these figures for Lyra's stars in its Allore: et est Vultur cadens: et est Testudo; while that of 1551 says Lyrae Testudo. But, notwithstanding the singularly diverse conceptions as to its character, the name generally has been Lyra, and the figure so shown. Roman coins still in existence bear it thus, as does one from Delos, Apollo's birthplace in the Cyclades; and Cilician money had this same design with the head of Aratos on the obverse. The Leyden Manuscript has the conventional instrument, with side bars of splendid horns issuing from the tortoise-shell base; the Venetian Hyginus of 1488, with a similar figure, calls it Lura as well as Lyra; but the drawing of Hevelius shows "an instrument which neither in ancient nor in modern times ever had existence." Dürer's illustration, as well as others, places it with the base towards the north. Lyra is on the western edge of the Milky Way, next to Hercules, with the neck of Cygnus on the east, and contains 48 stars according to Argelander, 69 according to Heis. Its location is noted as one of the various regions of concentration of stars with banded spectra, Secchi's 3d type, showing a stage of development probably in advance of that of our sun. From near its κ, 5° southwest of Wega, radiate the swiftly moving Lyraids, the meteors which are at their maximum of appearance on the 19th and 20th of April, but visible in lesser degree from the 5th of that month to the 10th of May. These have been identified as followers of the comet 1 of 1861. . . . azure Lyra, like a woman's eye, Burning with soft blue lustre. Willis' The Scholar of Thebet ben Khorat. Wega, less correctly Vega, originated in the Alfonsine Tables from the Wāḳiʽ of the Arabs, Bayer having both titles; Scaliger, Waghi; Riccioli, Vuega vel Vagieh; and Assemani, Veka. The Greeks called it Λύρα, which, in the 16th‑century Almagests and Tables, was turned into Allore, Alahore, and Alohore. Among Latin writers it was Lyra, in classical days as in later, seen in p285the Almagest of 1551 as Fulgens quae in testa est & vocatur Lyra; and in Flamsteed's Testa fulgida dicta Lyra; but Cicero also used Fidis specially for the star, as did Columella and Pliny [XVIII, passim], Fides and Fidicula, its preëminent brightness fully accounting for the usurpation of so many of its constellation's titles, indeed undoubtedly originating them. In Holland's translation of Pliny it is the Harp-star. The Romans made much of it, for the beginning of their autumn was indicated by its morning setting. It was this star that, when the hour of its rising was alluded to, called forth Cicero's remark, "Yes, if the edict allows it," — a contemptuous reference to Caesar's arbitrary, yet sensible, interference with the course of ancient time in the reformation of the calendar, an interference that occasioned as much dissatisfaction in his day as did Pope Gregory's reform2 in the 16th century. Sayce identifies Wega, in Babylonian astronomy, with Dilgan, the Messenger of Light, a name also applied to other stars; and Brown writes of it: At one time Vega was the Pole-star called in Akkadian Tir-anna ("Life of Heaven"), and in Assyrian Dayan-same ("Judge of Heaven"), as having the highest seat therein; but fourteen millenniums have passed since Wega occupied that position! The Chinese included it with ε and ζ in their Chih Neu, the Spinning Damsel, or the Weaving Sister, at one end of the Magpies' Bridge over the Milky Way, — Aquila, their Cow Herdsman, being at the other; but the story, although a popular one not only in China, but also in Korea and Japan, is told with many variations, parts of Cygnus sometimes being introduced. These same three stars were the 20th nakshatra, Abhijit, Victorious, the most northern of these stellar divisions and far out of the moon's path, but apparently utilized to bring in this splendid object; or, as Mueller says, because it was of specially good omen, for under its influence the gods had vanquished the Asuras; these last being the Hindu divinities of evil, similar to the Titans of Greece. It was the doubtful one of that country's lunar stations, included in some, but omitted in others of their lists in all ages of their astronomy, and entirely different from the corresponding manzil and sieu, which lay in Capricorn. The Hindus figured it as a p286Triangle, or as the three-cornered nut of the aquatic plant Cringata, Wega marking its junction with the adjoining Çravana. Hewitt says that in Egypt it was Maʽat, the Vulture-star, when it marked the pole, — this was 12000 to 11000 B.C. (1), — and Lockyer, that it was the orientation point of some of the temples at Denderah long antecedent to the time when γ Draconis and α Ursae Majoris were so used, — probably 7000 B.C., — one of the oldest dates claimed by him in connection with Egyptian temple worship. Owing to precession, it will be the Polaris of about 11500 years hence, by far the brightest in the whole circle of successive pole-stars, and then 4½ ° from the exact point, as it was about 14300 years ago. In 1880 it was 51°20′ distant. Professor Lewis Boss and Herr Stumpe place near it the Apex of the Sun's Way. Picard failed in his efforts to obtain its parallax in the 17th century, but Struve thought that he had succeeded in this by his observations previous to 1840; still much discrepancy exists in the recent determinations. Elkin, in 1892, gave it as 0ʺ.092; or, to put it in popular language, if the distance from the earth to the sun be regarded as •one foot, that from Wega would be 158 miles. The 10th‑magnitude companion, about 48ʺ away, used for some of these determinations, is entirely independent of it, although difficult to be seen owing to the great brilliancy of Wega. At least two other still fainter companions also have been found. This was the first star submitted to the camera, by the daguerreotype process, at the Harvard Observatory on the 17th of July, 1850. It lies on the western edge of the constellation figure, and, after Sirius, is the most prominent of the stars showing spectra of the Sirian type; yet, with all its splendor, affords but 1/9 of the latter's light. Still it is supposed to be enormously larger than our sun, proportionately very much hotter. It is moving toward our system at the rate of about 9½ miles a second, and makes "the nearest approach in the northern hemisphere to an independently blue star"; while its flashing brilliancy justifies its being called the Arc-light of the sky. Miss Mitchell strangely called it pale yellow. Wega rises at sunset far toward the north on the 1st of May, and, being visible at some hour of every clear night throughout the year, is an easy and favorite object of observation. It culminates on the 12th of August. With ε and ζ it formed one of the Arabs' several Athāfiyy, this one being "of the people," while the others, fainter in Aries, Draco, Musca, and Orion, were "of the astronomers"; for sky objects are often very plain to them that are invisible to the ordinary observer. Sheliak, Shelyak, and Shiliak are from Al Shilyāk, one of the Arabian names for Lyra. The star lies about 8° southwest from Wega and 2½ ° west from γ. With δ and ι it was Tsan Tae in China. The changes in its brilliancy, detected by Goodricke in 1784, were fully investigated by Argelander from 1840 to 1859, and showed a regularly increasing period of variability which now is 12 days, 21¾ hours, with several fluctuations of a somewhat complex nature. Like γ Cassiopeiae and other variables of the Sirian type, it shows in its spectrum, — perhaps the best specimen of Pickering's 4th class, — not only the usual dark lines, but also the bright lines of glowing gases, hydrogen and helium being especially conspicuous. Pickering concluded, from the singular character and behavior in the shifting of these lines, that the chief star must consist of at least two luminous bodies rotating around a common centre of gravity at a very great rate of speed, perhaps three hundred miles a second, the period of revolution equaling the period of variability. Scheiner says of it, "There is great probability that more than two bodies are concerned in the case of β Lyrae"; and yet it may not be impossible, in view of the recent discoveries at the Johns Hopkins Laboratory, that variations of pressure may be concerned in this remarkable shifting of lines.3 2½ east of β is Sulafat, from another of the titles of the whole constellation. Jugum, formerly seen for it, may have come from a misunderstanding of Bayer's text, where it probably is used merely to designate the star's position on the frame of the Lyre, his words being ad dextrum cornu, Ζυγόν, Iugum, — a fair example of the indefiniteness of much of his stellar nomenclature. At a distance point ⅓ of the distance from β to γ is the wonderful Ring Nebula, NGC 6720, 57 M., discovered in 1772 by Darquier from Toulouse, although its apparent annular form was not revealed till later by Sir William Herschel's observations. In our day high-powers show its oval form somewhat undefined at the edges, with a dark opening in the centre containing a few very faint stars, among which, visible only in the largest telescopes, but prominent in photographs, is a central condensation of light like a star. p288The spectrum of nebula and central "star" is purely gaseous. Although appearing oval to us, it is supposed to be nearly circular, but seen obliquely. It is the only annular nebular visible through small telescopes, although there are six others now known. These are the celebrated Double Double, each pair probably separately revolving in a period of over two hundred years, and both pairs perhaps revolving around their common centre of gravity; but if so, the period is to be reckoned only by millenniums, for the measures of the last fifty years show no sensible orbital motion. This is by far the finest object of the kind in all the heavens. They are 207ʺ apart, and, to the ordinary eye, form an elongated star; but exceptionally sharp sight will resolve them without aid. The pairs are 3ʺ.2 and 2ʺ.45 apart respectively, and a good 2¼‑inch glass with a power of 140 will separate each pair. The position angle of the components of ε1 is 12°; and of those of ε2, 132°; while that of ε1 and ε2 is 173°. Their "double-double" character was first published by the Jesuit father Christian Mayer in 1779, although its discovery has generally been attributed to Sir William Herschel. The distance between ε1 and ε2, small as it is, is nearly twice that noticed by astronomers, in 1846, — 128ʺ — between the actual and the computed positions of the planet Uranus, a discrepancy which convinced them of the existence of a still more remote planet and led to the discovery of Neptune. Such is the marvelous nicety of modern astronomical measurements! Between these stars lie three very much fainter, two of which, of the 13th magnitude, are the Debilissima, Excessively Minute, of Sir John Herschel, discovered by him in 1823. ε and ζ form an equilateral triangle with Wega, the sides about 2° long; ε being at the northern angle. These three stars were one of the Athāfiyy of the early Arabs. η, a 4.4‑magnitude, is Aladfar in the Century Atlas, by some confusion with the star μ; and with θ, of the same brilliancy, was, in China, Leën Taou, Paths within the Palace Grounds. μ, of the 5th magnitude, was Kazwini's Al Aṭhfār, the Talons (of the Falling Eagle), which he described as a fainter star in front of the bright one, i.e. west of Wega. 2 The English refused to adopt this reform till 1752, when they abandoned the Old Style on the 2d of September, and made the succeeding day September 14th, New Style: a change, however, that "was made under very great opposition, and there were violent riots in consequence in different parts of the country, especially at Bristol, where several persons were killed. The cry of the populace was 'Give us back our fortnight,' for they supposed they had been robbed of eleven days." 3 A full and interesting discussion of this appears in Popular Astronomy for July, 1898. a I've been unable to find clara Fides or Mercurialis in either the de Lingua Latina or the de Re Rustica, but Varro refers to the constellation as just plain Fides in R. R. II.5.12. The word, by the way, is not to be taken as meaning "faith"; it's the word for a stringed instrument, that has given the English word fiddle: see the article Fidicula in Daremberg & Saglio, and "Nero Fiddled While Rome Burned" (CJ 42:211‑217). Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.) A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two **asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information. Page updated: 4 Mar 14

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- "Only a minority of trees can produce wand quality wood (just as a minority of humans can produce magic). It takes years of experience to tell which ones have the gift, although the job is made easier if Bowtruckles are found nesting in the leaves, as they never inhabit mundane trees." - —Garrick Ollivander[src] Various different types of wood are used in the construction of wands. They are also embedded with a core of a magical substance. Wands vary according to length, from at least 7" to 18", as well as rigidity, ranging from 'springy' to 'unyielding'. Every single wand is unique and will depend for its character on the particular tree and magical creature from which it derives its materials. Moreover, each wand, from the moment it finds its ideal owner, will begin to learn from and teach its human partner. Known wand woods |Wand wood||Known wands constructed of this wood||Notes| Mentioned only (Pottermore) |A very unusual wand wood which creates tricky wands that often refuse to produce magic for any but their owner, and also withhold their best effects from all but those most gifted.| |Alder||The ideal owner of Alder wand is not stubborn or obstinate, but often helpful, considerate and most likeable.| |Apple||Applewood wands are not made in great numbers. They are powerful and best suited to an owner of high aims and ideals, as this wood mixes poorly with Dark magic.| |Ash||Ash wands cling to its one true master and ought not to be passed on or gifted from the original owner, because it will lose power and skill. Those witches and wizards best suited to ash wands are not lightly swayed from their beliefs or purposes. The ideal owner may be stubborn, and will certainly be courageous, but never crass or arrogant.| |Ron Weasley's first wand (originally Charlie Weasley's)| Silver Spears' members |The proper owner of the aspen wand is often an accomplished duellist, or destined to be so, for the aspen wand is one of those particularly suited to martial magic. An infamous and secretive eighteenth-century duelling club, which called itself the Silver Spears, was reputed to admit only those who owned aspen wands.| |Beech||A wand produced by Garrick Ollivander||The true match for a beech wand will be, if young, wise beyond his or her years, and if full-grown, rich in understanding and experience. Beech wands perform very weakly for the narrow-minded and intolerant. When properly matched, the beech wand is capable of a subtlety and artistry rarely seen in any other wood, hence its lustrous reputation.| Though Garrick Ollivander himself did not use it, his associate in the Hogsmeade branch was known to sell wands made from birch. |Blackthorn||Blackthorn wands, which is a very unusual wand wood, has the reputation - in Garrick Ollivander's opinion well-merited - of being best suited to a warrior. These wands appear to need to pass through danger or hardship with their owners to become truly bonded. Given this condition, the blackthorn wand will become as loyal and faithful a servant as one could wish.| |According to legend, the wand of Sir Cadogan| |Black Walnut||Mentioned only (Pottermore)||Less common than the standard walnut wand, that of black walnut seeks a master of good instincts and powerful insight. Black walnut is a very handsome wood, but not the easiest to master. Paired with a sincere, self-aware owner, however, it becomes one of the most loyal and impressive wands of all, with a particular flair in all kinds of charmwork.| |Cedar||Horace Slughorn's wand||The Cedar wand finds its perfect home where there is perspicacity and perception. Something that goes against Slughorn's personality, as he was not particularly perceptive. The witch or wizard who is well-matched with cedar carries the potential to be a frightening adversary, which often comes as a shock to those who have thoughtlessly challenged them.| Both Mary's and Neville's wand has the same wand wood and core. |Neville Longbottom's second wand| |Several Mahoutokoro students||Cherry wood is a highly praised and sought after wood among Mahoutokoro students in Japan.| |Gilderoy Lockhart's wand||This wand was considered expensive, possibly because of the wood is was made out of.| |Chestnut||This wand had a second master in the form of Ron Weasley after it was taken from Pettigrew during the Skirmish at Malfoy Manor.| |The wands of three successive Chief Warlocks of the Wizengamot||Chestnut wands prefer witches and wizards who are skilled tamers of magical beasts, those who possess great gifts in Herbology, and those who are natural fliers.| |Professor Kettleburn, former Care of Magical Creatures teacher| |Cypress||Cypress wands are said to be well-matched to wizards who are self-sacrificing and willing to die a heroic death. Lupin spent the majority of his life alone to save others from having to deal with the consequences of his affliction and died defending Hogwarts castle in the Battle of Hogwarts.| Mentioned only (Pottermore) |Dogwood wands are quirky and mischievous; they have playful natures and insist upon partners who can provide them with scope for excitement and fun. It would be quite wrong, however, to deduce from this that dogwood wands are not capable of serious magic when called upon to do so; they have been known to perform outstanding spells under difficult conditions, and when paired with a suitably clever and ingenious witch or wizard, can produce dazzling enchantments. Dogwood wands refuse to perform non-verbal spells and they are often rather noisy.| Mentioned only (Pottermore) |Ebony wands have an impressive appearance and reputation, being highly suited to all manner of combative magic, and to Transfiguration. Ebony is happiest in the hand of those with the courage to be themselves. Frequently non-conformist, highly individual or comfortable with the status of outsider. In the experience of Garrick Ollivander, the ebony wand’s perfect match is one who will hold fast to his or her beliefs, no matter what the external pressure, and will not be swayed lightly from their purpose.| The Elder Wand |Elder is the rarest wand wood of all, and reputed to be deeply unlucky, elder wands are trickier to master than any other. They contain powerful magic, but scorn to remain with any owner who is not the superior of his or her company; it takes a remarkable wizard to keep an elder wand for any length of time. Only a highly unusual person will find their perfect match in elder, and on the rare occasion when such a pairing occurs, it may be taken as certain that the witch or wizard in question is marked out for a special destiny.| |Elm||Elm wands prefer owners with presence, magical dexterity and a certain native dignity. Of all wand woods, elm, in my experience, produces the fewest accidents, the least foolish errors, and the most elegant charms and spells; these are sophisticated wands, capable of highly advanced magic in the right hands (which makes it highly desirable to those who espouse the pure-blood philosophy).| |English oak||Rubeus Hagrid's wand||A wand for good times and bad, this is a friend as loyal as the wizard who deserves it. Wands of English oak demand partners of strength, courage and fidelity.| |Merlin's wand is rumoured to be English oak.| |Fir||Fir wands demand staying power and strength of purpose in their true owners, and that they are poor tools in the hands of the changeable and indecisive. Fir wands are particularly suited to transfiguration, and favour owners of focused, strong-minded and, occasionally, intimidating demeanour. Fir wands are called 'the survivor's wand.'| |Hawthorn||Hawthorn wands may be particularly suited to healing magic, but they are also adept at curses, and it has been generally observed that the hawthorn wand seems most at home with a conflicted nature, or with a witch or wizard passing through a period of turmoil. Hawthorn is not easy to master, however, and one should only ever consider placing a hawthorn wand in the hands of a witch or wizard of proven talent| |Hazel||Hazel wands often reflects its owner’s emotional state, and works best for a master who understands and can manage their own feelings. Others should be very careful handling a hazel wand if its owner has recently lost their temper, or suffered a serious disappointment, because the wand will absorb such energy and discharge it unpredictably. It is capable of outstanding magic in the hands of the skilful, and is so devoted to its owner that it often ‘wilts’ at the end of their master's life. Hazel wands also have the unique ability to detect water underground, and will emit silvery, tear-shaped puffs of smoke if passing over concealed springs and wells.| |Holly||Holly wands work most happily for those who may need help overcoming a tendency to anger and impetuosity. At the same time, holly wands often choose owners who are engaged in some dangerous and often spiritual quest.| |Hornbeam||Hornbeam selects for its life mate the talented witch or wizard with a single, pure passion, which some might call obsession - more kindly - vision, which will almost always be realised. Hornbeam wands adapt more quickly than almost any other to their owner’s style of magic, and will become so personalised, so quickly, that other people will find them extremely difficult to use even for the most simple of spells. Hornbeam wands likewise absorb their owner’s code of honour, whatever that might be, and will refuse to perform acts - whether for good or ill - that do not tally with their master’s principles. A particularly fine-tuned and sentient wand.| |Garrick Ollivander's wand| Though Garrick Ollivander himself did not use it, his associate in the Hogsmeade branch was known to sell wands made from ivy. |Larch||Larch wands have a reputation for instilling confidence and courage in the user. The celebrated wandmaker Garrick Ollivander found that larch always created wands of hidden talents and unexpected effects, which likewise describes the master who deserves it. It is often the case that the witch or wizard who belongs to the larch wand may never realise the full extent of their considerable talents until paired with it, but that they will then make an exceptional match.| Mentioned only (Pottermore) |It is said that a laurel wand cannot perform a dishonourable act, although, in the quest for glory (a not uncommon goal for those best suited to these wands), laurel wands have been known to perform powerful and sometimes lethal magic.| |Lime||Newton Scamander's wand.| |Mahogany||The mahogany tree symbolises strength, safety, protectiveness, and practicality. Likewise, the wand wood could reflect James I's character, in particular, his protectiveness of Harry, his son.| A wand produced by Garrick Ollivander |Their ideal owner are nature travellers and explorers; they are not stay-at-home wands, and prefer ambition in their witch or wizard, otherwise their magic grows heavy and lacklustre. Fresh challenges and regular changes of scene cause this wand to literally shine, burnishing itself as it grows, with its partner, in ability and status.<| |Oak||Rubeus Hagrid's wand||According to Pottermore, both English oak and Red oak can be used as wand wood.| Mentioned only (Pottermore) |Pear wands produce wands of splendid magicalpowers. Possessors of pear wands are, in the experience of the learned wandmaker Garrick Ollivander, usually popular and well-respected and he never knew of single instance where a pear wand has been discovered in the possession of a Dark witch or wizard. They are also the most resilient.| |Pine||Pine wands always chooses an independent, individual master who may be perceived as a loner, intriguing and perhaps mysterious. Pine wands enjoy being used creatively, and unlike some others, will adapt unprotestingly to new methods and spells. Many wandmakers insist that pine wands are able to detect, and perform best for, owners who are destined for long lives, including Garrick Ollivander who had never personally known the master of a pine wand to die young. The pine wand is one of those that is most sensitive to non-verbal magic.| |Poplar||Poplar wands rely upon, of consistency, strength and uniform power, always happiest when working with a witch or wizard of clear moral vision. The existence of these wands and its owners was cited as evidence against a myth that poplar wands never chose politicians.| |Evangeline Orpington's wand| |Prickly Ash||Chadwick Boot's wand||Created for him by No-Maj James Steward.| |Redwood||Mentioned only (Pottermore)||Redwood wands are strongly attracted to witches and wizards who already possess the admirable ability to fall on their feet, to make the right choice, to snatch advantage from catastrophe.| Though Garrick Ollivander himself did not use it, his associate in the Hogsmeade branch was known to sell wands made from reed. Mentioned only (Pottermore) |Rowan wands generally produce powerful, hard to break Defensive Charms. Rowan wands was also noted for its believed disassociation with the Dark Arts. Perhaps for these reasons, rowan has become associated with pure-hearted wizards, though Ollivander noted that rowan wands can also match or even outperform others in duels.| According to Pottermore, silver lime is an incredibly unusual and attractive wood that works best for Seers and those skilled at Legilimency. It was greatly in vogue in the nineteenth century when the demand outstripped supply, causing some wandmakers to dye other wood in effort to fool purchasers into believing they had purchased a silver lime wand. |Spruce||Spruce wands require particular deftness to work with spruce, which produces wands that are ill-matched with cautious or nervous natures, becoming positively dangerous in fumbling fingers. Spruce wands require a firm hand, because it often appears to have its own ideas about what magic it ought to be called upon to produce. However, when a spruce wand meets its match is a bold spell-caster with a good sense of humour and it becomes a superb helper, intensely loyal to their owners and capable of producing particularly flamboyant and dramatic effects.| |Swamp mayhaw||Seraphina Picquery's wand||According to Pottermore, Violetta Beauvais, a wandmaker from New Orleans, used the wood for all of her wands.| |Sycamore||The sycamore makes a questing wand, eager for new experience and losing brilliance if engaged in mundane activities.| |Vine||Vine wands are among the less common types, and their ideal owners are nearly always those witches or wizards who seek a greater purpose, who have a vision beyond the ordinary and who frequently astound those who think they know them best. Vine wands seem strongly attracted by personalities with hidden depths, and Garrick Ollivander himself has found them more sensitive than any other when it comes to instantly detecting a prospective match.| |Walnut||Bellatrix Lestrange's wand||Walnut wands are often found in the hands of magical innovators and inventors; this is a handsome wood possessed of unusual versatility and adaptability. Walnut wands will, once subjugated, perform any task its owner desires, provided that the user is of sufficient brilliance. This makes for a truly lethal weapon in the hands of a witch or wizard of no conscience, for the wand and the wizard may feed from each other in a particularly unhealthy manner.| |Willow||Willow is an uncommon wand wood with healing power, and their ideal owner is often has some (usually unwarranted) insecurity, however well they may try and hide it. They have handsome appearance and well-founded reputation for enabling advanced, non-verbal magic) the willow wands there have consistently selected those of greatest potential, rather than those who feel they have little to learn.| |Ron Weasley's second wand| |Yew||Lord Voldemort's wand||Yew wands are among the rarer kinds, and their ideal matches are likewise unusual, and occasionally notorious. The wand of yew is reputed to endow its possessor with the power of life and death, which might, of course, be said of all wands; and yet yew retains a particularly dark and fearsome reputation in the spheres of duelling and all curses. However, it is untrue to say (as those unlearned in wandlore often do) that those who use yew wands are more likely to be attracted to the Dark Arts than another. The witch or wizard best suited to a yew wand might equally prove a fierce protector of others. Wands hewn from these most long-lived trees have been found in the possession of heroes quite as often as of villains. Where wizards have been buried with wands of yew, the wand generally sprouts into a tree guarding the dead owner’s grave. What is certain, in my experience, is that the yew wand never chooses either a mediocre or a timid owner.| |Ginevra Weasley's wand| |A wand produced by Garrick Ollivander| |A wand made of yew was presented to Harry Potter in 1991. It did not choose him.| Behind the scenes - Although J. K. Rowling has said that she only used the Celtic assignations for Harry, Ron and Hermione, Draco Malfoy's wand wood of hawthorn matches his date of birth in the Celtic tree calendar as well. - Wand wood bearing trees are often protected by bowtruckles and protective curses cast by their owners. - Many superstitions have arisen around wands, based on the woods used. Certain wands are supposedly incompatible "When his wand's oak and hers is holly, then to marry would be folly." It also can denote flaws in the owner's character "Rowan gossips, chestnut drones, ash is stubborn, hazel moans". Among these sayings is also "wand of elder, never prosper". - It is unclear if magical variants of trees used as wand woods, such as the Wiggentree and the Whomping Willow, can be used as wand wood, or if such wands would have additional properties. - "It was not an arbitrary decision: holly has certain connotations that were perfect for Harry, particularly when contrasted with the traditional associations of yew, from which Voldemort’s wand is made. European tradition has it that the holly tree (the name comes from ‘holy’) repels evil, while yew, which can achieve astonishing longevity (there are British yew trees over two thousand years old), can symbolise both death and resurrection; the sap is also poisonous." Rowling has also revealed that she discovered that Harry's wand wood corresponded to his date of birth in the Celtic tree calendar afterwards, and decided to use the calendar to assign the wand woods of Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger as a "hidden connection" between the three. - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (First appearance) - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (film) - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (video game) - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (film) - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (video game) - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (film) - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (video game) - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (film) - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (video game) - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (film) - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (video game) - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (film) - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (video game) - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (video game) - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (video game) - LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 - LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 - The Tales of Beedle the Bard (Mentioned only) - The Wizarding World of Harry Potter - The Making of Harry Potter Notes and references - ↑ The wand of Cedric Diggory was described as "pleasantly springy" by Garrick Ollivander in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. - ↑ Ollivander described Bellatrix Lestrange's wand as "unyielding" in Chapter 24 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. - ↑ Pottermore - ↑ Wand wood information from Pottermore - ↑ Pottermore - ↑ EXCLUSIVE: Newt's wand has elements of BONE, LIME, and SHELL. #FantasticBeasts #HPCelebration by MuggleNet.com on Twitter - ↑ More Info on Newt's Wand! at Mugglenet - ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref>tag; no text was provided for refs named - ↑ "History of Magic in North America: 1920s Wizarding America" on Pottermore - ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Extra Stuff: Wands at J. K. Rowling's Official Site - ↑ The Tales of Beedle the Bard, pg 85 - ↑ The Tales of Beedle the Bard, pg 100-01

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Federal Communications Commission (FCC) - Homepage: http://www.fcc.gov/ February 2002: "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent United States government agency, directly responsible to Congress. The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC's jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. possessions." http://www.fcc.gov/aboutus.html June 2016: 'Here’s Barr: “The FCC’s rule is nonsensical. They’re saying you can’t have exclusive agreements, but, at the same time, a landlord gets to say yes or no to anyone coming into the building, and you have to have the landlord’s permission. So, a landlord certainly can sign an agreement with one company and say ‘No’ to everybody else, thereby creating an exclusive agreement. So that’s what they do. They’re under no obligation to let everyone in, so they’ll extract a rent payment from one provider.”'https://backchannel.com/the-new-payola-deals-landlords-cut-with-internet-providers-cf60200aa9e9#.o9aqytv63 August 2014: "The FCC is still working through the public comments about their current net neutrality proposal, and it will be many months still before any final rule is made. But one industry veteran, with over four decades of experience in defining the digital world, suggests that maybe we want to slow down and rethink this a bit. What if, he suggests, true net neutrality isn’t actually everything we think it’s cracked up to be?"http://consumerist.com/2014/08/14/founder-of-one-laptop-per-child-maybe-net-neutrality-isnt-such-a-good-idea-after-all/ July 2013: "So in Google’s version of net neutrality, the FCC was the right to force Apple to let iPhone users connect to their home servers, but the FCC has no right to force Google to let its broadband subscribers run a home server."http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/google-neutrality/ November 2012: In 1985, the conservative organization Fairness in Media, backed by Senator Jesse Helms, tried to arrange a takeover of CBS and “become Dan Rather’s boss.” It failed, but two years later conservatives set the stage for an even bigger triumph. For decades, radio and television broadcasters had been required to present multiple viewpoints on contentious public debates on the grounds that they were stewards of the public airwaves. But in 1987, members appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the Federal Communications Commission abolished this “fairness doctrine.”'http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/opinion/the-real-loser-truth.html February 2012: "Under the new rules, telemarketers would have to get permission in writing before placing an automated call to a consumer. Currently, companies that have an established business relationship with a particular consumer can call them without permission. For example, the FCC official said, a bank could robocall one of its checking account customers to try and sell them insurance. These new rules stop that without written permission."http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/15/politics/fcc-robocalls/index.html February 2011: "WWOR-TV is the subject of an unusual investigation by the Federal Communications Commission, which is looking into charges that the station’s owner, the News Corporation, misrepresented the station’s number of employees and amount of programming. The investigation is gaining attention in part because WWOR is a rarity: it is effectively the only big commercial station licensed to the state of New Jersey."http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/business/media/21wwor.html December 2010: 'At the commission meeting in Washington, Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, said the steps were historic. “For the first time,” he said, “we’ll have enforceable rules of the road to preserve Internet freedom and openness.”'http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/f-c-c-approves-net-rules-and-braces-for-fight June 2010: "Just kidding. More seriously, the Federal Communications Commission took note of the European Union’s action and decided this year to study whether bill shock rules would be a good idea in this country. Yes, appears to be the answer. A survey conducted by the commission found that one in six cellphone users — about 30 million people — had experienced bill shock at least once. Nearly a quarter of those said the shock involved sums greater than $100."http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/your-money/27haggler.html May 2010: 'The FCC has given Hollywood permission to activate the "Selective Output Control" technologies in your set-top box. These are hidden flags that allow the MPAA to deactivate parts of your home theater depending on what you're watching. And it sucks. As Dan Gillmor notes, "Fans of old TV science fiction will remember the Outer Limits. Given Hollywood's victory today at the FCC -- they'll be able to reach over the lines and disable functions on your TV -- the intro to the show takes on modern relevance."'http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/07/fcc-hands-hollywood.html May 2010: "The Federal Communications Commission ordered Comcast to stop the blocking. Comcast challenged the ruling. On April 6, an appeals court in Washington sided with the operator, saying the F.C.C. could not tell Comcast how to manage its network."http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/technology/internet/03neutral.html October 2009: 'A boatload of smaller telcos and bigger broadband users are cheering yet another probe launched by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Thursday—this one on the impact of "special access" rates on broadband availability in general.'http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/fcc-to-investigate-gating-role-of-middle-mile-access.ars September 2009: 'Indeed, in November of 2003, our own Ofcom equivalent, the Federal Communications Commission, tried to push through a bonafide "broadcast flag" mandate for device makers. All gadgets able to pick up digital TV streams would have had to abide by codes embedded into video content signaling that a program was copyright protected, the FCC ordered, limiting the ability of consumers to copy and record. But an appeals court ruled in May of 2005 that Congress never gave the agency the authority to act on the question, and it shut the FCC's order down.'http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/09/drms-tentacles-snare-british-hdtv.ars August 2009: 'The United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has just thrown out the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) rule limiting each cable provider to no more than 30 percent of the overall video marketplace. In the words of the justices (PDF), the rule was "arbitrary and capricious," and the FCC's "dereliction in this case is particularly egregious."'http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/08/court-tosses-arbitrary-fcc-cable-market-share-cap.ars July 2009: "Other programs are rejected because they duplicate (or potentially compete with) Apple's iPhone software. On July 31 the Federal Communications Commission sent a letter to Apple questioning its rejection of Google Voice, a telephony application. Many analysts believe the service was blocked because it could have snatched revenue from Apple's exclusive wireless service provider, AT&T (T), by providing cheap call rates over Google's (GOOG) lines. AT&T denies any involvement in the move. Among the FCC's questions: Why was Google Voice rejected? What are the standards for acceptance and rejection?"http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2009/tc20090731_732921.htm July 2009: 'The Federal Communications Commission is examining a recent decision by Apple to reject an iPhone application developed by Google. On Friday, the commission sent letters to executives at Apple, Google and AT&T, which is the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the United States, saying it was “interested in a more complete understanding of this situation.”'http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/technology/companies/01google.html July 2009: "Kohl called for reforms at the FCC that would force the largest carriers to offer partnerships with smaller service providers on data roaming, so that regional-carrier customers can get smartphone service around the country. He also called for the agency to scrutinize the exclusive deals between network carriers and phone makers such as Apple and Research in Motion, which sells the BlackBerry. Smaller carriers say such deals hamper their business as customers look for the latest and fastest phones, which only run on the biggest networks."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/06/AR2009070603526.html July 2009: "A bill introduced by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) and backed by Maynard would allow local and state governments to seek jamming authority from the Federal Communications Commission on a prison-by-prison basis. The bill, the Safe Prisons Communications Act of 2009, has the support of Maryland's senior U.S. senator, Barbara A. Mikulski (D), and a hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee is likely this month."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/02/AR2009070202780.html July 2009: "This is not the first time the PPM system has come under scrutiny. In May, the FCC initiated an inquiry, inviting comments and complaints about the new ratings system. The deadline for submitting comments is today; as of yesterday afternoon, 54 comments had been filed."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/30/AR2009063003855.html April 2009: 'The Supreme Court’s last major case concerning broadcast indecency, F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation in 1978, upheld the commission’s determination that George Carlin’s classic “seven dirty words” monologue, with its deliberate, repetitive and creative use of vulgarities, was indecent. But the court left open the question of whether the use of “an occasional expletive” could be punished.'http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/us/29scotus.html April 2009: "For years the cable business had acted like a typical monopoly, providing less-than- ideal customer service, skyrocketing prices, and little choice of service. Then along came the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which opened the door for competition and promised weary cable customers relief at last. Too bad that relief never came. Nearly four years after the bill was passed, a mere 286 of the 30,000 U.S. cable markets were being served by more than one provider, according to the Federal Communications Commission. And in the FCC’s most recent report, in 2005, not much had changed; only 294 out of about 33,000 U.S. cable markets were served by more than one provider—meaning that for all the effort to create change, few customers today are being served by the smaller providers that generally offer better deals."http://www.smartmoney.com/spending/technology/10-things-cable-companies-will-not-tell-you/?cid=1122 November 2008: 'The Supreme Court appeared far from a consensus Tuesday on whether the Federal Communication Commission's crackdown on broadcasters who allow "fleeting expletives" to reach the airwaves should continue.'http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202425794221 October 2008: "ISPs also have run into public and government opposition just for slowing down, not blocking, some Internet traffic. The Federal Communications Commission ruled in August, on a 3-2 vote, that Comcast's limiting of BitTorrent traffic was illegal. Comcast said it was merely trying to keep the flood of peer-to-peer file sharing from slowing down the Internet for everyone else. As for CopyRouter, the company's manager said it would not slow down Internet traffic noticeably, because it's not inspecting the contents of files, merely comparing their hash values to a list, which can be done quickly."http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27198621 October 2008: 'Several lawmakers and professional sports organizations are urging the Federal Communications Commission to delay a vote on opening spectrum known as "white spaces" for unlicensed use.'http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10075172-94.html August 2008: "And certainly any ISP thinking about looking at what its users are doing has got to be worried given that the House Energy and Commerce Committee is on a roll -- taking on ISPs that want to or have watched what their customers do online in order to serve them targeted ads. That roll is reportedly heading towards a long-fabled online privacy omnibus bill. Add to that, this month's unprecedented decision by the Federal Communications Commission to slap down Comcast for its secret and deceptive interference with file sharing traffic."http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/google-privacy.html July 2008: "Comcast is poised for legal showdown with the Federal Communications Commission as the agency moves to fine the cable giant for blocking file-sharing traffic on its Web network."http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2008/07/portfolio_0728 July 2008: 'In a decision that clears CBS of any wrongdoing for airing the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show that featured Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction,” a federal appeals court overturned the $550,000 fine that the Federal Communications Commission levied against the station, calling the fine arbitrary and capricious.'http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/business/media/22FCC.html April 2008: "The Federal Communications Commission 's (FCC) 700 MHz spectrum auction concluded on March 18 after nearly eight weeks of continuous bidding with $19.6 billion in bids. Verizon and AT&T were the big winners with Verizon winning most of the C-block. Last year, Google pushed the FCC to make the C-block open to all applications and devices. The commission granted that request, provided bidding on the spectrum reach a reserve price of $4.6 billion."http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2281382,00.asp March 2008: "the transition to digital-only television -- the biggest change for the industry since color TV -- could leave some people in the dark....The Federal Communications Commission, which is leading education efforts about the transition, has been sponsoring workshops geared toward specific demographics. Of the more than 4,000 presentations the staff has given around the country, about 3,000 of them have been at senior centers, FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin said."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/30/AR2008033002136.html March 2008: "Because satellite Internet, like TV, requires a clear view in the proper direction, a tree or hill can spoil your online life. Some subdivisions attempt to prohibit rooftop and balcony accessories, although Federal Communications Commission regulations preempt many such restrictions."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/21/AR2008032101641.html March 2008: "While key players are slugging it out over ISP content filtering, the Federal Communications Commission has released a slew of decisions and announcements about broadband. They include a new public hearing on broadband network management practices and new rules for telecommunications services in apartment buildings. And one of the commissioners attempted to ease concerns of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) over the impact of net neutrality regulations."http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080320-fcc-commish-net-neutrality-shouldnt-extend-to-illegal-acts.html March 2008: 'The [Supreme Court] will review the Federal Communications Commission's policy that even a one-time utterance of an obscene word on radio and television broadcasts during daytime and early evening hours is subject to punishment....The FCC says technology makes it easy for networks to avoid such gratuitous use of obscenity. The networks argue that the FCC has exceeded its authority when the word does not convey a sexual message...'http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/17/AR2008031700842.html December 2007: "The Federal Communications Commission approved two new rules on Tuesday that are likely to reshape the nation’s media landscape by setting new parameters for the size and scope of the largest news and cable companies."http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/business/media/19fcc.html November 2007: The head of the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday announced the details of his plan to relax the longstanding rule that had prevented a company from owning both a newspaper and a radio or television station in the same city.http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/business/media/14media.html November 2007: The Federal Communication Commission says people who use cellphone jammers could be fined up to $11,000 for a first offense. Its enforcement bureau has prosecuted a handful of American companies for distributing the gadgets — and it also pursues their users.http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/technology/04jammer.html July 2007: The Federal Communications Commission is overseeing the auction of a portion of the radio frequency spectrum once used by television broadcasters, and this week drafted rules for the sale. The auction, scheduled for January, is expected to raise at least $15 billion, with bidders ranging from start-ups to established phone companies.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/12/AR2007071202221.html July 2007: Several members of a House subcommittee voiced agreement with a proposal that would require a portion of valuable airwaves about to be auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission to be used for an 'open' network that would connect to any mobile device or service. Such a rule would benefit technology companies such as Google, Intel, Yahoo and Skype, who want more ways to reach their customers without going through carriers. The plan could hurt wireless carriers, who say unfettered access to their networks would undermine billions of dollars of investment for high-speed services.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/11/AR2007071102170.html June 2007: In a 2 to 1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York ruled that the FCC went too far in issuing a 2006 decision against Fox Broadcasting for separate incidents in 2002 and 2003 after singer Cher and celebrity Nicole Richie each uttered an expletive on live television.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/04/AR2007060400875.html June 2006: President Bush yesterday signed legislation that allows the Federal Communications Commission to slap a broadcaster with a fine of up to $325,000 per incident for airing programming the feds deem indecent.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/15/AR2006061501941.html March 2006: Which version of 'The Bedford Diaries' do you plan to watch -- or to miss? Thanks to the FCC and its quixotic censorship bender, two are available. One premieres tonight on the WB. The other is already streaming into homes via the Internet -- a 'webisode' that is safe, for now, from the government.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/28/AR2006032802150.html January 2005: The Federal Communications Commission, which had adopted the proposed rules in a hotly contested, 3 to 2, party-line vote in June 2003, now must decide whether to start anew on rules governing media consolidation or to re-argue its case before a lower court that the current proposals should be approved.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42134-2005Jan27.html December 2004: The justices will hear an appeal of a lower-court ruling that threatened to force cable operators to share their Internet lines with competitors, much like local phone companies are required to do. The Federal Communications Commission had sought to exempt cable firms from the requirement, defining them not as telecommunications providers but as an information service.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34058-2004Dec3.html December 2004: Executives at News Corp, which owns Fox, declined to comment, saying they wanted the filing to speak for itself. Executives at the other networks also declined to comment; both CBS and NBC have high-profile indecency appeals before the FCC. CBS is appealing a proposed $550,000 fine spurred by Janet Jackson's Super Bowl halftime show in February and NBC is appealing an indecency ruling caused by singer Bono's use of obscenity during a 2003 awards show.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34112-2004Dec3.html Role Name Type Last Updated Possible/Unclear Fairness in Media Organization Nov 7, 2012 Research/Analysis Subject Inner City Press (ICP) Organization Feb 24, 2008 Opponent (past or present) NextWave Wireless Organization Mar 1, 2008 Cooperation (past or present) Public Safety Spectrum Trust (PSST) Organization Jul 12, 2008 Owned by (partial or full, past or present) US Federal Government - Independent Agencies Organization May 4, 2005 Organization Executive (past or present) Tom Allibone Person May 3, 2006 Organization Executive (past or present) Mignon Clyburn Person Dec 22, 2010 Advised by (past or present) Organization Executive (past or present) Prof. David J. Farber Person Dec 4, 2006 Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Prof. David "Dave" J. Farber Person Organization Executive (past or present) Prof. Gerry Faulhaber Ph.D. Person Mar 23, 2008 Organization Head/Leader (past or present) Julius Genachowski Esq. Person Aug 20, 2009 Organization Head/Leader (past or present) Reed Hundt Person Nov 19, 2008 Organization Head/Leader (past or present) William "Bill" Kennard Person Nov 19, 2008 Organization Executive (past or present) Edward P. Lazarus Esq. Person Nov 21, 2009 Organization Head/Leader (past or present) Organization Executive (past or present) Kevin J. Martin Esq. Person Dec 26, 2005 Organization Executive (past or present) Robert M. McDowell Esq. Person Aug 7, 2006 Organization Head/Leader (past or present) Newton Norman Minow Esq. Person May 1, 2010 Organization Head/Leader (past or present) Michael K. Powell Person Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) David H. Solomon Person Articles and Resources Date Fairness.com Resource Read it at: Jun 27, 2016 Dear Landlord: Don’t Rip Me Off When it Comes To Internet Access When building owners get kickbacks from big providers it’s the tenants who lose QUOTE: Water and heat are regulated utilities. But when it comes to Internet access, people in apartments (called Multiple Dwelling Units, or MDUs) often have the worst of both worlds: all the limitations of a utility framework — no competition, no choices — with zero protections for consumers. That means unconstrained pricing. Network operators like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T, in cahoots with developers and landlords, routinely use a breathtaking array of kickbacks, lawyerly games of Twister, blunt threats, and downright illegal activities to lock up buildings in exclusive arrangements. Backchannel Aug 14, 2014 Founder Of One Laptop Per Child: Maybe Net Neutrality Isn’t Such A Good Idea After All QUOTE: What we need, then, is some kind of middle ground, Negroponte suggests — but he also doesn’t quite suggest where that might be. Instead, he likens available bandwidth to a limited natural physical resource. If it’s immoral to use up all of the air, or water, or oil on frivolous things, is it perhaps also immoral to use up the internet? Consumerist Jul 30, 2013 Now That It’s in the Broadband Game, Google Flip-Flops on Network Neutrality QUOTE: In a dramatic about-face on a key internet issue yesterday, Google told the FCC that the network neutrality rules Google once championed don’t give citizens the right to run servers on their home broadband connections, and that the Google Fiber network is perfectly within its rights to prohibit customers from attaching the legal devices of their choice to its network....So in Google’s version of net neutrality, the FCC was the right to force Apple to let iPhone users connect to their home servers, but the FCC has no right to force Google to let its broadband subscribers run a home server. Wired Nov 05, 2012 The Real Loser: Truth (Op-Ed) QUOTE: To be sure, the Obama campaign has certainly had its own share of dissembling and distortion, including about Mr. Romney’s positions on abortion and foreign aid. But nothing in it — or in past campaigns, for that matter — has equaled the efforts of the Romney campaign in this realm. Its fundamental disdain for facts is something wholly new....win or lose, the Romney campaign has placed a big and historic bet on the proposition that facts can be ignored, more or less, with impunity. New York Times Feb 15, 2012 FCC set to impose new limits on automated telemarketing calls QUOTE: Under the new rules, telemarketers would have to get permission in writing before placing an automated call to a consumer. Currently, companies that have an established business relationship with a particular consumer can call them without permission. CNN (Cable News Network) Apr 08, 2011 House Votes Against ‘Net Neutrality’ QUOTE: But Republicans in the House maintained that the order exceeded the F.C.C.’s authority and put the government in the position of overseeing what content a consumer could see and which companies would benefit from Internet access... “This is a bill that will end the Internet as we know it and threaten the jobs, investment and prosperity that the Internet has brought to America,” Mr. Waxman said. New York Times Feb 20, 2011 New Jersey TV Station Is Accused of Failing Its Audience QUOTE: The F.C.C.’s inquiry, announced on Thursday, was prompted by complaints from media activists who say that since the cutbacks, WWOR has overstated its coverage in filings to the F.C.C. New York Times Dec 21, 2010 F.C.C. Approves Net Rules and Braces for Fight (Media Decoder) QUOTE: The new rules [approved by the FCC-- Ed.] are, at best, net semi-neutrality. They ban any outright blocking and any “unreasonable discrimination” of Web sites or applications by fixed-line broadband providers, but they afford more wiggle room to wireless providers like AT&T and Verizon. New York Times Jun 25, 2010 Cellphone Charges, Rung Up by a Thief (The Haggler) QUOTE: When a credit card company notices spending patterns way beyond a customer’s norm, it suspends the card until it’s sure the card is in the customer’s possession. Shouldn’t a cellphone company do the same? New York Times May 13, 2010 Recording Customer Service Calls to India QUOTE: Last month, I wrote a Bucks post, “When and Why You Should Record Customer Service Calls,” with resources and guidelines for recording customer service calls....in this age of outsourcing, customer service representatives are often in other countries, like India or Ireland or a few other places. Which begs the question: What recording guidelines should one follow if the customer service representative is elsewhere? New York Times May 07, 2010 FCC hands Hollywood the keys to your PC, home theater and future QUOTE: The FCC has given Hollywood permission to activate the "Selective Output Control" technologies in your set-top box. These are hidden flags that allow the MPAA to deactivate parts of your home theater depending on what you're watching. And it sucks. Boing Boing May 02, 2010 Web’s Users Against Its Gatekeepers QUOTE: With the majority of Internet traffic expected to shift to congestion-prone mobile networks, there is growing debate on both sides of the Atlantic about whether operators of the networks should be allowed to treat Web users differently, based on the users’ consumption. New York Times Apr 24, 2010 Undercover persuasion by tech industry lobbyists QUOTE: The influence peddlers of K Street have discovered the power of social networking on such Web sites as Twitter and Facebook. Using their own names without mentioning that they work in public relations or as lobbyists, employees of companies with interests in Washington are chattering online to shape opinions in hard-to-detect ways. Washington Post Nov 20, 2009 Arrests made in massive, $390/hour Video Relay Service scam QUOTE: Dealing with some technology is challenging enough for the hearing-impaired without scammers taking advantage of federal dollars meant to help them. That's exactly what has happened with the Federal Communications Commission's Video Relay Service (VRS), however... Ars Technica Oct 09, 2009 FCC to investigate "gating" role of middle-mile access lines QUOTE: As DSL or cable customers, consumers usually pay directly for that last-mile access. But large businesses and other ISPs shell out humongous sums for middle and secondary transport services to connect their networks or cell towers with the Internet backbone. Ars Technica Oct 09, 2009 Epicenter The Business of Tech The Empire Strikes Back: FCC Probes Google Voice (Updated) (Epicenter) QUOTE: AT&T has just given Google a taste of its own mandated openness medicine, successfully goading federal regulators into officially looking into why Google’s Voice service blocks phone calls to certain rural numbers. Wired Sep 21, 2009 If spectrum isn't scarce anymore, can you say $#!% on TV? QUOTE: the brief [filed by the Center for Creative Voices and the Future of Music Coalition] also grapples with a very sticky wicket that the Second Circuit [Court of Appeals] may or may not take up: whether there's a scarcity of broadcast spectrum any more, and whether the legal precedent empowered by that assumption—a case called Red Lion—still authorizes the FCC to regulate the airwaves. Ars Technica Sep 18, 2009 DRM's tentacles snare British HDTV QUOTE: DRM watchers are sounding the alarm about a proposal to bring what they fear amounts to a "broadcast flag" to the UK's over-the-air digital Freeview television service. Ars Technica Sep 02, 2009 Movie studios again demand HDTV disabling powers from FCC QUOTE: "The vast majority of consumers would not have to purchase new devices to receive the new, high-value content contemplated by MPAA's" request, the group [MPAA] assures the FCC. 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Swiss Mennonite Cultural and Historical Association |Home Origin History Monthly Feature Activities Board Anniversaries Store| It was the fall of 1928, just 13 months before Black Thursday, and the people of Freeman, South Dakota, like the rest of the country, were beginning to feel the pinch of an impending depression. Money was becoming increasingly scarce, and chicken theft was not uncommon. Such thievery may have been the indirect cause of one of the most unique hoaxes ever visited upon this community. It was a prank that escalated into community-wide hysteria and inspired at least one copycat caper. It all began with the sighting of a ghostlike woman dressed in white at the Carl Miller farm. The locals referred to her as die weisse Frau (“the white woman” or “the woman in white”). This was a community that at the time was still speaking primarily German. Jonas Huber continued to record the minutes of the Heilbronn Township telephone meetings in German until 1948. And, although most of the young people no longer speak German, the community is still proclaiming its German heritage with an annual three-day Schmeckfest celebration. The account in the 13 Sept. 1928 Freeman Courier reads, in part, as follows: “The other night the dogs were barking fiercely and later on quit. At about 2 o’clock in the night they again started to bark and Carl Miller went to the door and to his surprise a woman dressed in white came to the door. He asked her what she wanted and the answer was ‘nothing.’ She then went away…” The weekly newspaper went on to say that some locals had thought that the woman was a somnambulist, a sleepwalker.1 Leland Miller, who was seven at the time, remembers the incident somewhat differently. He was sleeping in his second floor bedroom, when the family dog began to bark on the side of the house exposed to his room. The parents also slept upstairs. He is not sure whether he awoke when the German Shepherd started barking or when his father came into his bedroom to check on the disturbance that moonlit night. Leland did not get out of bed and did not see the woman. But he saw his father open the bedroom window and heard him call down to the woman and ask her who she was and what she wanted. As he recalls, the woman said nothing (without the Courier’s quotation marks). The younger Miller recalls that his father later said that the woman “ignored the dog as she approached the west entry of the house” and that the dog “threatened to bite her but never did.” He cannot recall that his father ever went to the door.2 Later there was speculation that the woman may have been Doris M. (not her real name), who was rumored at the time to have run away from the Human Services Center (then called the Yankton State [Mental] Hospital) 35 miles away and that she may have followed the railroad tracks from Freeman, which lies five miles southwest of the Miller farm. The tracks (now gone) ran past the house by not further than 70 yards. Doris, who was twenty-two years old at the time, had been a patient at the hospital for several years. If it was indeed she who had come to the Miller residence, her appearance there would initially seem somewhat unusual, since her family lived quite a few miles west of Freeman, and the Miller place is east of town. At least ten miles separated the farms. She also belonged to a different dialect group. But she may have avoided her home due to animosity toward her family. A reliable source, who shall remain unnamed, stated that Doris despised her parents and siblings because they had put her into the mental hospital. They readmitted her shortly after her return to Freeman, and she died at the hospital six years later... In any case, Carl Miller’s reputation was impeccable, and nobody doubted his story. But the series of sightings was just beginning. The next week the 20 Sept. Courier recorded the following appearances: “A good many strange things happened in this old world but there is something out in the East Freeman community that baffles the whole neighborhood. When reports reached town that a woman dressed in white is [sic] seen out there it didn’t take long we heard Mr. Robinson threw her out of the [Freeman Junior College and Academy] dormitory… Last night before getting ready for printing we called up all the places where she had been seen and here is what each one said. Ferdinand Walter, who is boarding at the Henry Wilde place in town, says when he walked home late in the evening, somebody dressed in white was at the gate. It didn’t take Ferd long to decide what to do. He turned around and went to the other side of the house to enter. …Saturday night A.A. Graber’s dog seemed very much disturbed. Sunday morning Mr. Graber’s son saw this woman in the corn field. They missed their dog and later found the dog in the cornfield killed by a rifle bullet. Yesterday morning at 3 o’clock Mr. Mohler’s brother saw this woman at J.C. Neufeld’s farm. A corn crib burned down at the A.A. Graber place and the presumption is, at least with some, that this woman may have caused it. All who saw her say it’s not really a white dress, but…a kind of white sheet. …She is barefoot and the footprints are almost too large for a woman. Tuesday almost 400 men were out in the cornfield looking for this woman. …”3 Although Editor J.J. Mendel states that he phoned various people to verify the sightings, he says no more about the Robinson rumor. The Oct. 5 Star, the bi-weekly student paper, had a paragraph on the incident. But whether anyone besides Robinson saw her is not clear. The article reads, in part, “The white woman … visited the old dormitory. Some of the girls are rather excited about this affair. Some of them are even afraid to go out of the building after supper.” 4 And a September 16 notation in the 1929 Lark, the student annual, reads as follows: “Dorm girls fear attack by ‘White’ woman.” 5 The only living student resident who resided in the old dorm, where the intrusion supposedly occurred, cannot remember the incident. And two of the ladies who lived in the new dorm remember the incident but cannot recall whether any residents witnessed the intrusion or whether the episode was a hoax. These ladies are now all in their 90s. Having moved to Freeman from Kansas two years earlier, Elmer Robinson, the cook for the two dormitories, likely didn’t know Doris. Perhaps he learned the next day who she was, and Mendel, in deference to the family’s feelings, dropped the matter. Darlene Robinson, who was four at the time of the dormitory sighting, vaguely recalls that her father chased a loitering woman off one of the two porches attached to the old dormitory, where the family lived in an apartment.6 All evidence points to Sunday as the day when the cornfield sweep took place, not Tuesday, as the Courier states. It is likely that Tuesday is the day the corncrib burned. It is hard to determine whether there were actually 400 men trying to flush out die weisse Frau. But Earl Gering, who was eight at the time and whose father was among those who made the drive, said that someone was in every other row. He said, “The woman couldn’t possibly have escaped.” 7 Lillian Tieszen Glanzer, ten at the time, remembers riding to church that Sunday forenoon in the family car. The country road to the church happened to border the cornfield, and the group was just beginning the attempt to flush out the elusive woman. She recalls people on telephone poles as they strained to get a better view of the hunt. Then her father drew the curtains on the Dodge so that she and her siblings in the back seat would be spared any sudden appearance of the dreaded woman. 8 For several weeks, the woman in white held the area in her grip. Dr. Wilbert Hieb, then an eight-year-old neighboring Marion resident, remembers the city’s siren blowing one morning between 1 and 2 a.m. His father got up and went to the fire station. There was no fire. Someone had spotted the mysterious woman in a field southwest of town and sounded the alarm. The elder Hieb didn’t join the fruitless search, but some of the firemen did. 9 Parents would not let their children go anywhere unescorted. Marian Graber Gering, three at the time, said that her father wouldn’t allow her older sister to walk to country school, transporting her by car.10 And Marian’s husband Earl added, “Houses that had never been locked were now being bolted.” 11 The A.A. Graber in the Courier article was Andrew Graber, who, after his dog was killed, watched his cornfield being trampled by men on foot, men on horseback, and dogs. He then watched his corncrib burn just before harvest. Andrew had inherited not only his father Andreas’s first name and surname but also his nickname, Skurra, which in Russian means “pelt.” Since the gnome-like Andrew was extraordinarily short and pudgy (with a bulbous nose), the South German diminutive was added, and he was known as Skurgele (pronounced ShKUHRgelie).12 His adopted13 son Willard, of stocky medium height, had a reputation as a troublemaker and had acquired the nickname Hickey, after a certain Hickman, a notorious British gangster of the period.14 The nickname was apparently appropriate. Nellie Graber Kunkel, Hickey’s sister, says that he was involved in “every devilment there was. He was trouble.”15 Although Willard had already blamed the woman for killing the dog, he didn’t claim to have seen her until that Sunday, when his dad asked him to round up horses that had broken out into the cornfield. It was Sunday morning, and Hickey had just gotten into an argument with his father about going to church. He didn’t want to go and, according to Erwin Graber, was looking for an excuse to stay home. He saddled a horse and headed for the cornfield. Soon he “came galloping back,” claiming to have seen the strange woman.16 Word got around, and soon there were many sightings. A common Schweizer announcement was, “Ich han sie gesieht.”17 The sightings quickly jumped the boundaries of the East Freeman Swiss enclave, and reports expanded to include the hutterische, plattdeutsche, and schwäbische Dialekte, the other three major language groups in the community. Some observers claimed that there was a strange light surrounding the apparition, which fostered speculation of an Irrlicht, a ghost light. Cleon Graber was only two years old at the time but remembers people talking about the episode for years afterward. His father, Carl J. Graber, was one of the horsemen who helped scour the cornfield. As Cleon remembers it, the hoax began as an attempt to cover up chicken stealing. Hickey was stealing chickens from his father and selling them for pin money. Shortly after Carl Miller saw the woman, Skurgele announced that someone was stealing chickens from the family’s flock. Eager to divert suspicion from himself, Hickey suggested the likelihood that it was die weisse Frau and promptly set out to lend credence to his explanation. Soon he was enjoying his newfound activity. Andrew’s wife Helena had a soft heart and put out food for the woman one night, and in the morning the food was gone, proof that the poor woman was stealing chickens because she was hungry. When he killed the dog, Hickey deliberately left prints of his bare feet, and his father decided to call the sheriff. He then torched the crib, knowing that the neighbors would rally to douse the corncrib fire and obliterate the nearby tracks.18 If Graber’s sequence of events is accurate, he offers a neat package. But this order of events differs from the sequence described by Erwin Graber. That food was put out for the woman there is no doubt. Erwin Graber said that Hickey went to check the offering the next morning, ate the food, took off his shoes, and left barefoot tracks. Hickey was only fifteen when he pulled off his hoax. Erwin Graber, his friend, was sixteen and knew all along what was happening. He was at the Sunday sweep and also claimed to have been present at the crib burning, along with some neighbors who had arrived too late to save the structure, which burned quickly due to the spaced wooden slats that facilitated the corn drying process. Erwin said that Willard lit the crib before breakfast, between 6 and 7 a.m. He had been “snapping” corn for the hogs from the edge of the field that was next to the hog lot. The crib was nearby, and Hickey poured gasoline at one end of the structure before lighting it. Later as the group poked around in the ashes and speculated about what happened, Hickey gave Erwin a knowing grin. Erwin stated that it all began when Hickey clubbed the dog to death with a neck yoke and blamed the woman. He said that Hickey never liked that dog. So if that explanation is accurate, the account in the Courier that the dog was shot was erroneous, and so is Cleon Graber’s claim that chicken stealing precipitated the sightings. Yet, reports that chicken bones were found at a rural Evangelical church, where the woman supposedly dined, would support the fowl theft theory. Kunkel exclaimed, “Don’t believe anything Risser [Erwin’s nickname] said. He had more to do with this [incident] than he wanted to admit. And Hickey wasn’t there to defend himself [during the taped interview].” Kunkel says that Hickey “loved that dog.” She’s certain that Hickey didn’t shoot him, insisting that the dog was shot and not clubbed. She claims to have seen the bullet hole. Kunkel also says that she overheard Hickey tell their mother to make two sandwiches to put out for the woman and that later Erwin joked how good the food was. She further states that she was present when the corncrib went up in flames. She recalls that it was quite early in the forenoon but doesn’t remember the time. Kunkel said, “For some reason, ‘Dicke’ (stout) Jake [Jacob E. Graber] had come to our place that morning, and everybody [the family and the visitor] was at least two city blocks from the crib. I was there, and so was Hickey.” She says that Erwin was absent, and she thinks that he may have torched the crib himself, although she agrees that Willard likely was the instigator. That Erwin lit the crib makes a certain amount of sense. If Willard was coming under suspicion by that time, he probably tried to continue the hoax by drawing suspicion from himself and giving credence to the ghost theory. Although Erwin’s account doesn’t connect chicken stealing with the white woman, Erwin stated that Hickey stole not only chickens from his parents’ coop but also hams from their smoke house. He sold them in Parker, where he wasn’t well known. And when the family quit raising chickens, he stole cream and sold it. Erwin blames Hickey, in large part, for causing his father eventually to lose the farm. Erwin stated further that Hickey occasionally skipped church [Salem-Zion Mennonite]19 and stole homemade wine from several neighbors’ cellars while they worshipped. Since this was during Prohibition, people didn’t want to admit having alcoholic beverages. Another reason for not wanting to admit possessing wine is that the Church frowned on the consumption of alcohol. The Communion wine even today is not really wine but grape juice. Several parishioners bent the rules, and Hickey knew who they were. The victims reported grape juice having been stolen. Hickey quipped to his friends that that was the “best grape juice” he ever drank. Erwin stated that Willard was feeding a liquor habit even at that early age. According to Erwin, the Sunday morning when Hickey claimed to have sighted the woman, the neighbors began to gather at the Graber farm. The sheriff had been called and arrived early. A large number of neighbors had gathered already in the forenoon, some on horseback, and prepared to scour the field. Even in those days, word traveled very fast, since the crank telephones were on a party-line system. Neighbors not only knew who was being phoned by the assigned sequence of rings for each subscriber but also often listened in on conversations. Erwin said that the flushing-attempt was well organized, with men on foot and horsemen placed alternately. The 60-acre field was thoroughly covered in one swath. That the Andrew Graber family was sorely distressed by the series of events is evident by the “Card of Thanks,” which appeared in the 27 Sept. issue of the Courier: “We desire to take these means to extending [sic] to our neighbors, friends and county officials our warmest thanks for their kindness and interest shown and the assistance given us in guarding our home and property during the recent ‘Wild Woman’ episode…. Especially do we feel under obligation to those who were with us during the night. –A.A. Graber and family.” 20 Erwin said that by late Sunday many, including the sheriff, suspected that Hickey was behind the shenanigans. But Hickey, whom the sheriff grilled thoroughly, denied involvement. Erwin stated that the corncrib burning several days later was almost anti-climactic, since by then Hickey was the prime suspect. Later while imbibing, he bragged to his friends about his woman-in-white prank. Erwin said that Willard was one of 11 baptism candidates that fall, and the youths were undergoing catechism instruction. But because of unresolved problems with Hickey, baptism was postponed until November. He was finally baptized with his peers. But Kunkel says that later, after a different incident, the deacons asked him to relinquish his membership. He responded by saying, “Consider me out.” And he never set foot in the church again. Some time after the wild woman episode, the sheriff solved the unrelated stolen hams case. But when he told Andrew who the culprit was, he refused to press charges. Erwin said that a naïve Andrew had been upset that the sheriff interrogated Willard during the ghost woman case. He just couldn’t believe that his son was responsible for these activities. Erwin said that Hickey “had a heart of gold, and in many ways people liked him.” He also stated that he was a hard worker. Kunkel, who was 14 at the time, said that Willard always felt that the community never really accepted him and his three siblings, all of whom were adopted. She blames his anti-social behavior, at least in part, on this belief and agrees that she and the others felt a bit the same way. But the other three did not rebel, as did Hickey. Roy, who eventually lived in California, even went on to become a millionaire. Hickey left the community and lived in San Diego, where he married and served in the Navy during World War II. He was in his 50s when he died, said Kunkel, partly because of the ravages of alcohol abuse, which ruined his liver. The last mention of the woman in the Courier was on 4 Oct., a month after the first report. Editor Mendel’s somewhat stilted style reads, in part, “…the last report we heard comes from Beadle [County]. The woman is caught in Beadle and it took no police to do it and no secret detective worked on the case. …A young man came home late in the evening and found the woman standing at the gate. He jerked the steering wheel to the side and went down the ditch. Knowing that the woman is close and with her eyes on him, he jumped down went through the fence to the house and made alarm. With the woman at the gate who can sleep? So the father and sons armed with guns prepared for the attack. The orders were shoot to scare but not to kill. She was surrounded and believe it or not, woman [sic] clothes filled with straw is all they found. The neighborhood boys played one on the young man.” 21 While there is little evidence that any of the four major German dialect groups here believed in Hexe (witches) or Hexerei (witchcraft), some residual memories of an earlier period undoubtedly persisted. Some German groups, especially the Pennsylvania Germans, painted symbols on barn doors to ward off witches. These symbols seem reminiscent of the gargoyles of medieval Europe, which were supposed to frighten away evil spirits. It is probably no coincidence that the sighting of die weisse Frau had such a grip on the community, albeit for only several weeks. It seems that many German groups believed in witchcraft in the Old Country and brought their old beliefs with them to the United States. Folklorist Timothy Kloberdanz says many German-speaking groups believed in the weisse Frau phenomenon. He says that she is a “supernatural, ghost-like being that can be seen at night and can even be heard to wail at times.” 22 Kloberdanz relates further that the Catholic Volga Germans chalked “symbols on doorways well into the 1900s. …and some families continue this practice today.” These marks, he explains, had a connection to the Feast of the Epiphany and brought good luck. He continues, saying that the Volga Germans “sometimes painted an Alpfuss (pentagram-type design) over the barn door to keep away evil.” And other German groups painted the words in German “The Blood of Jesus Christ.”23 It is hard to determine how much belief in the supernatural influenced the reaction of the Freeman community. It is tempting to think that such a hoax would meet with considerably more skepticism today. But each generation thinks it is more enlightened than the previous one. In many ways, superstitions still persist. We still have witchcraft, and the term witchhunt seems more than just a convenient metaphor. We also have not given up our belief in charms and talismans. Placing human nature in historical context and understanding human psychology of a different period are indeed difficult tasks. 1 “East Freeman,” Freeman Courier, 13 Sept. 1928, 8. 2 Leland Miller, Spokane, Washington, telephone interview 28 Apr. 2004. 3 “Personal,” Freeman Courier, 20 Sept. 1928, 1. 4 “Locals,” The Star, 5 Oct. 1928, 3 5 “Hysterical Historian,” The Lark, 1929, 35 6 Darlene Robinson, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, telephone interview 20 Sept. 2004. 7 Earl Gering, Freeman, South Dakota, personal interview 17 Feb. 2004. 8 Lillian Tieszen Glanzer, Marion, South Dakota, personal interview 17 Feb. 2004. 9 Dr. Wilbert Hieb, M.D., Freeman, South Dakota, personal interview 9 Nov. 2003. 10 Marian Graber Gering, Freeman, South Dakota, personal interview 13 Apr. 2004. 11 Earl Gering, personal interview 13 Apr. 2004 12 Warren E. Schwartz, In the Far Country (Lincoln, Nebraska: Augustana Printing Service, 1984), 99. In his highly fictionalized account, Schwartz seems nevertheless accurate in both his description of Andrew and Hickey and his explanation of the source of their nicknames. 13 Schwartz, 99. Schwartz’s account states that Hickey was Andrew’s grandson and that he adopted him after his son drowned. This is false. Andrew and Helena née Mueller had no children of their own. Willard’s sister Nellie Graber Kunkel states that the four siblings were all adopted and were all of different Western European nationalities, none German. Willard was of English origin. 14 Schwartz, 101. 15 Nellie Graber Kunkel, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, personal interview 15 Nov. 2003. Kunkel, who was present when most of the activities took place (including the Sunday hunt), has an extremely sharp mind at 90. 16 Erwin Graber, Moundridge, Kansas. In 1981 Bill Gering, Mishawaka, Indiana, taped an interview with Erwin Graber, who was 69 at the time and has since died. He had moved to Kansas several years after the episode. The various Grabers mentioned in this article are either not related to A.A. Graber or are distantly related. 17 “I saw her.” (High German: “Ich habe sie gesehen.”) 18 Cleon Graber, Freeman, South Dakota, personal interview, 12 Jan. 2004 19 The author has been a lifelong member of Salem-Zion, a rural church. He was 10 years old when Andrew died in 1942 and remembers him quite well. By then Hickey had been long gone from the community. But the author met him in San Diego in 1950 and agrees that he was very congenial. He cannot recall whether the white woman episode was discussed. 20 “Card of Thanks,” Freeman Courier, 27 Sept. 1928, 10. 21 “Personal,” Freeman Courier, 4 Oct. 1928, 1. 22 Dr. Timothy Kloberdanz, Ph.D., North Dakota State University, Fargo, e-mail exchange 12 Dec. 2003. 23 Kloberdanz, e-mail 5 Dec. 2003. |Home Origin History Monthly Feature Activities Board Anniversaries Store|

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Citric acid: emerging applications of key biotechnology industrial product © The Author(s) 2017 Received: 12 January 2017 Accepted: 27 February 2017 Published: 8 March 2017 KeywordsCitric acid Fermentation White biotechnology Bioeconomy Citric acid (2-hydroxy-1,2,3-propanetricarboxylic acid, C6H8O7) is an acidulant, preservative, emulsifier, flavorant, sequestrant and buffering agent widely used across many industries especially in food, beverage, pharmaceutical, nutraceutical and cosmetic products . First crystallized from lemon juice and named accordingly by Scheele in Sweden in 1784 , citric acid is a tricarboxylic acid whose central role in the metabolism of all aerobic organisms was undisclosed by Krebs in the late 1930s . Owing to its remarkable physico-chemical properties and environmentally benign nature, the use of citric acid across several industrial sectors increased rapidly throughout the 19th century when the acid was directly extracted from concentrated lemon juice, mainly in Sicily (Palermo in 1930 hosted the largest citric acid plant in Europe, Palermo’s Fabbrica Chimica Italiana Goldenberg), by adding lime to precipitate calcium citrate, and then recovering the acid using diluted sulfuric acid. Along with its elegant chemistry in aqueous and organic solutions, the history of citric acid utilization has been thoroughly recounted by Apelblat in 2014 . In brief, production of citric acid from lemon juice peaked in 1915–1916 at 17,500 tonnes , after which it started to decline due to the introduction of the commercial production by sugar fermentation: first in 1919 by Cytromices (now known as Penicillium) mold in Belgium following the researches of Cappuyns; and then, in 1923, in New York following Currie’s discovery that strains of Aspergillus niger (the black mold, a common contaminant of foods belonging to the same family as the penicillins) in acidified solution containing small amounts of inorganic salts afforded unprecedented high yields of the acid (today, 60% on dry matter basis) . Rapidly adopted by numerous other manufacturers, the fermentation process is still used nowadays across the world, and particularly in China, to meet the global demand for the acid, mainly using low cost molasses as raw materials. Interestingly, as recounted by Connor , a global citric acid cartel fixed prices for decades. In this study, referring to production, market and recent research achievements, we provide arguments supporting our viewpoint that citric acid will become a key chemical in the emerging bioeconomy , with applications beyond conventional usage in the food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries. Structure, properties and biochemical function In 1994, Tarakeshwar and Manogaran published the results of the ab initio quantum chemical calculations of electron rich citric acid (and citrate trianion) approximated at the Hartree–Fock level . The team found that citric acid and the citrate trianion have unique features which differentiate them from other α-carboxylic acids. The main difference between the central carboxyl group and the terminal carboxyl groups, highlighted by the ν(C=O) frequencies, was ascribed to an intramolecular hydrogen bond between the central hydroxyl hydrogen and one of the terminal carboxyl groups, with the ν(C=O) stretch frequency appearing at a lower frequency than the ν(C=O) stretch of the other terminal carboxyl. In 2011, Bichara and co-workers published the outcomes of the structural and vibrational theoretical study for the citric acid dimer (Fig. 1) . The values obtained through natural bond orbitals and atoms in molecules calculations, clearly indicate formation of the dimer through hydrogen-bond between two COOH groups of each monomer. Numerous bands of different intensities observed in the vibrational spectra not previously assigned, could now be assigned to the citric acid dimer. Remarkably, the X-ray analyses of Nordman , Glusker and co-workers were undertaken in the context of biochemistry studies. Citric acid, indeed, plays a central role in the biochemical cycle discovered by Krebs in 1937. Production, properties and applications Citric acid in different fruits Reproduced from Ref. , with kind permission Citric acid content (mg/100 mL) Pineapple, strawberry, cranberry To recover the acid from the fermentation broth, a first precipitation with lime is followed by acidification with H2SO4 and ion exchange, decoloration and crystallisation. The acid is generally sold as a white powder comprised of anyhydrous or monohydrate form typically available in 25 kg paper bags or large (500–1000 kg) bags. In general, the fermentation process generates twice the volume amount of by-products originating both from the carbohydrate raw material and from the downstream process in the form of a solid sludge (gypsum and organic impurities). All co-products are sold for technical, agricultural and feed applications. The organic part of the molasses, after concentration, is sold as a binding agent for feed. The protein rich mycelium resulting is sold as animal feed, while gypsum is marketed as a filler in cement or in medical applications. In 2012 Ray and co-workers were noting that the increasing demand required “more efficient fermentation process and genetically modified microorganisms for higher yield and purity” . However, while it is true that numerous citric acid suppliers use molasses from genetically modified corn and genetically modified sugar beet, other manufacturers produce only citrate products certified to originate from carbohydrates obtained from non-genetically modified crops and without any involvement of microorganisms derived from recombinant DNA technology. Main applications of citric acid and related chemical function Pharmaceutically active substances, pharmaceuticals, personal care and cosmetic products Many APIs are supplied as their citrate salt. Effervescent tablets and preparations (via reaction with bicarbonate or carbonate), aiding the dissolution of APIs and improving palatability. Effervescent systems are widely used in teeth-cleaning products, pain relief and vitamin tablets. Very effective buffering system for pH control used in a wide range of for improving stability Enhancing the activity of antioxidant preservatives (citrate powerful chelating agent for trace metal ions) Sharp, acid taste of citric acid can help mask the unpleasant, medicinal taste of pharmaceuticals Potassium citrate has diuretic properties Citrate chelates calcium, reducing the tendency for blood to clot Chelating agent sequestering heavy metals, including radioactive isotopes, easing also removal of hydrophobic organic compounds Acidulant and pH stabilizer Compared to the numerous applications identified by Soccol and co-workers in 2006 , in the subsequent decade the significant decrease in price and increase in production has opened the route to several new usages of citric acid that had remained idle due to prolonged high prices. Research on new uses and applications of citric acid is currently flourishing, as testified for example by new books published , following the still very relevant book written in 1975 by two leading industry’s practitioners . A first noticeable new use is in household detergents and dishwashing cleaners (approximately 13% of the global citric acid market) as a co-builder with zeolites, mainly in concentrated liquid detergents. Citric acid acts as builder, chelating water hardness Ca2+ and Mg2+ ions but, contrarily to phosphate builders, it does not contribute to the eutrophication of acquatic systems. Since 2017, furthermore, phosphates in dishwasher detergents already banned in the US (since 2010) will be banned in the EU too, leading to increasing consumption of citric acid , that will add to increasing use of citrate in domestic cleaners. Numerous other applications will follow. In the following, we provide three examples of recent innovative uses of citric acid that are likely to lead to a further significant market expansion. Citric acid is successfully applied to crosslink many other materials, including ultrafine protein fibers for biomedical applications , polyols for making biodegradable films suitable for example for for eco-friendly packaging , and with hydroxyapatite to make bioceramic composites for orthopedic tissue engineering . Goyanes and co-workers simply cross-linked citric acid with starch using glycerol as plasticizer by heating a mixture of starch, glycerol, water and citric acid at 75–85 °C. The resulting films with citric acid processed at 75 °C showed a significant decrease in both moisture absorption and water vapor permeability, namely the two main parameters affecting the barrier properties of packaging films. Crosslinking the starch–glycerol films with citric acid, furthermore, significantly improves the poor thermal degradation and mechanical properties of starch films . A significant new application of citric acid as crosslinking agent was discovered in 2011 by Rothenberg and Alberts at the University of Amsterdam, who found that glycerol and citric acid polymerize to form a thermoset resin, soluble in water, showing several important properties including quick degradation in the environment. Until the introduction of this thermoset, nearly all biodegradable plastics have been thermoplastic polymers. Combining citric acid dissolved in glycerol at a temperature above the boiling point of water at ambient pressure and below 130 °C gives a hard polyester resin by a straightforward Fisher esterification process . The boiling points of glycerol (290 °C) and the decomposition temperature of citric acid (175 °C) ensure that water is the only compound liberated as steam, as no decarboxylation takes place at T < 150 °C. Dubbed “Plantics-GX” by the start-up manufacturing company Plantics, the resin is currently produced on tonne scale at a pilot plant in the Netherlands. The polymer is also inherently safe as it bears no N atom and no S atoms, so there is no possibility of toxic gases during combustion. Full biodegradability ensures that the composite can be disposed of as organic waste as the material hydrolyzes in water making the bio-based particulate available for biological degradation. Citric acid is an excellent, harmless disinfectant against several viruses, including human norovirus. For example, added to norovirus-like particles, citrate precisely binds at the binding pocket on the histo-blood group antigens involved in attaching to host ligands, preventing the transmission of these viruses, as well as reducing symptoms in those already infected with noroviruses . In detail, citrate was also found to bind the norovirus P domain, pointing to a broad reactivity among diverse noroviruses. Easily transmitted through contaminated hands or contaminated food, noroviruses cause frequent gastroenteritis outbreaks in community settings such as hospitals, cruise ships, and schools. A commercial paper tissue, containing a middle layer impregnated with citric acid (7.51%) and sodium lauryl sulphate (2.02%), kills the viruses emitted in the form of tiny droplets in the tissue paper after sneezing, coughing or blowing of the nose into the tissue. When moisture hits the middle layer, sodium lauryl sulphate disrupts the lipid envelope of many viruses, whereas citric acid disrupts rhinoviruses, which do not have a lipid envelope, but are sensitive to acids, thereby preventing transfer back to the hands and to surfaces with which the tissue comes into contact . The biocidal product can also be used for the disinfection of surfaces where cold and flu viruses can survive for more than 24 h. Due to its excellent metal chelating properties, citric acid is widely used to clean industrial sites, including nuclear sites contaminated with radionuclides , and soils polluted with heavy metals. For example, not only the citric moiety facilitates the removal of metals in soils , but it also enhances the soil desorption of hydrophobic organic compounds from soils . Further enhancing the potential to remove mixed contaminants from soils, recent research in China has shown that when combined with rhamnolipid biosurfactants, citric acid affords unprecedented capacity in soil environmental remediation (better than most thermal or chemical treatments) through biobased chemical agents that are not only environmentally compatible, but also promote soil ecological restoration after remediation . Pectin is extracted under reflux in a condensation system at 97 °C (solute/solvent 1:50), using water acidified with citric acid to pH 2.5, and apple flour as raw material. The optimal citric acid concentration is 62 g/L. After 150 min, pectin with excellent degree of esterification (DE = 68.84%) was isolated. Remarkably, the pectin yield was significantly higher using flour as raw material in place of the pomace, as protopectin is more available in small particles than in large ones. Due to its chemical properties and health beneficial effects, the use of pectin is growing across many industrial sectors , while its scarcity on the market due to obsolete production processes generating large amounts of waste has recently led to unprecedented high prices. The use of citric acid to reduce microbiological activity, thereby enhancing the stability of concentrates, is well known for example to orange juice makers, who add the acid to concentrates delivered to customers in the beverage industry. Formulated along with other ingredients, citric acid affords an effective commercial antioxidant (NatureSeal), which preserves the aspect (texture and colour) and the organoleptic qualities of several fruits, making them appearing fresh. In tests with fresh-cut apples, for example, the inhibitor out-performs both ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and citric acid when used alone . Buffered citric acid makes bacteria membranes more vulnerable to leakage, keeps the wash water within pH 4.0 inhibiting bacterial growth, while the powerful oxidizing agents perorganic acid and hydrogen peroxide quickly penetrate the lipid bilayer membrane providing rapid inactivation of foodborne pathogenic bacteria, including human pathogens such as Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes and Escherichia coli. After the produce wash is applied to the raw produce and allowed to drain, the constituent ingredients break down into water, oxygen, and organic acids. No toxic compounds are released to the environment. Indeed, in late 2015, the manufacturing company received a positive food-contact substance notification . Market and bioeconomy aspects Citric acid plant closures until 2010 Reproduced from Ref. , with kind permission Year of closure Tate & Lyle Tate & Lyle Haarman & Reimer (Bayer) Gujarat State fertiliser & chemicals World’s main citric acid manufacturers and country headquarter Gadot Biochemical Industries Weifang Ensign Industry Huangshi Xinghua Biochemical Anhui COFCO Biochemical Tate & Lyle The sudden abundance of the product, with production output almost doubled in the 2004–2013 decade, led to unprecedented low prices that in 2015 bottomed out at $700/t . As in the case of solar photovoltaic modules , manufacturers in Europe and in North America were the petitioners in the investigation of anti-dumping duties imposed on products shipped by Chinese companies, lamenting unfair government subsidies and loans to China’s firms. In Europe, for example, the market investigation carried out by the European Commission in 2008 found out that Chinese domestic prices were around 48% lower than those in the EU market. Since June 2008, duties of almost 50% were applied on Chinese citric acid imports. Commenting on the impact of said tariffs and imposing definitive duties (varying between 15.3 and 42.7%) in early 2015, EU officers were writing that “the Union industry has recovered from the injury caused by the past dumping of Chinese exporting producers” . Yet, in mid-2016, workers in Belgium at one of the few manufacturing sites left in Europe started a blockade . Similar duties exist for example in the US , in South Africa and Brazil. In the latter country, on June 2016 antidumping duties of $803.61 and $823.04/t were applied to two Chinese companies found to be violating the provisions determined in 2012, when both were found part of an existent price undertaking . Outlook and conclusions Reviewing selected research achievements and market trends, this study provides a critical overview on citric acid. Obtained from molasses via fermentation on black mold, with its 2 million tonnes yearly output, citric acid is the main biotechnology product of the chemical industry and, in our viewpoint, a key chemical of the nascent bioeconomy. The global and strong demand of consumers for naturals, namely for functional products which are beneficial, and not harmful, both to health and to the environment, will continue to drive the demand of citric acid as ingredient in beverage, food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic products. Second, low price and abundance will originate a number of new, large-scale applications of the highly functionalized citric acid molecule, often in combination with other natural products and green chemicals, such as H2O2 , to formulate new preservatives and antioxidants. The entry into the international market of new China-based manufacturers has reshaped a chemical market which had existed in its oligopoly state for about 80 years since the inception, in the 1920s, of the commercial fermentation process in western Europe and in the US. Likewise to what happened with photovoltaic (PV) modules, wherein tariffs rapidly enforced in the EU and in the US did not stop global expansion of solar PV energy to unprecedented levels , low price of citric acid boosted its adoption in market segments and world’s regions where it was not traditionally used due to high price, including many south east Asia Pacific countries and Russia, the world’s largest country, which to the best of our knowledge hosts only one citric acid plant (Fig. 3). In conclusion, we argue, existing manufacturers in China will neither reduce production capacity built in the course of the last decade, nor production outputs; but they will rather adapt to prolonged low prices, by increasing the efficiency of the production process. The cost of the raw materials (molasses, A. niger water and sulfuric acid) is low and their availability practically unlimited. Under these industrial and market circumstances, developing environmentally friendly chemical technologies based on this eminent green chemical is an important task for today’s chemistry and biotechnology scholars engaged in contemporary sustainable chemistry and green technology research. MP conceived the idea for the review. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. This article is dedicated to Dr. Francesco Vadalà, AMG Energia (Palermo), for all he has done to support the work of one of us (M.P.) during his presidency. The authors declare that they have no competing interests. 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You are looking at 31-40 of 146 articles Rhian Salmon, Rebecca Priestley, Michele Fontana, and Taciano L. Milfont This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Please check back later for the full article. Climate change communication in Aotearoa New Zealand occurs through multiple channels. This includes public communication by experts; formal and informal science-policy dialogues; and publication of popular books, documentaries, and media reports. There are, in addition, a wide array of climate change communication activities that are less well documented, such as those that utilize the educational system, social media, art, community events, and festivals, and co-production processes related to adaptation and mitigation choices. Although research into the communication of climate change is in its infancy in the country, there is a wealth of data on public attitudes towards climate change over the past decade. Much of this information indicates that most New Zealanders currently believe climate change is occurring, is anthropogenic, and is a serious concern. This is mirrored by research into media coverage on climate change, which shows that mainstream news reports are largely consistent with the scientific consensus and reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and do not give much coverage to “climate skeptic” viewpoints. This latter perspective is, however, represented in other media such as opinion pieces in newspapers, blogs, popular books, and public lectures. Climate change communication in Aotearoa New Zealand is shaped, to some degree, by the country’s small population. This leads both to opportunities, such as the relative ease of access to political decision makers, and to barriers, mostly related to limited resources for both New Zealand-specific research on climate change impacts and implications, and for national communication and public engagement on the topic. Marianne Ryghaug and Tomas Moe Skjølsvold Climate change research, activities, and initiatives in Norway started relatively late, by international comparison. From the beginnings in the early 2000s, research has mainly followed two paths: First, media studies, typically focusing on traditional newspaper representations of climate change and the surrounding debate, and second, research on public perceptions of climate change. Initially, the research field was dominated by media studies and science and technology studies (STS). As climate change and related controversies made headlines during the mid-2000s, the authorities implemented several engagement activities and research programs to improve climate change communication, typically aiming at public education on climate change. Teaching the public about climate change as a scientific phenomenon along the lines of the “knowledge deficit model” was a favored strategy. Research on climate change media coverage indicated that the issue was reported in the same way as other news stories: the journalistic principles of newsworthiness often led newspapers to cover global warming as a contested phenomenon, in which harsh scientific controversy was played out. Thus, the Norwegian media framed the issue similar to U.S. newspapers, giving voice to both concerned climate scientists as well as climate skeptics (representative of “balanced” reporting). Studies of public perceptions of climate change demonstrated that public opinions were largely influenced by this “balanced reporting”: although most people believed the climate threat was real, the many accounts of scientific controversy made people uncertain, and many people questioned the urgency of the issues. This was, of course, not only a result of the media accounts, but also of what the public interpreted as political inertia. Following this, a debate about the ethics of journalism surfaced, and the media increasingly downplayed the controversy angle. Recent research indicates that this may have had paradoxical consequences; downplaying controversy has made climate change less newsworthy, and it has thus been given less priority by Norwegian media. Recently, more disciplinary groups have become interested in climate change communication, from psychology to linguistics, political science, and philosophy. Accordingly, research trajectories have multiplied, and at least two new strands surfaced: how science is communicated in traditional and new social media and the use of climate change knowledge in so-called “climate change services.” The latter strand of research typically also relates to climate change adaptation work, to a greater extent than the earlier works, where the focus has mainly been on mitigation. Bruno Takahashi and Alejandra Martinez Peru is one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet. More than 65% of the country is covered by the Amazon rainforest, and the Andes region is home to more than 70% of the world’s tropical glaciers. This abundance of natural resources also makes the country highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The Peruvian government therefore requires the development and implementation of action plans to adapt to the present and future impacts of climate change. At the same time, it requires the development of sound communication strategies that include collaboration with stakeholders such as the media and nongovernmental organizations. Media coverage of climate change can have important implications for policy decision making. This is especially salient in a context of low information availability where media reports play an important role in filling knowledge gaps that in turn can affect the way policies are developed. Climate change, as an environmental and social issue in Peru, is not highly politicized, as it is in countries such as the United States and Australia. There is no major debate about the reality of climate change, the scientific evidence, or the need for political action and technological and policy innovations. This approach is also reflected in the media’s coverage of the issue. Peru’s media tend to focus on climate change mostly during key policy events. Among these major events was the capital city of Lima’s hosting in 2010 of the V meeting of Latin American, Caribbean, and European Union countries, where the main topics of discussion were climate change and poverty. In addition, Lima hosted the COP20, which preceded the Paris meeting in 2015 that led to a major global agreement. The media’s coverage of these events was intense. These were the exceptions: A good proportion of Peru’s newspaper coverage comes from international news wire agencies. Coverage from those sources focuses mostly on mitigation actions, instead of adaptation, which is more relevant to vulnerable countries such as Peru. This coverage is in line with the government’s view of mitigation as a business opportunity. There is, however, a lack of studies that explore, first, the factors that affect this coverage, and, second, the way other mediums such as television or radio cover the issue. Strategic communication by governmental organizations, as well as accurate and fact-based media reporting about climate change, is necessary to better communicate the urgency and magnitude of the problem to the general public, grassroots organizations, industry, and international agencies, among others. Anabela Carvalho and Ana Horta This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Please check back later for the full article. Severely threatened by heat waves, droughts, fire hazards, water restrictions, coastal flooding, and climate-related impacts on the economy, among other socio-ecological disturbances, Portugal is an interesting case for the analysis of climate change communication. In view of those risks, public debate and policy action towards adaptation are lacking. National climate policies have been formulated mostly in response to external impulses coming from the European Union membership. There has been almost no political conflict regarding climate change, and levels of skepticism regarding its anthropogenic causes are low. Media coverage of climate change tends to focus on global political issues and international negotiations, relying heavily on political sources, the dominant—but quite mistrusted—voices in media discourses. National policy makers tend to adopt a technical discourse that comes across as “rational” and fairly optimistic, with little contestation by environmental groups or others. Climate change is thus mainly (re)presented as a global issue, distant from local realities, and scientists seem to avoid dramatizing its consequences for the country. Climate change is closely tied to energy issues. In the 1990s, national governments initiated significant investments in renewable energy sources and publicly depicted climate change through a green economy discourse. Since then, the weight of wind power in energy generation has increased significantly, and its expansion has not faced major opposition. The mega-dams that are currently under construction and were also officially justified by climate change (as well as energy sovereignty), have encountered some civic resistance, but it is disproportional to the large environmental and landscape impacts the dams will cause. Although public opinion surveys have shown that the population considers climate change a serious problem, surveys have also revealed levels of ignorance and self-evaluated lack of information among the Portuguese that are considerably higher than in other European countries. Behavioral commitment to address climate change is rather weak. Moreover, public participation is generally low in Portugal, and the environmental movement is traditionally weak. This particular set of conditions seems to contribute to low levels of awareness of the country’s vulnerability to climate change and a lack of effective measures to deal with its impacts, in spite of the fact that Portugal is included in a group of countries—the European Union—that is considered watchful, and a frontrunner regarding climate change. Adam R. Pearson, Matthew T. Ballew, Sarah Naiman, and Jonathon P. Schuldt Interest in the audience factors that shape the processing of climate change messaging has risen over the past decade, as evidenced by dozens of studies demonstrating message effects that are contingent on audiences’ political values, ideological worldviews, and cultural mindsets. Complementing these efforts is a growing interest in understanding the role of nonpartisan social factors—including racial and ethnic identities, social class, and gender—that have received comparably less attention but are critical for understanding how the challenges posed by climate change can be effectively communicated in pluralistic societies. Research and theory on the effects of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status (education and income), and gender on climate change perceptions suggest that each of these factors can independently and systematically shape people’s attitudes and beliefs about climate change, as well as both individual and collective motivations to address it. Moreover, the literature suggests that these factors often interact with political orientation (ideology and party affiliation) such that climate change beliefs and risk perceptions are typically more polarized for members of advantaged groups than disadvantaged groups. Notably, differential polarization in the perceived dangers posed by climate change has increased in some group dimensions (e.g., race and income) from 2000 to 2010. Groups for whom the issue of climate change may be less politically charged, such as racial and ethnic minorities and members of socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, thus represent critical audiences for bridging growing partisan divides and building policy consensus. Nevertheless, critical knowledge gaps remain. In particular, few studies have examined effects of race or ethnicity beyond the U.S. context or explored ways in which race, ethnicity, class, and gender may interact to influence climate change engagement. Increasing attention to these factors, as well as the role of diversity more generally in environmental communication, can enhance understanding of key barriers to broadening public participation in climate discourse and decision-making. In the Russian case, climate change communication links to critical issues of domestic and foreign policy. Russia is one of the leaders in the global carbon market, but its outdated industrial sector needs modernization based on energy efficient technologies. Russia is an ambitious international player seeking high moral positions in addressing global problems such as climate change, but its growing isolation and authoritarianism strangle free public discussions about climate change on a national scale. This article reviews the development of climate change communication as practice and as a field of academic research in Russia. By outlining the relevant scholarly field, the article splits the discussion into two parts—the realities of communication in climate politics and environmental communication. The section on climate politics touches upon Russia’s climate policy, the development of environmental movement since the 1960s, and the question of indigenous peoples. The environmental communication section highlights historical and more recent roles of environmental journalism, points to a generally low volume of climate change coverage, and raises questions about the potential of alternative media. The article concludes that the Russian field of communication research focusing on climate change is growing, but needs a more systematic approach, international comparisons, and research designs that would include more types of empirical materials. Edson C. Tandoc Jr. and Nicholas Eng While initial research on climate change communication focused on traditional media, such as news coverage of climate change and pro-environmental campaigns, scholars are increasingly focusing on the role of social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Sina Weibo. Social media platforms provide a space for three important domains of climate change communication: information, discussion, and mobilization. First, social media platforms have been used by scientists, activists, journalists, and ordinary people to share and receive reports about climate change. Policymakers and academics also use social media for climate change research. Second, social media platforms provide users with a space to discuss climate change issues. Scientists and journalists use social media to interact with the public, who also use social media to criticize policies, as well as media coverage. Finally, social media platforms have been used to coordinate rescue and relief operations in the aftermath of climate change–related disasters, as well as to organize movements and campaigns about climate change. However, most research about climate change communication in social media spaces are based on quantitative analysis of tweets from Western countries. While this body of work has been illuminating, our understanding of social media’s increasingly important role in climate change communication will benefit from a more holistic research approach that explores social media use in climate change communication across a variety of platforms, cultures, and media systems. Sei-Hill Kim, Myung-Hyun Kang, and Jeong-Heon Chang Climate change is a significant issue in South Korea, and the news media are particularly important because they can play a central role in communicating information about climate change, a complex phenomenon on which the public in general lacks expert knowledge. The amount of climate change coverage increased in South Korean newspapers until 2009 and started to decline thereafter. The increase seems to have been driven primarily by international news and domestic politics. Until 2007, the increase in news coverage—as well as its short-term peaks—coincided with major international events, such as the releases of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. After 2007, the amount was affected not only by international events but also by domestic politics, such as the Lee administration’s “Low Carbon, Green Growth” policy, which became an important part of the national agenda. In terms of the nature of news coverage, newspapers represented the perspectives of climate change believers for the most part, while it was relatively hard to find skeptics’ arguments. News stories relied heavily on such authoritative international figures as the IPCC for information, which often led to conclusions that climate change is real and that human activities are primarily responsible. There are also political reasons for this point of view. President Lee, and his successor, President Park, maintained strong and ambitious environmental policies. As an important part of the president’s agenda, these policies might have affected the nature of news coverage, setting the tone of news articles in favor of strong environmental regulations. Lack of scientific expertise among news writers seems to affect the nature of news coverage as well. The lack of expert knowledge has often resulted in heavy reliance on press releases, newsworthy events, and scandals, instead of providing in-depth analyses of scientific backgrounds in climate change reporting. Another consequence was a heavy reliance on international news. The largest number of climate change articles was found as part of international news, while such articles rarely appeared in the science sections. María Carmen Erviti and Bienvenido León It is not easy to determine the precise moment when climate change became a public communication issue in Spain. Among early references, the national newspaper El País published a story titled “World climate is going to change,” on November 17, 1976, and the term “global warming,” imported from the United States, appeared frequently in the media, from 1988 onward. However, academic research about communication of this important issue is relatively recent. A seminar held in 2005 warned that there were “no specific studies on the way the Spanish citizenry is facing the climate change threat” (II Seminario de Comunicación, Educación y Participación frente al Cambio Climático, Lekaroz, Navarra). This seminar precipitated the first study on public perception of climate change in Spain. According to more recent research, 90.1% of Spanish citizens are aware that climate change is happening, whereas only 4.6% are not. Historical records indicate that awareness has grown consistently in the early 21st century, with awareness levels that are similar to those of other countries. However, although there exists a strong consensus within the scientific community on the existence and the anthropogenic origin of climate change, polls indicate that only a small part of the Spanish population (39.0%) is aware of this agreement; a figure that is similar to that of other countries, such as the United States. In addition, two thirds of the Spanish population (64.4%) believe that climate change is mainly a consequence of human activities; a higher percentage than in other countries, like the United States. This ambivalent picture is not surprising, considering climate change is a marginal topic for mainstream Spanish media. According to a study conducted in 2005 and 2011, only 0.2% of all stories in the main national newspapers and 0.19% of national TV news focused on climate change, a lower percentage than in other countries. Media coverage of this issue has fluctuated since the 1990s, depending on several factors, like the existence of links to current affairs (such as international climate summits), notable report publications (from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and public engagement efforts (such as the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth). As far as the quality of the coverage is concerned, research shows similar trends to those detected internationally, including politicization, superficiality, and catastrophism. However, compared to other countries, there is a lower representation of skeptic viewpoints in the Spanish media that may be related to a weaker public visibility of skeptic think tanks and personalities. Academic interest in climate change communication has risen since 2010. Only four publications (books or articles) were released from 2001 to 2005, whereas more than 30 appeared in the period 2011–2015. Research has primarily focused on public perception and media coverage of climate change and has been conducted mainly by four universities (Universidad Complutense, Universidad de Málaga, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, and Universidad de Navarra). Communication actions related to climate change have been carried out by several nongovernmental organizations, often as part of international events and campaigns. In the early 21st century, national and regional public institutions have conducted several campaigns to communicate and raise climate change awareness, producing several exhibitions and publications, mainly on climate change mitigation. Several forums have suggested that the current weaknesses could benefit from a closer relationship among the media and scientific institutions. This could contribute to provide more credible information on the reality of climate change, as well as the options for mitigation and adaptation. Future research could also address climate change coverage in online media and social networks, as well as reception studies, currently underrepresented in academic studies conducted in the country. The contribution summarizes the topic of climate change communication in Switzerland. The development of the topic of “climate change” is described and located within the general area of environmental politics in Switzerland, based on the specifics of Switzerland as a small, federal state, and non-EU member with direct democratic political processes. Climate change communication then is analyzed based on the results of several content analyses, mostly of Swiss print media, which focus on intensity of coverage, topics, and media frames. In the last part, the perception of and attitudes towards environment and climate change are presented and compared to other countries, based on public opinion survey data.

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Auschwitz is a name that was virtually unknown before 1989. Now it has become a symbol for The Holocaust -- the Nazi plan to systematically exterminate all the Jews of Europe, which resulted in the deaths of 6 million Jews. Auschwitz is the site of the greatest mass murder of all time, the most infamous Nazi death factory, the primary killing site where the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was carried out by means of homicidal gas chambers, the most heinous place on earth. An estimated 1.3 million victims arrived at Auschwitz between June 1940 and January 1945 and 1.1 million of them died there, including over 900,000 Jews. Today there are around one and a half million visitors who tour Auschwitz-Birkenau each year. The world first learned that the Jews were being gassed at Auschwitz when resistance fighters in the Polish Underground passed this information on to the Polish government in exile in Great Britain. On June 25, 1942, The Telegraph, a British newspaper, ran a story about the mass murder of Jews in gas chambers at Auschwitz. The headline read "Germans murder 700,000 Jews in Poland." According to this first report, which was also broadcast on the radio by the British BBC in June 1942, a thousand Jews a day were being gassed. Auschwitz is more than one place: it is a small town in what is now Poland, but the name Auschwitz also refers to three separate prison camps called Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II and Auschwitz III, all of which were located just outside the town. The Auschwitz complex was an extermination camp, a labor camp, a transit camp and a concentration camp, all rolled into one. Auschwitz I was the main camp; it was a Class I concentration camp, which was opened in June 1940 in the barracks of a former Polish Army garrison. The first prisoners were mostly non-Jewish Polish political prisoners, but a few Jews were also imprisoned there. Auschwitz II was the death camp where over a million prisoners, mainly Jews, were killed, mostly in gas chambers; today, it is the world's largest Jewish graveyard, the place where the ashes of innocent victims were scattered over the fields, thrown into the rivers, or dumped into several small ponds sixty five years ago. Auschwitz III was a work camp where prisoners worked in the factories of the I.G. Farben company, along side civilian workers who were not prisoners. The town of Auschwitz, which was originally founded by Germans in 1270, is now known by its Polish name, Oswiecim, and the three camps are known as Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz. The Polish name for Birkenau is Brzezinka and Monowitz is called Monowice by the Poles. In June 2007, the United Nations officially changed the collective name of the three Auschwitz camps to Auschwitz-Birkenau, German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945). This change was made at the request of the government of Poland so that people will know that Poland had nothing to do with setting up the camps or running them. The size of the Auschwitz "Zone of Interest" was 40 square kilometers. There was a security zone, consisting of 5,000 acres of potential farmland, which Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and all the concentration camps, eventually turned into a huge farm where 10,000 inmates, mostly women, were put to work. This was an agricultural experiment station for the benefit of the German farmers who were brought to the region to settle on farms that were taken away from the Polish inhabitants. Himmler, who is sometimes dismissed as a "chicken farmer" had a degree in Agriculture and Rudolf Hoess, the first Commandant of Auschwitz, was previously a farmer. The photo at the top of the page was taken on May 26, 1944 when Hungarian Jews were brought to the Auschwitz II extermination camp, also known as Birkenau. In the photo, the prisoners in striped uniforms, wearing white scarves, were with the Kanada Kommando, which was in charge of collecting the luggage from the incoming trains and taking it to the clothing warehouses. The location of the clothing warehouses was called Canada, or Kanada in German, because of the great wealth to be found there, including fur coats, diamonds and even pots and pans and canned food that had been confiscated from the luggage of the Jews. Across the road from Canada at the Birkenau camp was the Sauna building where the clothing was disinfected in steam chambers. There was also a shower room in the Sauna building. In the photo above, you can see Crematorium II with its tall chimney on the right side in the background. Up to 12,000 Jews per day were murdered upon arrival in the gas chambers at Birkenau and their bodies were burned in the ovens in the crematoria. According to Robert Jan van Pelt, a noted Holocaust historian, there were 500,000 Jews gassed in the underground gas chamber in Crematorium II, called Krema II by the Germans. The total number of Jews gassed during the Holocaust, as stated in a display at the Wannsee Museum in Berlin, is 3,652,000. This incudes the Jews who were gassed at Chelmno, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Majdanek, as well as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Note the absence of German guards with guns or dogs in the photo above; at this point, the new prisoners did not yet know what their fate would be. Note that there is no smoke coming out of the chimneys of the crematoria. In the center background of the photo, the concrete posts for the barbed wire fence around the barracks can be seen, but notice that there were no guard towers along the whole length of the main camp road. Guard towers have since been added. On July 2, 1947, what is left of the Auschwitz camps became the Auschwitz Museum, by an official decree which stated: "...on the site of the former Nazi concentration camp, a Monument of the Martyrdom of the Polish Nation and of Other Nations is to be erected for all times to come." Note that there was no mention of the Jews in the decree. Poland was, at that time, a Communist country under the domination of the Soviet Union, which did not recognize any religion. The Monowitz camp, once located on the east side of the town of Auschwitz, is no longer in existence, although the Buna Werke factories, once owned by the I.G. Farben company, were taken over by the Poles and are still in use today. It was at Monowitz that famous Auschwitz survivors Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel once worked. Both Levi and Wiesel wrote extensively about their suffering at Auschwitz, but for years after the war, no one was interested. When Primo Levi took his first manuscript, "Se questo è un uomo," to an Italian publisher in 1946, it was completely rejected. At that time, it was not Auschwitz that was the focus of the Nazi Crimes against Humanity, but rather Dachau and Buchenwald. Oswiecim is now a factory town with 50,000 residents, but before the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, it was a market town with a population 12,000, of which 7,000 residents were Jewish. The next largest ethnic group in Oswiecim in 1939 was the Roma (Gypsies). The Jews, who had lived for over 500 years in the town, which they called Oshpitzin, were evacuated by the Nazis to three different ghettos in 1941, but eventually ended up back at Auschwitz, where most of them perished in the death camp. A few Jewish survivors came back to the town after the war, but soon left for Israel or the United States. At one time there were more than 12 Synagogues in Oshpitzin, but all except one were destroyed by the Nazis. The one surviving Synagogue, originally opened in 1930, has been reconstructed and since the year 2000, it has been open for tourists. The area of Europe that was inhabited by the German tribes in the Middle Ages became the Holy Roman Empire in the year 800 and by 1270, the Empire had expanded to include the area known as Upper Silesia, where Auschwitz is located. In 1457, Auschwitz became part of the Kingdom of Poland and it was then known as Oswiecim. Most of Silesia was annexed to the German state of Prussia in 1742, except for four duchies. The duchy of Auschwitz was annexed to Galicia, a province which was given to Austria when Poland lost its independence in 1772 and the country was divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Western Galicia soon became known as The Corner of Three Empires: Russia, Prussia and Austria. The town known as Auschwitz, or Oswiecim or Oshpitzin, became a prime location for Jewish traders or merchants during the time that Galicia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In 1871, Prussia and the other German states, except Austria, united into the country of Germany. After the defeat of Germany and Austria in World War I, Galicia and the industrial area known as Upper Silesia were given to Poland. In 1939, after the joint conquest of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union, Upper Silesia was annexed into the Greater German Reich, which at that time consisted of Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland in what is now the Czech Republic. The map shown above is what was left of Germany after German territory was given to other countries in the terms of the Treaty of Versailles after the end of World War I. Hitler blamed the Jews for the German defeat in World War I and for the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles. World II started with the German invasion of Poland, followed by the annexation of Silesia into the Greater German Reich. Auschwitz was located in Silesia. When railroad lines were built in the 19th century, the little town of Auschwitz, at the junction of three empires, became the crossroads of Europe. There were 44 train lines coming into Auschwitz, making it at one time a larger railroad hub than Penn Station in New York City. It was because Auschwitz was such an important railroad junction that a camp for migrant workers was built in a suburb of the town in 1916; seasonal farm workers from all over Europe were sent from Auschwitz to the large German estates. The migrant worker camp, with its beautiful brick barracks buildings, was the place that eventually became the Auschwitz I concentration camp. In 1919, Poland became an independent country again and Auschwitz became a Polish town called Oswiecim. The former migrant worker camp was used as a garrison by the Polish Army. The Auschwitz main camp originally had 20 brick barracks buildings; 14 of them were single story buildings and 6 were two stories high. When this camp was converted into the Auschwitz concentration camp, a second story was added to the 14 single story buildings and 8 new two-story buildings were added, making a total of 28 barracks buildings. Between 13,000 and 16,000 concentration camp prisoners were crowded into these 28 buildings where they slept in three-tiered bunks. At one point, in 1942, there were 20,000 prisoners at the Auschwitz main camp. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 and the town of Oswiecim was captured on September 6th. Following the conquest of Poland, the name of the town reverted back to Auschwitz. The city of Krakow, located 37 miles from Auschwitz, became the capital of German-occupied Poland, known as the General Government. It is important to note that, during the time that Auschwitz was a killing center, it was in the Greater German Reich, not in occupied Poland. The Polish people are incensed when Auschwitz is described as a concentration camp in Poland. Auschwitz was located literally at the junction of the Greater German Reich and occupied Poland; it was also in the heart of "The Black Triangle," an industrial area with large coal deposits, which is why it was such an important location for the Nazis. The genocide of the Jews did not officially start until after the Wannsee Conference, held on January 20, 1942, where the plans for the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" were finalized. The conference was led by Reinhard Heydrich. The exact date of Hitler's order to exterminate the Jews is unknown, but an order from Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich on July 31, 1941 reads as follows: Complementing the task already assigned to you in the directive of January 24, 1939, to undertake, by emigration or evacuation, a solution to the Jewish question as advantageous as possible under the conditions at the time, I hereby charge you with making all necessary organizational, functional, and material preparations for a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe. Insofar as the jurisdiction of other central agencies may be touched thereby, they are to be involved. I charge you furthermore with submitting to me in the near future an overall plan of the organizational, functional, and material measures to be taken in preparing for the implementation of the aspired final solution of the Jewish question. On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and by the time that the Wannsee Conference took place, German troops had "liberated" Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and the Ukraine from the Communist Soviet Union. The eastern one third of Poland, which was across the Bug river from the General Government, had been a province of the Soviet Union since the conquest of Poland in September 1939; in January 1942, this area was now under the control of the Germans. Between 1836 and 1917, the area east of the Bug river belonged to Russia and it was known as the "Pale of Settlement." The Czar of Russia had confined the Jews in the Pale of Settlement in 1836; the Russian Jews were finally liberated during the Communist Revolution. After the German conquest of this area in June 1941, millions more Jews were now within the grasp of the Nazis. By December 1941, the German Army had advanced 1,000 kilometers into Russia. The Nazis believed that they were on the verge of winning the war against the Communist Soviet Union and it was time to begin their diabolical plan to exterminate (ausrotten) the Jews of Europe. After the Wannsee Conference, three death camps, called the Aktion Reinhard camps, were set up along the Bug river on the eastern border of the General Government; these three camps were Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. The headquarters of Aktion Reinhard was in eastern Poland in the city of Lublin, near the Majdanek death camp. The most conservative estimate of the number of Jews gassed, using carbon monoxide, during 1942 and 1943 in the Aktion Reinhard camps is 1.5 million, the figure given by Raul Hilberg in his 3-volume classic entitled "The Destruction of the European Jews." The bodies were first buried, then dug up and burned on pyres. The round-up of all the Jews in Nazi occupied Europe did not begin until after February 1942 when millions of Jews were deported to the Aktion Reinhard camps and they never returned. Up until that time, many Jews had been sent to Dachau and other camps, but not just because they were Jews. The first Jews were sent to concentration camps because they were Communists, or Social Democrats, or labor union leaders, or homosexuals, or race-mixers who had broken the Nuremberg law against having sex with an ethnic German. It was in February 1942 that the plan to annihilate the Jews of Europe was first implemented, although the murder of Jews in gas vans had already started on December 6, 1941 at Chelmno, shortly before the Wannsee Conference, which had been originally scheduled for December 9th. The first transport of male prisoners to Auschwitz, that consisted entirely of Jews, arrived from Slovakia in February 1942. A transport from France, which consisted of Jewish refugees without French passports, arrived on March 23, 1942. The first Jewish women sent to Auschwitz were on a transport of 1,000 women, between the ages of 16 and 30, from Poprad in Slovakia, which arrived on March 26, 1942. On that same day, 999 women were transferred from the women's camp, in the Ravensbrueck Concentration Camp, to Auschwitz. Most of them were criminals and "asocials," but there were also between ten and twenty political prisoners among them. The plan to establish a concentration camp at Auschwitz was first announced by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on April 27, 1940. Konzentrationslager Auschwitz, the main camp, was originally opened on June 14, 1940, as just another concentration camp, in the former Polish military garrison in Zazole, a district of the town of Auschwitz. Thirty German criminals, who were prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, were brought to Auschwitz in May 1940 to convert the garrison into a prison camp. Throughout its existence, the Nazis called Auschwitz a concentration camp, not an extermination camp or Vernichtungslager. The term "extermination camp" was coined by the Allies and initially, it applied to all the Nazi camps. At first, the Auschwitz main camp, known as the Stammlager, was only a camp for Polish political prisoners, including some Jews, and also German common criminals, who assisted the Nazis in supervising the other prisoners. The first transport to the main Auschwitz camp consisted of 728 Polish inmates of the Gestapo prison at Tarnow, Poland. They were mostly university students, including a few Jews, who had joined the Polish Resistance. The Polish Army had never surrendered to the Germans and no Armistice had ever been signed. The Poles continued to fight during World War II, but as insurgents or illegal combatants, not as soldiers on the battlefield. When captured, the Polish resistance fighters were sent to Auschwitz or other concentration camps such as Buchenwald and Dachau. Among the first 728 prisoners who arrived at Auschwitz on June 14, 1940 was 18-year-old Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who later became Poland 's foreign minister and a pioneer of German-Polish reconciliation. Bartoszewski recalled in his memoirs that guards herded the prisoners through the gate with the German inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei." (Work makes Free) "I felt relieved - it seemed like encouragement," he wrote. Source: Gulf Times website Bartoszewski fell seriously ill and was released a half-year later, thanks to intervention by the Red Cross. The first Commandant of Auschwitz was Rudolf Hoess, who is sometimes confused with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess. Hoess is the English spelling of the German name Höß or Höss. Hoess was an officer in Hitler's elite army called the SS; he had received his training at Dachau and had then been assigned to the Sachsenhausen camp before becoming the Commandant of Auschwitz in May 1940. After the war, Hoess was hunted down and arrested by the Jewish Brigade in the British Army. He testified as a defense witness for Ernst Kaltenbrunner at the Nuremberg IMT; Kaltenbrunner was charged with committing Crimes Against Humanity but Hoess testified that Kaltenbrunner didn't know about the gassing of the Jews since he had never visited Auschwitz, which Hoess freely admitted was a death camp. Hoess was later extradited to Poland to stand trial himself. He was convicted and subsequently hanged on April 16, 1947 in front of the Gestapo building at Auschwitz which was right next to the Krema I gas chamber in the main camp. Hoess was the one who put the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign over the gate into the main Auschwitz camp. Translated into English, the words mean "Work will set you free." In his autobiography, Hoess explained that this expression means that work liberates one in the spiritual sense, not that the prisoners literally had a chance of being released if they worked hard. However, according to Franciszek Piper, the former director of the Auschwitz Museum, the camp records show that around 1,500 prisoners were actually released from the Auschwitz main camp. Hoess was relieved of his duties as Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau complex and sent to Oranienburg to replace Arthur Liebehenschel as the Senior Director of WVHA, the SS Economic Department. On December 1, 1944, Liebehenschel became the new Commandant of Auschwitz, but only the Auschwitz I camp, not the whole Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. Hoess was allegedly having an affair with a woman prisoner in Block 11 at the Auschwitz I camp. The woman, identified only as E.H., told her story to the American liberators at Dachau and it was included in a book entitled "Dachau Liberated, The Official Report by The U.S. Seventh Army." Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, an SS judge who was assigned to investigate corruption in the Auschwitz camp, allegedly learned of the affair and fired Hoess from his position as Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The daughter of Arthur Liebehenschel wrote in a book entitled "My father, the Auschwitz commandant, published in 2009, that her father was demoted and sent to Auschwitz in 1944 because he had left his wife for another woman who was friendly with Jews. According to Danuta Czech, who wrote "The History of KL Auschwitz," published in 1967, the administration of the three camps that comprised the vast Auschwitz complex was divided among three different Commandants on November 22, 1943. The original Auschwitz I camp was put under the command of Liebehenschel while Auschwitz II (Birkenau) was placed under the command of SS Major Fritz Hartjenstein, who was later transferred to Natzweiler and then to Ravensbrück. SS 2nd Lt. Hans Schwarzhuber was put in charge of the men's camp at Birkenau and SS 2nd Lt. Franz Hössler was put in charge of the woman's camp. Hans Schwarzhuber, who was transferred to Ravensbrück on January 12, 1945, was put on trial in a British military court at Hamburg after the war. Schwarzhuber confessed that prisoners were gassed at Ravensbrück and at Birkenau. He was convicted of war crimes and executed on May 3, 1947. Franz Hössler (sometimes spelled Hoessler) was later transferred to Bergen-Belsen where he stayed behind to assist the British when the camp was voluntarily turned over to them on April 15, 1945. Hössler was put on trial by the British in the Belsen trial in 1945. He was convicted of war crimes committed at Birkenau and was hanged on December 13, 1945. Auschwitz III (Monowitz) was put under the command of SS 2nd Lt. Heinrich Schwartz in November 1943. In his autobiography, published under the title "Death Dealer," Hoess wrote this about Commandant Schwartz: Schwartz always stubbornly demanded that the prisoners be treated decently, be given good food and have adequate shelter. He moved quickly and often drastically against those responsible where there were legitimate complaints, and he didn't rest until the grievance was remedied. On May 8, 1944, Liebehenschel was transferred to Lublin to become the Commandant of the Majdanek death camp, according to Danuta Czech. After Majdanek was evacuated just before it was liberated by the Soviet Union in July 1944, Liebehenschel was sent back to Oranienburg. He was arrested by the American military after the war and was extradited to Poland for trial; he was convicted of war crimes by a Polish court and was executed on January 24, 1948. On May 5, 1944, Richard Baer became the Commandant of the Auschwitz main camp, according to Danuta Czech. Baer is often referred to as the "last Commandant of Auschwitz," but he was only in charge of the Auschwitz main camp, not the whole Auschwitz complex. In January 1945, Baer replaced Otto Förschner as the Commandant of Mittelbau-Dora, the concentration camp in Germany where the V-2 rockets were built. After the war, Richard Baer escaped justice by hiding under an assumed name while he worked as a lumberjack in a remote area in Germany. He was finally tracked down and arrested in 1960, soon after Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina where he was also hiding under an assumed name. Baer was asked to give a deposition which was entered into the trial of Eichmann in Israel. Baer was awaiting his own trial in the Auschwitz case in Frankfurt when he mysteriously died in prison just before the trial began in June 1963. Under interrogation, Baer had stubbornly refused to admit to the gassing of prisoners at Auschwitz. On May 8, 1944, Rudolf Hoess was brought back to Auschwitz to be the commander of the SS garrison and to oversee the gassing of the Hungarian Jews, according to Danuta Czech. In January 1941, all the Nazi concentration camps were designated as Class I, Class II or Class III camps. The Auschwitz main camp, called KL Auschwitz, was designated a Class I camp, meaning a mild prison for political dissidents who were considered capable of being "rehabilitated." The Auschwitz main camp was a place where the political prisoners had such amenities as a swimming pool, a brothel, a library, several orchestras, a theater and a museum where their artwork was displayed. The barracks in the main camp were brick buildings with flush toilets, porcelain-covered stoves and double-paned casement windows. There was also a hospital where Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, stayed for three months because he was suffering from exhaustion. Otto Frank had himself voluntarily checked into the hospital, by a Dutch doctor, who was an inmate himself. The photo below shows one of the Auschwitz orchestras, conducted by Franciszek Nierychlo. The orchestra members were inmates in the camp. An orchestra was stationed near the camp entrance so that the prisoners could hear classical music as they marched in and out of the camp. On Sundays, there were concerts which the prisoners and the SS staff members attended together. Another orchestra, consisting of 54 female prisoners, played at Birkenau for a year and a half; this was the only female orchestra commisioned by the SS during World War II. After the orchestra leader, Alma Rosé, died in October 1944, the other 53 women were sent to Bergen-Belsen where all of them survived. Anita Lasker Wallfisch played the cello in the women's orchestra. In an interview in 2008, Wallfisch told a reporter that she survived Auschwitz because she was in the orchestra: "As long as they wanted an orchestra, they couldn't put us in the gas chamber. That stupid they wouldn't be, because we are not really replaceable. Somebody who carries stones is replaceable." A few prisoners were saved at Auschwitz because they had other skills that could be used for the amusement of the SS officers. Salamo Arouch was a boxing champion in his home town of Salonika in Greece before he was transported to Auschwitz in 1943. He escaped the gas chamber because he was selected to fight in boxing matches twice a week for the entertainment of the German officials at Auschwitz. In 1989, a movie called "Triumph of the Spirit" was made about his harrowing ordeal as a prisoner at Auschwitz. Arouch died in 2009 at the age of 86. According to the Auschwitz Museum, the first prisoners to be gassed at Auschwitz were 600 Soviet Prisoners of War and 250 sick prisoners who were killed with Zyklon-B gas on September 3, 1941 in Cell No. 27 in Block 11, the prison block in the main Auschwitz camp. Commandant Rudolf Hoess was not there when the first gassing took place in the Auschwitz main camp. Peter Padfield, the biographer of Himmler, wrote that while Hoess was away, "his deputy, SS Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, decided to experiment with a prussic acid gas called Zyklon-B that was stored in the camp in crystal form for use against vermin." According to Padfield, the experiment was a success and "Höss told Eichmann about it when he next visited the camp." Karl Fritzsch was the first Lagerführer (camp leader) of the Auschwitz main camp; he was transferred to the Flossenbürg concentration camp in December 1941 and replaced by Hans Aumeier. According to Jeremy Dixon who wrote the book entitled "Commanders of Auschwitz," Aumeier was dismissed from his job at Auschwitz by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and sent to several other camps, ending his career at a camp in Norway. After the war, Aumeier did not try to hide; he was arrested in June 1945 and was originally slated to be tried by an American Military Tribunal for crimes committed at Dachau, but instead, he was extradited to Krakow to be tried along with other members of the Auschwitz staff. Aumeier was convicted and hanged in January 1948. The first gas chamber, that was used at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, was in a room that was being used as a morgue in Krema I, the crematorium in the main camp. The gas chamber in Krema I was only used between September 1941 and March 1942, according to the Auschwitz Museum, although the ovens were used for cremation until 1943. Jews were gassed in Krema I only during a six-week period in 1942; the rest of the time, it was used for gassing Soviet Prisoners of War. According to Jean-Claude Pressac, who wrote a book entitled "Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers," there was a total of approximately 10,000 people gassed in Krema I, which had a capacity of 600 to 800 persons for each gassing. By the end of March 1942, the gassing operation was moved to the Auschwitz II camp, also known as Birkenau. Two old farm houses at the western end of the Birkenau camp were used for gassing while four new gas chambers were under construction. By the time that the Soviet liberators arrived on January 27th, the gas chamber in Krema I at the main camp had been converted into a bomb shelter in the fall of 1944. In 1947, when the Auschwitz camp became a Museum, the Krema I gas chamber was reconstructed according to the descriptions given by the survivors. Two of the three ovens were reconstructed from parts found in the camp. However, visitors to Auschwitz were told for 50 years that the reconstructed gas chamber was original. This page was last updated on February 03, 2010

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Map of the four principal pilgrimage roads to Santiago de Compostela, showing the southernmost route and the location of St.-Gilles-du-Gard. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the tomb of Saint James (Santiago) in northwestern Spain became the most important pilgrimage destination in Western Europe, eventually coming to rival even Rome and Jerusalem. Four main roads, winding through southern France from the population centers where groups of pilgrims initially gathered for their arduous journey, led across the passes of the Pyrenees before coming together at Puente La Reina and proceeding along the "Way of Saint James" to Galicia and the saint's shrine. Monasteries and abbeys located at regular intervals along these four routes provided shelter and sustenance for weary travelers, who often planned the stages of their journey according to advice found in pilgrims' guidebooks, such as the Liber Sancti Jacobi (or Book of Saint James) produced by the monks of Cluny. The most popular of these guides, written by the cleric Aymery Picaud, described the many holy sites and shrines the travelers would encounter along the way, and also counseled against various hardships and perils to avoid. The "Via Tolosana," the southernmost of the four great pilgrimage roads, began at the Provençal town of Arles. Across the river Rhône, approximately one day's journey to the west, pilgrims would arrive at the abbey church of St.-Gilles-du-Gard, originally built above the shrine to the semi-legendary sixth- (or eighth-?) century abbot known in English as Saint Giles (Latin = Egidius). Constructed in its present form early in the twelfth century, the church itself has been repeatedly rebuilt over the years, surviving major damage during the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and again at the time of the French Revolution. For more than eight centuries, the splendid west facade of St.-Gilles-du-Gard has excited the admiration of visitors ranging from medieval pilgrims to modern tourists. This article will introduce the reader to the overall form and iconographic program of the facade before taking a closer look at details of selected sculptures, interpreting their narrative content, analyzing their compositional features, and suggesting possible links to Classical antecedents in this magnificent example of the southern French Romanesque style. West facade of St.-Gilles-du-Gard, completed in present form ca. 1180 The facade of St.-Gilles-du-Gard appears to be a carefully conceived, but somewhat uneasy, synthesis of many disparate parts. It was probably completed incrementally over time, the work of as many as five different sculptors who may not have been contemporaneous (Porter, vol. I: 273ff.). For the sake of economy, the builders may have re-cycled existing elements, made from different types of stone: some features, such as the unequal columns (several set on Italianate lion bases mounted upon jamb pedestals), the Corinthian capitals carved in somewhat different styles, and fluted pilasters -- including one used as a trumeau for the central portal -- suggest re-use of these elements from earlier structures, some perhaps of ancient Roman origin. The facade is characterized by triple recessed portals, each surmounted by a carved tympanum framed by unadorned archivolts. The left (north) tympanum depicts the Adoration of the Magi, while the right (south) shows the Crucifixion; the central tympanum (a nineteenth century replica after the badly damaged original) presents Christ in Majesty surrounded by symbols of the Four Evangelists. This motif, in the context of a triple portal, has led some scholars to propose stylistic affinities between St.-Gilles and northern French transitional facades, such as the "Royal Portals" at Chartres. A more likely source of inspiration for the triple portal can be found in actual Roman monuments located throughout the region, especially the Roman Theater and the Arch of Tiberius, both in nearby Orange. Roman theaters typically used three doorways in the skena frons (permanent set) to accommodate actors' entrances and exits. The skena frons of the theater at Orange incorporates non-supportive columns and pilasters, as well as decorative statues set into niches; these features are also evident on the facade of St.-Gilles. In its present form, the Arch of Tiberius dates from the first century; like St.-Gilles, it is probably a synthesized work incorporating portions of earlier monuments. Its triple arch, the center passage taller than the two flanking apertures, is also adorned by columns that appear decorative rather than functional. Visual continuity in the otherwise eclectic facade of St.-Gilles is provided by the noteworthy sculpted frieze depicting the events of Holy Week and the Passion of Christ, its sections running from left to right across the lintels above the triple portals and the colonnades connecting these to one another. The central section wraps at right angles into the recessed central portal. While some scholars have proposed that Byzantine ivory Passion diptych reliefs inspired individual scenes (Porter, vol. I: 283-4), the St.-Gilles frieze brings together a number of separate incidents into a clear linear chronological presentation, in which Jesus' "journey" towards the cross provides inspiration for the pilgrims' own travels. Christ is the focal point of each scene as the narrative unfolds cinematically, one incident flowing into the next. Reduced scale representations of architectural settings, such as towers, portals, and arcades, act as framing devices to help establish context, or provide demarcations indicating the passage of time or change of location. As was true of many Romanesque pilgrimage churches, the sculptures of St.-Gilles may have originally been painted in bright colors, the better to be "read" by throngs of viewers standing below them at ground level. Specific events (the Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, the Road to Emmaus, along with the Washing of the Disciples' Feet and the sharing of a communal meal in the Last Supper) must have especially resonated with medieval men and women traveling on foot, looking forward to succor and nourishment at major stops along the Pilgrims' Way. The figures in the frieze have retained their detail despite the erosion caused by centuries of the strong seasonal winds blowing from the nearby Mediterranean; but heads, and especially faces, show frequent evidence of mutilation, much of this due to deliberate acts of iconoclasm carried out during the religious wars. Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem: portion of frieze forming lintel of north portal, West facade of St.-Gilles-du-Gard, ca. 1140s-1180 The Passion narrative begins with a scene of the Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem [Matthew 21:1-11; Mark 11:1-11; Luke 19:1-10,28-44; John 12:12-15] in the portion of frieze forming the lintel beneath the left (north) tympanum. Christ is shown riding on a donkey, followed by its foal. The figures of the Apostles exhibit strong dexteral motion, accentuated by the carved folds of their garments. Several of the Apostles wave palm branches. Their heads are turned unnaturally towards one another in sharp profiles, an ancient convention used by medieval artists to indicate excited conversation. In front of a stylized palm tree to the far right, two onlookers spread their cloaks in Christ's path. Christ Driving the Money-changers from the Temple: detail of frieze to left of central portal, West facade of St.-Gilles-du-Gard, ca. 1140s-1180 The scene of Christ Driving the Money-changers from the Temple [Matthew 21:12-13; Mark 11:15-19; Luke 19:45-46; John 12:13-17] occupies the portion of the frieze between the north and central portals which, like several others, appears above a border of dogs and grotesque heads. Miniature (and wholly imaginary) representations of the Temple and an entrance pillar bracket the composition. Within a shallow arcaded space, cowering figures crowd together to escape from Christ's wrath. The figure of the Money-changer closest to Christ uses part of his garment to hold a heap of coins as he flees; the man in front of him carries a pair of doves. The figure farthest to the right turns back in a leftward (sinister) direction to shake a moneybag mockingly at Christ, an action that may recall a stereotyped perception of Jews as moneylenders and usurers (Kraus, 155). Along with the fleeing Money-changers, pairs of sacrificial oxen and sheep appear to spill away towards the lower right, their forms overlapping like those in ancient reliefs of quadriga, or four-horse chariot teams. Christ Washing Peter's Feet: left detail of portion of frieze forming lintel of central portal, West facade of St.-Gilles-du-Gard, ca. 1140s-1180 The frieze section forming the lintel under the central portal's tympanum uses this strategically focal position to combine two scenes often iconographically distinct: Christ washing the Disciples' Feet [John 13:1-20], and the Last Supper. On the left portion of this continuous narrative, Peter is shown seated on a low stool as Christ washes his foot using water from a pottery basin. Peter's pose and gesture, conveying a mood of sadness and regret, are similar to those often found on Roman sarcophagi, in turn derived from Classical Greek grave stelae. The expressive faces of these two figures have survived nearly intact; each is framed by a halo, Christ's with a cross inscribed. Above this scene, the viewer will notice examples of "egg-and-dart" and "bead-and-reel" borders used as framing devices. These are copied after antique prototypes common throughout southern France, examples of which can be seen today on Roman and Early Christian sarcophagi in the Musée Lapidaire Paien and Musée Lapidaire Chrétien in Arles. Christ Washing Peter's Feet; the Last Supper: portion of frieze forming lintel of central portal, West facade of St.-Gilles-du-Gard, ca. 1140s-1180 The scene of the Last Supper [Matthew 26:17-29; Mark 14:12-25; Luke 22:7-23; John 13:21-30] shows Christ and the Disciples seated opposite the viewer along the length of a wide table covered with drapery. All figures here are represented with haloes, though these are often absent in other portions of the frieze. Most of their faces are severely damaged, the result of iconoclastic destruction. The far left and right edges of the table are occupied by Disciple figures seated in profile, acting as visual brackets to contain and focus the scene. The figure on the far left uses a knife to cut a round loaf of bread; the figure on the far right appears to hold the paschal lamb, symbolic of the Jewish ritual of Passover. The Arrest of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemene (The Betrayal): detail of frieze on right inner angle of central portal, West facade of St.-Gilles-du-Gard, ca. 1140s-1180 The sculptor of the Betrayal [Matthew 26:47-56; Mark 14:43-50; Luke 22:47-53; John 18:1-12] demonstrates particular skill in the central grouping of Christ and Judas, the latter clasping the shoulder of his Master to pull him closer into an embrace, while the taller Jesus inclines his head to submit to the traitor's kiss. Christ's head, skillfully worked in three-quarter profile, displays an expression of prescient understanding. The deeply carved drapery of these two pivotal figures accentuates their body lines. As is traditional for the iconography of this incident, Judas is oriented in a sinister (left-facing) direction; the tight curls of his hair are perhaps intended to emphasize his Jewish ethnicity. Balancing Judas on the left, an arresting officer, his body lines echoing those of Jesus, lays a hand on his victim's shoulder. To the right of the scene, at the corner of this angle block, another guard prepares to draw his sword; the Phrygian-style forward-peaked helmet he wears underscores his Eastern, pagan, identity. The entire scene rests on a base border featuring the meander (Greek key) pattern, another motif derived from antique reliefs. Christ Before Pilate; the Flagellation: detail of frieze to right of central portal, West facade of St.-Gilles-du-Gard, ca. 1140s-1180 The section of the frieze located between the central and south portals includes the Judgment of Christ before Pilate [Matthew 27:1-2,11-26; Mark 15:1-15; Luke 23:1-25; John 18:28-40,19: 1-16] and the Flagellation [Matthew 27:27-31; Mark 15:16-20; John 19:1-7]. On the far left, as guards pull the bound Christ before Pilate, there is a suggestion of hieratic scale indicating the Roman governor's power: though seated, he appears larger than his attendants, an effect underscored by his arrogant, open pose. In the scene of the Flagellation, to the right, Christ is bound to a pillar, his arms unnaturally elongated to form an X-shaped suggestion of a cross (Chi), foreshadowing his coming sacrifice. His body buckles in pain under the force of the torturers' scourges. Images of dogs and grotesque faces again appear in the lower border; "egg-and-dart" and "bead-and-reel" motifs mark the top of the scene. The sculptural program of the facade of St.-Gilles is completed by a series of frontal statues of Saints and Archangels set into niches behind the colonnade. Our photograph shows two of these figures from the north jamb of the central portal. On the left, Saint John the Evangelist, clad in simple garments, carries a codex bearing the Latin Vulgate text from the incipit of his Gospel. On the right, Saint Peter may be identified by his attribute of the key; he is attired in ecclesiastical vestments, a reminder of his status as the first Bishop of Rome. These two figures are typical of the formulaic, frontally posed high relief niche statues characteristic of the southern French Romanesque style. Their bodies appear slightly elongated in proportions, a feature which may optically correct when viewed at an angle from below as the visitor passes through the portal. Both are posed above lion socles. Although details of the figures' garments and attributes are sharp even after the erosion of many centuries, here again the faces show the effects of wanton damage. Although most of the iconographic program of the St.-Gilles West facade is based on New Testament subjects, several Old Testament scenes appear on the podium bases beneath the paired columns flanking the central portal. The Sacrifices of Cain and Abel [Genesis 4:1-7] is a bilaterally symmetrical composition set in a double-arched frame, a device perhaps inspired by the Moorish architectural device of the ajimez (paired windows with round-topped arches). This particular relief, however, is probably based on a manuscript illumination. The rival brothers are shown in stylized, attenuated poses, each raising his offerings towards heaven. Their cloaks appear artificially suspended behind them, an awkwardness perhaps stemming from the translation of painted drapery forms from a two-dimensional page into carved stone. Abel faces dexterally (to the right), holding his gift of a lamb; above him, the Hand of God breaks the frame, signifying divine approval. Cain is oriented towards the left (sinister) as he holds up his gift of a grain sheaf; a demon crouches on the frame over his shoulder, implying evil thought or counsel. In contrast, the relief of David Slaying Goliath [I Samuel 17:4-54] is a dynamic composition which appears tightly confined inside a rectangular space having a width nearly double its height. The body of the collapsing giant is dramatically compressed as he is doubled over by the force of David's dexterally-facing attack. Though wearing a corselet and armed with a spear and heavy Norman-style teardrop-shaped shield, Goliath is no match for the more agile young Israelite hero, who smites off the Philistine's head with his own outsized sword. Nearly seven centuries after its completion, the West facade of St.-Gilles-du-Gard, along with the entrance portal of St.-Trophime in nearby Arles, helped to inspire a major American religious structure. During the latter 1860s, architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886) began to incorporate stylistic features he had studied in French Romanesque churches of the Auvergne region into his designs for public buildings in the northeastern United States. His success helped to popularize a style known as Romanesque Revival (or simply as "Richardsonian Romanesque" after its best-known proponent). In 1872, Richardson was awarded a major commission to design Trinity Church, Boston. For the main facade, fronting on Copley Square, he planned a triple portal with elaborately sculpted decoration, in which he carefully synthesized features of the St. Gilles-du-Gard facade with those of the main portal of St.-Trophime. Although he had never visited either of these medieval buildings, Richardson was aided in his work by access to a major publication by Henry Antoine Revoil, the Architecture romane du midi de la France, a copy of which was in the architect's professional library. This multi-volume reference work, issued between 1867 and 1873, was illustrated with detailed engravings based on measured drawings Revoil had made while supervising restoration projects funded by the French government. The plates included large fold-out elevations of the St.-Gilles and St.-Trophime west facades, along with numerous details of individual sculptures and decorative moldings. Today, many architectural historians believe that high public regard for Trinity Church, Boston was pivotal in popularizing the Romanesque Revival style over the next two decades. The photographs of St.-Gilles-du-Gard used to illustrate this article were taken by the author in May, 1990. Readers may obtain source information regarding the photographs of other sites and works mentioned in this article through the "Image Resources" link following the bibliography below. All photographs are the copyrighted intellectual property of Allan T. Kohl; please read Note on the "Virtual Tour" as a Resource for Teachers and Scholars for information on availability and use conditions. Borg, Alan. Architectural Sculpture in Romanesque Provence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Hearn, M. F. Romanesque Sculpture; the revival of monumental stone sculpture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U. Press, 1981. Kraus, Henry. "Anti-Semitism in Medieval Art." The Living Theatre of Medieval Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967. O'Meara, Carra Ferguson. The Iconography of the Facade of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard. New York: Garland, 1977. Porter, A. Kingsley. "St.-Gilles." Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1923, 1966. Revoil, Henry Antoine. Architecture romane du midi de la France. Paris: A. Morel, 1867, 1873. Schapiro, Meyer. "New Documents on Saint-Gilles." Romanesque Art. New York: George Braziller, 1977. Stoddard, Whitney S. Art and Architecture in Medieval France. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. -----. The Facade of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard; its influence on French Sculpture. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Art historian Allan T. Kohl is Visual Resources Librarian at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design, where he has frequently taught courses in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance art history. He also teaches special topics art history courses for the University of Minnesota's College of Continuing Education. A member of the Visual Resources Association's Intellectual Property Rights Committee, he has a particular interest in legal issues relating to photographic reproductions of art works, and was principal author of the VRA's Copy Photography Computator, an interactive decision-making guide intended to assist educators in assessing rights in images of art and architectural works.

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First Anniversary of the Popular Government National Stadium, Santiago, November 4, 1971 Addressing an enthusiastic throng, Allende notes that each May 21, Chile's president is obligated to "render accounts" ("dar las cuentas") to Congress. He then announces he intends to break with that old framework by going directly to the people "in this stadium, or in larger places, dialoguing with the people and telling them that they are the fundamental factor in the Chilean revolutionary process." He talks about the difference between achieving the reins of government and achieving real political power. Speaking of achievements during his first year in office, he notes that it is now "our copper, our iron, our nitrates"; that unemployment is way down; and that special measures have been adopted to meet the needs of Chile's Mapuche people and other indigenous groups. He addresses the free milk program for children; agrarian reform; penal reform ("not one political prisoner"); maternity care and other social services; law and order; protection of small and medium-sized businesses; reforestation; the foreign debt; and bureaucratism. He lauds the armed forces and Carabineros (national police). Denouncing the forces of fascism and infantile leftism ("extremism," an implicit reference to "ultraleft" groups), Allende concludes with a renewed plea for unity and a ringing series of "we shall win's." Chileans, people of Santiago. A year ago in this same big place, I said, "The people said we shall win, and we did." Today, with authentic pride, the Comrade President also says, "We said we were going to accomplish things, and we did." I was told: "You will not be able to fill the stadium." I was told that the galleries were going to be deserted, that the people were not going to come. I wish our enemies could see this marvelous spectacle of workers, students youth, women, peasants and — thanks also to those fathers and mothers who have brought their children — the children of Chile, to them my affection and consideration. I greet and am grateful for the presence here of diplomats and representatives of friendly countries who have willingly come to be with us. I greet the members of the Chilean trade union confederation [CUT], its President Comrade Luis Figueroa, and its secretary general who have come to this ceremony. I greet the representatives of the parties and groups that make up the Popular Unity. I also pay homage to the thousands and thousands of workers who fill the galleries, and those who built floats with their own hands and funds. I greet and I pay homage to an exemplary worker, Comrade Barría. This anonymous worker, with a new awareness and a new spirit, built a new machine at the Andina Mine which has greatly increased production. I greet the new revolutionary awareness of the Chilean workers. I have come to render accounts to the people. According to the political constitution I am required to inaugurate the regular session of Congress on May 21 and to report to it and to the country on the administrative, economic, social, and political state of the country. We are breaking in new structures and within one year we shall inform the people in this stadium, or in larger places, dialoguing with the people and telling them that they are the fundamental factor in the Chilean revolutionary process. We attained power in October and on November 3 we assumed the responsibility of governing this country by a popular mandate expressed at the polls and ratified by congressional decision. Today, I have come to say that slowly but surely we have been gaining power. We have carried out the revolutionary changes of the Popular Unity platform. Chileans have recovered what belongs to them, their basic wealth which was formerly held by foreign capital. We have defeated monopolies and the oligarchy. Both of these advances are essential to break the chains which bind us to underdevelopment, are the only means of destroying the institutionalized violence which exploited the great majorities. That is why we are here to show that we have advanced in the social areas, under the economic program that is fundamental for people's power. We control 90 percent of what was previously private banking. Sixteen banks, the most powerful including the Español, the Suramericano, Crédito de Inversiones, and the Banco de Chile are today the property of the country and the people. More than 70 strategic or monopolistic enterprises have been expropriated, intervened or nationalized. Today we can speak of our copper, our coal, our iron, our nitrates, and our steel. The fundamental bases for heavy industry are today owned by Chile and Chileans. We have emphasized and extended the agrarian reform process. A total of 1,300 extensive holdings, 2.4 million hectares, have been expropriated. Some 16,000 people now live there and we plan to settle 10,000 more. If it was important to have extended the agrarian reform to make the soil produce in a different manner, and to change its ownership, it was also important to provide seed and fertilizer to those for whom the land is their daily bread. More than agrarian reform, we have made the peasant feel like a citizen and aware of his great task side by side with the workers and the people, so that the people will have more to eat. Your work is spread throughout the country and will represent more health and welfare for all Chileans. That is why we created the Peasant Councils. Furthermore, we have been striving to change labor relations. Now, the workers are aware that they are the government, that their attitude has to be different. This is why I say to you that the responsibility assumed by the leaders of CUT is exemplary and point out the importance of their agreement with the government. That is also why the national congress has a bill before it which decrees worker participation in the administration of government enterprises; worker participation in mixed enterprises; and participation in private enterprise cooperation committees. That is also why we have created production committees in nationalized and mixed enterprises, and we will have to create them in private enterprises to deeply impress workers with their responsibility in the process of national production. To us it is very important that the majority, all the workers, understand that they are the government, and therefore, their attitude toward workers' demands, and readjustments, as well as their own personal attitudes should be different. I went to Chuquicamata and spoke to the copper workers. I visited the different sections and held a meeting at each one. In the late afternoon, after the sun had set, I spoke to more than 4,000 workers for three hours. I expounded on the need to revise their list of demands. I asked them, how could they want a copper strike — which the people's enemies very much wanted — at a time when Chile was facing the problem of indemnification to the previous foreign owners? I asked them, how could they conspire to provoke a strike through a list of demands that the enterprise could not grant? I told them that we should write the list of demands in such a manner that the worker, the poor copper worker would be incorporated in the leadership of the enterprise; that the workers assembly would produce administrators; and that according to the CUT-government agreement there would be union-management committees. There would be a readjustment of the minimum salary and a percentage of the firm's surplus profits would go to the union's funds. The balance would be divided between the investment which should be made by the enterprise to achieve technical progress and social investments made to benefit the workers, to pay salaries and wages in relation to the production and productivity, and to lead the worker to productive progress, because the copper enterprises are Chile's wages, and because the copper workers are the owners of these enterprises when they become part of the process. From here, looking down at other miners, with their helmets, their lighted headlamps, I call on the Chuquicamata workers to assume their responsibility, and tell them that all Chile awaits their answer. I have faith in the copper workers' answer. I want to point out that the government has been concerned, through the Agriculture Ministry, about a sector of the Chilean people that has been discriminated against, the Mapuches, the Indians, the roots of our race, who are always forgotten. Your government has taken special interest in them. That is why we have intensified agrarian reform in Cautín. That is why we have created the Mapuche Vocational Training Institute and the Indian Development Corporation. We want the Mapuches to have the same rights and the same laws as other Chileans, and we want to improve their cultural, material and political levels so that they can join us in the great battle for the liberation of our country. There is another group of Chileans, always forgotten, ignored, and in my opinion unknown in the scope of their role. I had the opportunity to see and appreciate their integrity and their value as humans. They are "afuerinos" [landless peasants]. They are the 150,000 Chilean outcasts in their own country, without homes, without permanent jobs, without families, walking from village to village, sleeping under bridges, and sometimes persecuted by the police. The Moneda [presidential palace] and the Agriculture Ministry have been opened to them for the first time, and I gave an urgent order to schedule an emergency program so that the landless peasant will be another worker, so that he can till the land, have his own home and so that he can stand beside the Mapuche and the worker in the task we have before us in our country. That is why we have been gaining power; we have been incorporating deprived groups and sectors. We have been concerned with strengthening democracy and expanding liberties through the redistribution of income and economic liberation. This government wants an authentic democracy and complete freedom for all Chileans. Democracy and freedom are incompatible with unemployment and lack of housing, the lack of culture, illiteracy and sickness. How is democracy strengthened? By creating more jobs, giving better wages, building more homes, providing the people with more culture, education and better health. Workers, let us see what we have done. This country has been plagued for more than a century by brutal unemployment. In September 1970, we had 8.4 percent unemployed. By September 1971, we had reduced it to 4.8. In December 1970, there were 87,000 unemployed in Santiago. Now, regrettably we still have 51,000. In December 1970 there were 5,000 unemployed in Puerto Montt, now there are only 300. In Temuco there were 9,000 unemployed last year, there are now only 3,000. In the Bío-Bío, Malleco and Cautín areas we have created 12,000 new jobs. Another important factor in cementing democracy is to balance the possibilities and incomes to lessen the immense differences existing in the capitalist system as far as salaries are concerned. Let us see what have we accomplished. In 1968, 60 percent of the families received 17 percent of the national income. During that same year 2 percent of the families received 45 percent of the national income. We are correcting this injustice. In 1970, wage earners received 50 percent of the national income. In 1971 wage earners are receiving 59 percent of the national income. We have taken a big step. We have taken a bigger step, however, by increasing the workers', peasants', and government employees' family incomes, bringing them closer to private employees' income. With compassion and kindness, we have concerned ourselves with pensioners, widows, old people and the poor. For the first time in Chilean history we have not seen in the congressional gardens, or around the presidential palace, old Chileans who gave their life's work and who even in their last hours, were not granted the right to die in peace. Today, your government has taken a basic interest in providing justice for these old people.... Listen well: we have increased by 52 percent the delivery of milk to Chilean children, and the half liter of milk will be a reality for your children, comrades. We have carried out a campaign against infectious diseases in the provinces affected by the earthquake, and also against endemic diseases, especially summer diarrhea. We have controlled the quality of water and conducted campaigns to eradicate the garbage dumps and clean up the slums. Volunteer work by citizens has been an important factor in these campaigns. We have democratized the National Health Service to complement the doctor with the personnel working under him to allow workers and their families to really benefit from health services and also to participate authentically in their own health maintenance. In order to bring democracy to the welfare field we have given social benefits to one-third of the population which did not have them. Some 900,000 have been incorporated into the benefits — merchants, transporters, small and medium farmers, fishermen, craftsmen, dentists, the independent sector and priests, nuns, pastors, ministers of all religious creeds. Some 900,000 Chileans who did not have social benefits will have them thanks to you and the popular government.... We have financed the milk plan for 600 million escudos and contributed to the special mother-child fund which will amount to the considerable sum of more than 1 billion escudos. ...I can say with great satisfaction that in this country we have authentic democracy. There is not one political prisoner in jail here. There are some who abuse their freedom, who deserve to be in jail. [Cheers from the crowd] There is no politician in jail, no student under arrest. University autonomy is respected here. There is not a single banned magazine. Two or three newspapers and five or six magazines have been established since September 4 . Some of them are poisonous, the likes of which Chile has never seen, but they are there. They print their plots against the government of the people daily, others periodically. Only 20 meters from La Moneda Palace anyone who wants to can purchase papers and magazines which insult the president and his government, but which receive in return the contempt of the people and my own contempt, because I have confidence in your political conscience and faith in your strength for the defense of the government. [Applause] We have submitted to congress a bill that creates the social area of economy, and in it we have incorporated — as I said before — the participation of the workers. With it we must establish which sectors will be state-controlled and the companies that will become — for the benefit of Chile — part of the social area of the economy. We have provided as a basis 14 million escudos in capital. In this stage we want to bring under state control between 120 and 150 companies, realizing that in Chile there are 35,000 or more enterprises. The monopolies, the large businessmen, know that their enterprises will be brought under state control in the social area. They will receive compensation. However, 35,000 or more small and medium businessmen and industrialists have nothing, absolutely nothing, to fear from the government of the people. [Applause] It is appropriate that our nation should be proud of its workers, that there has been an appreciable increase in production in state-controlled industries, in the industries managed by the workers: nitrate production is up 50 percent, cement 7 percent, oil 32 percent, electronics 55 percent — which has made possible the program of popular television sets and you will be able to have television sets in your homes and will see me periodically — Bella Vista Tomé Textile has increased 26 percent, and Caupolicán-Chiguayante 15 percent. That is, all the state-controlled industries have put idle capacity into production enormously increasing their production. I want to point out that this year 60,000 hectares have been reforested, whereas the average of the last few years was 25,000.1 want to say as an example, that the National Oil Enterprise has, in five months, with the help of Chilean workers and technicians, constructed a dock in Quintero for ships of 200,000 tons deadweight, which will save us more than $5 million a year in freight costs. ...The law and order of a revolutionary government is not the law and order of a bourgeois democracy. Our law and order is based on social equality and uses persuasion as its tool. We need order to change structures. It is the law and order of a people's government, of a revolutionary country. We cannot accept the imbalance of isolated individuals who might provoke chaos. The guarantee of order lies in the organized working classes, aware, disciplined, capable of understanding the historic task ahead. That is why we must have the workers participating in all the activities of our life with their class awareness and their revolutionary purpose. That is why we do not accept pressure, why we have said with revolutionary sincerity that we are against the indiscriminate takeover of farms because it creates anarchy in production and the end result is the eviction of the peasants, a result detrimental to the peasants.... We are against the takeover of housing which is detrimental to the workers who have made payments to acquire them. We are against the seizure by workers of small and medium factories. Nationalization, intervention, and requisitioning of enterprises must follow a government plan and not the anarchy of a voluntary impulse of a few.... This year we Chileans did more than the Cubans did during their first year of the Cuban Revolution, and that is not intended to the detriment of the Cubans. When Fidel Castro comes here I am going to ask him and I know what his answer will be. Let it be known for the record that we made our revolution without social cost. I can say that there is no country in the world which has carried out its revolutionary process without social cost. You have seen that the People's Government has done it, we have done it together, and this has a great value in human terms and for the country's economy. I want to stress that an organized, aware and disciplined people with political ideals, whose workers are organized in unions, and federations, and the CUT, is the political base of the revolutionary process, as are also — and I point this out because this is a process within legality — the armed forces and the Carabineros of Chile: I pay homage to the people who wear uniforms, and to their loyalty to the constitution and to the will expressed at the polls by their fellow citizens. I want to emphasize the exemplary discipline of the armed forces and the Carabineros, their courage and sacrifice during the sad times of the earthquakes, snowstorms, and volcanic eruptions. I want to point out how they joined the process of defending our economic frontier and are present in the steel, iron and copper industries, and in the atomic energy commission. Chile thereby provides an example which is envied by the whole world.... We have faced serious problems: earthquakes, snowstorms, volcanic eruptions — and the people have marched on — economic problems, a decrease in the price of copper. During the previous administration copper reached a high of 84 cents. The average this year will be no higher than 49 cents. World inflation forces us to pay more for our imports. It is true that we started with $3.4 million in monetary reserves, but we also assumed a foreign debt of $2.56 billion plus $736 million that the copper companies owe. We are the world's most indebted country. Each of you, hear me well, each one of the 120,000 present here, each one of the 10 million Chileans, owes $300 abroad. Many of you have never seen a dollar and have to realize that you are in debt and that this country is so indebted. Only Israel, a country that is at war, has a higher debt per capita than Chile. During the next three years we must pay, as a result of the commitments of the previous governments, more than $1 billion.... In the political picture we deplore the split in the Radical Party, and we hope that the reunification of that ancient party will soon be possible because we want the political base of your government to be maintained. That is also why we have appealed to the Christian Leftists separated from the Christian Democracy, to join the Popular Unity because we have to strengthen the ties between Marxists, laymen, and Christians which represent the Chilean's revolutionary zeal. I would like to stress the "ultras" — the pseudo-fascists we might say, those who were involved in General Schneider's murder the pseudo-nationalists, those who never said a word when Chile's copper and wealth were in foreign hands — are now speaking of demagogic nationalism which the people reject. They are the troglodytes and cavemen of an anticommunism called upon to defend the advantages of minority groups. The people will stop them and fascism shall not occur in this country. There are also, as I have said before, extremist sectors to whom I say that we do not fear discussion or ideological debate, but to begin this discussion it would be well for them to read Lenin's little book which says: "Extremism, the infantile disease of communism."... We cannot disregard the fact that objectively the small and medium bourgeoisie is and must be on our side. Just as we need the small and medium craftsmen, producers, businessmen, technicians and professionals. That is why more than ever one has to be aware of what Chilean life is and of the path that is authentically ours, which is the path of pluralism, democracy and freedom, the path that opens the doors of socialism. We have to put an end to centralism and bureaucracy. We want to put an end to the queues at the windows that sell stamped paper and the little phrase "come back tomorrow." We want the public employees to work on Saturday morning. We do not want a "Saint Monday" in the revolutionary government of the people. [Applause] I would like to point out that voluntary work is something responsible and serious that should be planned.... I had the joy of seeing that the workers of Chuquicamata, the Sunday before last, mobilized 40,000 tons of slag, 36,000 the previous Sunday, and they are going to continue working. This is constructive, planned and organized voluntary work which is a demonstration of the conscientious participation of the people in the great constructive work of the homeland. We should concern ourselves with the sickness of alcoholics. I have always said that one of the most serious diseases of Chile is alcoholism, and I have said that during the government of the people there would be less and better drinking. We are also going to fulfill that, comrades. [Applause] Don't protest! Don't protest! [Laughter and applause] We have done a lot for the children but we must do more for the abandoned children and those in unusual situations, for the beggars, for the vagrant children. We have not established a sufficient number of childcare centers and parks. Every town should have a children's library and a children's park. That is the task that we must fulfill. The people have learned that victory is in unity. Let us not permit the unity of the people to fall apart. Let us not permit extremism which attempts to dislodge the fundamental bases. We have to find, and we will search for it, the language that will unite all revolutionaries because the enemies are too powerful and do not rest. We have to defend the popular victory. The people know that they are the true forgers of victory. The people know that once again, through one of their sons, and the son of a railroad worker, they are on the world stage. The people know that the name of Chile is engraved in history thanks to the verse and song of one of its sons, a man who is one of us, a social fighter, Pablo Neruda, poet of Latin America and the world. Therefore I said one year ago: Forward, we shall win. We shall win by strengthening our unity. We shall win by broadening the political and social bases of the Chilean revolutionary movement. To the youth: We shall win by studying more. To the workers, technicians, professionals, peasants and employees: We shall win by producing more. We shall win when the Chilean woman learns about our appeal and joins the struggle of her man, her father, her son and her brother. We shall win when the youth know that their combat post is here, that we have called upon them for the great task of tomorrow. Forward, comrades, we must win so that we can live as brothers and without hate in our own homeland, improving our morality with the constructive revolutionary force of the people. Forward Chileans, we shall win again for the homeland and the people.

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In recent days, Christians have been discussing the role of judgments in the New Testament age. Judgment is a gloomy topic, so not many people study the topic, but it is important for understanding how God works in the world. A common view is God's judgments ceased with the cross. We are living in the age of grace when God works to transform nations by the gospel and the spirit. He will not judge nations until the great tribulation just before Jesus returns. The real judgments are stored up for the Last Judgement at the end of the age. I believe that this view is wrong and confused. To get to the truth we need to a clearer understanding of role of judgment in the scriptures. The Old Testament describes to different types of judgment. These two types continue into the New Testament. Distinguishing these two types of judgment is really important. When God made a covenant with the people of Israel, he told them what he required of them in the law given through Moses. God promised to bless the people if they fulfilled the conditions of the covenant. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the LORD your God (Deut 28:2). These blessing are spelt out in detail. Moses also warned that failure to keep the covenant and trust in God would bring them under a curse. However, if you do not obey the LORD your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come on you and overtake you (Deut 28:15). Deuteronomy lists the curses in even greater detail than the blessings. When left the true part and forgot about God, when these curses were fulfilled, they were referred to as the judgments of God. You will be judged according to your conduct and your actions, declares the Sovereign LORD (Ezek 24:14). I judged them according to their conduct and their actions (Ezek 36:19). God is Israel's King and Judge. The covenant made them accountable to him for their behaviour. When they broke the covenant, he judged their actions and pronounced judgment against them. By disobeying God, the people of Israel placed themselves under the curse of the covenant. The main role of the prophets was to be guardians of the covenant. Whenever, Israel broke the covenant, the prophets would challenge them and warn in advance of the judgments that would inevitably come, if they continued in disobedience. The prophets called the people to repentance and obedience, to prevent their warnings from being fulfilled. Most of the prophecies in the Old Testament were warnings of curses/judgments that would come upon Israel, if the continued to reject God. Israel broke the covenant again and again, so the prophets had a consistent message. They often seemed to be full of doom and gloom because Israel was mostly living in disobedience. They could not be nice, because the prognosis for Israel was usually bad. A few prophecies were declarations of judgment against local nations attacking Israel. These judgements were fulfilment of the blessings of the covenant (Is 14:29). They will come at you from one direction but flee from you in seven (Deut 27:8). The role of prophesying to the people of the old covenant was curtailed by the cross. Jesus took over the role of guardian of the that covenant and gave a final prophesy to Israel warning of the destruction of Jerusalem (Matt 23:33-24:2). The people of Israel were about to place themselves under the curse of the covenant by rejecting their messiah and handing him over to the Romans to be killed. Look, your house is left to you desolate (Matt 23:38). They were coming under a curse that would last for a long time. There will be great distress in the land and wrath against this people. They will fall by the sword and will be taken as prisoners to all the nations. Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled (Luke 21:23-24). This judgement announced by Jesus will last until the Times of the Gentiles are complete. Israel will not come back under the blessing of their covenant until they believe in Jesus, so this is a long judgment. Jesus warned the people of Jerusalem that they would not get another prophetic word for a long, long time. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord (Matt 23:38-39). Being left without prophets is part of their desolation. All future prophets will be Christians, so if the Jews will not accept those who come in the name of Jesus, they will have no prophets (Micah 3:6). NT prophets will only get to speak freely to Israel when the Times of the Gentiles are coming to an end. A new covenant was established when Jesus died on the cross. The benefits of this covenant are received by faith and the Spirit is given to enable those who trust in him to hear his voice and walk in obedience to him. They Holy Spirit is able to convict believer of sin and teach them how to serve God, so he generally does not need to send judgements to teach us how to live in the fullness of the covenant. Under the Old Covenant, the people of Israel could assess how they were going with God by reviewing their external circumstances. Peace and prosperity were signs that they were obeying God. Poverty and war were signs of disobedience. The prophets just amplified these signals to the people. The pattern is totally different under the New Covenant. The Sermon on the Mount warns that external circumstances are poor indicator of our spiritual state. Christians who are slack in following Jesus will often have a more comfortable life. But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort (Luke 6:24). Those who follow Jesus seriously will often be persecuted. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me (Matt 5:11). Our situation does not provide a reliable indication of our spirituality. We need to to the witness of the Holy Spirit to know how we are doing. The peace that surpasses understanding is the best indicator that we are fulfilling the covenant. If we have fallen into sin, the conviction of the Holy Spirit should turn us Back to the right path. We will sometimes need a jolt from a prophet to confirm his witness, but that should be quite rare. God should not need to send judgments to keep us on track. In New Testament times, the church is the people of the new covenant. The prophetic role of watching over the covenant continues, but the focus has shift from nation to church. New Testament prophets are primarily responsible for watching their church, rather than their nation. Agabus, Judas and Silas are New Testament prophets who watched over their church to ensure that its leaders fulfilled their covenant with Jesus (Acts 11:28; Acts 15:31). This is not a doom and gloom ministry. When a church loses the plot and persists in disobeying God, the Holy Spirit will be forced to withdraw. This is a new covenant judgment. These judgments should usually be called in advance by the prophets. They will warn of the consequence for the church and explain must be done to return to blessing. John's letters to the seven churches are examples of a prophetic challenge to a church that has lost the plot. John explained what was wrong and where this would lead. He also told each church what it must do to Return to blessing. New covenant prophets watch over the church. They will not need to prophecy judgment against a church very often, because in contrast to OT Israel, the victory of the cross and the gift of the spirit means that most churches will mostly walks in blessing. More often they will need to encourage the church through the troubles that often arise when it obeys Jesus voice. Judgments under a covenant follow a standard pattern. The church or nation has a made a covenant with God. The terms of the covenant are clearly understood. The people of the covenant know what is required of them. The covenant spells out the consequence for disobedience. When the covenant is broken, God send prophets to challenge the disobedience and warn of the consequences. The prophets call the people to repentance and explain what they must do to Return to blessings. The prophets are required to pray for the people If the people repent, the judgment will be averted. Covenant judgments are redemptive, not destructive. The scriptures record a different type of judgment that does fit within a covenant that spells out the conditions and consequences of obedience. The purpose of these judgments is not to strengthen a covenant, but to prevent evil from expanding and spreading. God has committed to preventing evil from taking hold on earth through a powerful nations and empires. He will sometimes send judgment to destroy the source of the evil, before it does too much harm. These judgments are not redemptive. Their purpose is to destroy evil, before it gets out of control. If an evil nation or evil empire gets too powerful, a protective judgment against it to prevent evil from growing too strong. Protective judgments prevent evil from dominating on earth. Protective Judgments began during the time of Noah. When God created the world he gave dominion over the earth to man (Gen 1:26). This bold act transferred authority over the earth from God to man. This is confirmed in Psalm 115:16: The highest heavens belong to the LORD, but the earth he has given to man. God has control over the heavens, but he has given full control of the earth to man. This means that God cannot act on earth without human permission. When humans sinned and let evil take hold on earth and got caught up in evil, God had the power to put things right, but he did not have authority to act, because he had given authority over the earth to humans. God could not just intervene to put things right, but had to wait until he is invited by the people on earth. By the time of the flood, life on earth had gone on for nearly 2000 years. That was a long time, almost as long as the time from the time of Jesus until now. The population had grown and humans would have developed in many amazing ways. Unfortunately, for most of this time very no one knew God and served him. Things were so bad that hen Enoch began to walk with God, he had to be from earth, before he was destroyed by evil men (Gen 5:24). Everyone ignore or hated God, so he received no invitations to act on earth. With no one praying, the Holy Spirit was entirely shut out of the earth. Under these conditions, evil advanced in a terrible way. All human developments were twisted for evil purposes. The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time (Gen 6:5). The situation on earth was abysmal. Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways (Gen 6:11-12). The Hebrew word translated "corrupt" is "shachath". This word is used through the record of Noah's covenant. It means "destroy" or "ruin". God looked upon the earth and saw that it was being ruined by the evil in human hearts. When Noah's prayers gave him permission to act, he was able to destroy (shachath) the people of the earth by water to prevent the earth that he loved from being totally ruined (shachath). Everything on earth will perish (Gen 6:17). Prior to the cross, a protective judgment was the only way to destroy rampant evil and prevent wicked men from destroying the earth. God did not just destroy evil people. He also took the opportunity to lock up some of the evil spirits that had gained freedom to work on earth. When the people they worked through died God shut them away where they could do no harm (1 Peter 3:19; 2 Pet 2:4-5). God wanted to restrain evil on earth, but he had given authority over the earth to man. To implement a strategy of protective judgments against evil, he needed permission from people on earth. He raised up the prophetic ministry to give him authority to send these judgments on earth. When the situation turned sour and God needed to take action, his prophetic would proclaim God's condemnation of the evil. This prophetic declaration would give God permission to send a protective judgment against the evil that the prophet had pronounced judgment against. The prophet's declaration expresses God's judgment/verdict on the evil. God's action against the evil represents his sentence against the evil. Prophets and judgments go together. Without the prophets, God does not have authority to bring preventive judgments against evil. Unless God sends judgments against emerging evil, the prophets would be just crying in the wind. Prophets and protective judgments were God strategy for constraining evil in the world. The first prophecy recorded in the Old Testament was spoken by Lamech when he named his son Noah. He will comfort us in the labor and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the LORD has cursed (Gen 5:29). This was an important prophecy, because it opened the way for Noah to enter into a prophetic ministry that would begin to roll back the effects of sin and the curse. Noah was the first prophet. James called him a herald of righteousness (2 Pet 2:5) His proclamation that God would send judgment on the evil of the earth gave God authority on earth. Abraham was the next major prophet to emerge on earth (Gen 20:7). He heard God's voice and moved to Canaan, where God was planning to establish an oasis of peace in a hostile world. His prophetic voice gave God authority to remove the serious evil that was emerging in Sodom and Gomorrah. The Rainbow Covenant was the first crack in the wall of the defence that the powers of evil had placed round the world. They had shut God out of his creation, and stuffed it up. Noah opened the door a chink, and let God back in. God used Noah to make put in place this important tool for dealing with evil. The covenant that God made with Noah allows him to bring protective judgments on earth, during times of serious evil, without getting permission from a prophet. This allows God to act against evil in a season when there are no prophets. This rainbow covenant is different from other covenants, because it was not exclusive, but applies to all people and animals on the earth. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth (Gen 9:16). The rainbow reminds us of covenant with all people forever. The rainbow covenant is unconditional. No conditions are specified for fulfilling the covenant. No consequences were specified for failure to keep the covenant. The covenant with Noah is and unconditional promise to all the people of the earth through all time. The common understanding is that God was promising not to destroy the earth by another flood. This does not seem very likely anyway, so this view makes the covenant seem irrelevant. We do not see a rainbow and think, "Wow, I am glad that God is keeping his covenant". Christians assume we have a better covenant and do not need this old one, but we have missed the significance of God's promise. God was not promising there would never be another flood. He was actually promising that he would not need to send another flood, because he would never let conditions get so bad on earth that it needed to be destroyed. God promised to prevent evil from getting so strong that it has potential to destroy the entire earth. God was able to make this promise, because the covenant with Noah increased God's authority on earth. God had given authority over the earth to man, so he could not intervene on earth without getting permission. The Rainbow Covenant God gave him permission to intervene on earth when evil was getting out of hand. This covenant was a serious crack in the wall of the defence that the powers of evil had placed round the world. They had shut God out of his creation, and stuffed it up. Noah opened the door a chink, and let God back in. Noah was the father of all who would live on earth after him, so his covenant binds everyone on earth. Speaking on behalf of his descendants, Noah gave God permission to intervene when evil is rampant. The Covenant of the Rainbow gave God long-term permission to act on earth, if things got really bad. This was not much of a constraint on human authority on earth, because it does not apply most of the time, but it give a God authority to act on earth, if becomes strong and destructive. This permission still applies several thousand years later. The rainbow covenant was a huge step in the battle against evil. Until the time of Noah, God was shut out of the world and could do nothing to prevent evil from destroying the world. The rainbow covenant did not give God a free hand on earth. Most of the time, it does not apply, because the situation is not bad enough. However, it does give God permission to intervene on earth when evil gets really bad. This is a great improvement over the situation that existed before the Flood. Establishing Israel did two things to constrain the growth of evil in the world. God gave Israel the law to constrain personal and social evil. God intended that other nations to copy Israel and get a similar reduction in personal and social evil by applying God's law. Unfortunately, Israel chose to copy the nations and have a king, so they never demonstrated the benefits of God's law to the nations. The law should have constrained personal evil in Israel and throughout the world. God planted Israel in the playground of empires in the middle of the world to provide himself with a prophetic voice to announce protective judgments against emerging evil in the surrounding empires and nations. The strategic position of Israel in the Middle East meant that any emerging empire would eventually pass through it on the way to do battle with its enemies. The rampaging of the empires gave the prophets of Israel authority to speak God's judgments against them. When the empires took people from Israel into captivity, they bought prophets into their midst and strengthening the power of the prophetic voice. Joseph and Daniel are prophets who ended up within the empires that God planned to destroy. Protective judgments and the prophets constrained political evil. These two solutions were not perfect, because only the cross and the spirit can fully deal with evil. However, this two-pronged strategy for dealing with personal and political, should have kept the world from totally going to the dogs. The Old Testament records a number of situations where God sent a protective judgment to prevent the advance of evil in fulfilment of the rainbow covenant. The disruption of the tower of Babel was the first protective judgment recorded in the scriptures. When the people of the world got together to expand their power, God sent confusion among the people, because he could see that it would lead to terrible evil (Gen 11:5-6). The prophetic voice is not identified. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed when evil was rampant and threatened to spill out across the Middle East (Gen 18:20-21). Abraham was the prophet who released God's power to act ((Gen 20:7). The faithfulness and righteousness of Abraham gave God to his prayers. His prayers protected Lots and his family, but they also gave God authority to remove a serious evil from the earth authority to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. The Kings of Canaan were destroyed by and invading army when their evil began to get out of hand (Gen 15:16; 17:8). Moses was the prophet who pronounced judgment against the sin that had taken control of Caanan. God destroyed the armies of Pharaoh to set the children of Israel free from their captivity in Egypt. Moses was the prophet who made this protective judgment possible (Deut 34:10). He prophesied specifically by holding out his staff and releasing the power of God against the army of Egypt. The Assyrian empire was destroyed by God when it Got out of hand. This event was prophesied by Isaiah (Is 14:25). God used Babylon to smash the power of Egypt. This event was prophesied by Isaiah (Isaiah 19:1-4) and Jeremiah (Jer 46). The Babylonian empire collapsed when it was invaded by Darius Mede. Isaiah, Jeremiah and Daniel were the prophets who made this possible (Is 13:17-22; Jer 50-51). Daniel was on the spot giving precise warnings (Dan 5). In each of these situations, a powerful forceful for evil was emerging in the world. If these had been left to grow, they could have produced tremendous evil. God cut them down before they got big enough to ruin the earth. God has been faithful to the promise of the rainbow. Evil has never been able to take control of earth as it did before the flood, because God's judgements have kept evil in check. Isaiah described some of the methods God uses for protective judgments. Natural events. The river Nile was dried up to constrain Egypt. The waters of the river will dry up, and the riverbed will be parched and dry (Is 19:5). Confusing leaders. God sometimes causes confusion or foolishness among the leaders of the evil nation. This happened in Egypt. I will stir up Egyptian against Egyptian-brother will fight against brother, neighbor against neighbor, city against city, kingdom against kingdom (Is 19:2). Invading nation. God often raises up another nation to destroy the an evil one. Babylon was destroyed by the Medes and the Persians. See, I will stir up against them the Medes Their bows will strike down the young men; Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms will be overthrown by God (Is 13:17-19). An invading nation was the most common form of protective judgment. One role of the Old Testament prophets was to speak to evil nations and warn them of the approaching protective judgments. Their declarations and intercession gives God authority to deal with political evil when the rainbow covenant does not apply. God's purposes are clearer, if a prophet warns in advance. When the prophets speak clearly, the people of the world see that God is fulfilling the rainbow covenant that he made through Noah. When announcing protective judgments to the nations, the prophets did not refer to the covenant with Moses, because these nations were not covered by it. The nations had never agreed to the covenant of blessings and curses and blessings made with Moses, so it was not relevant to their situation. The protective judgments announced by the prophets were not redemptive, so they never gave a call to repentance and conditions for restoration. The situation was so evil that repentance was no longer possible. Protective judgment only occurs when a people or nation has gone so far into evil that it is beyond hope and in danger of becoming a destructive force on earth. The prophets reminded these nations that they had become so evil that God has no option but to bring them down. They had become a threat to God's promise that evil will never dominate the world again. Nineveh was an exception. Jonah was sent to announce a destructive judgment on a city that had gone too far into evil. Nineveh was so evil that God had to destroy it to prevent evil spreading, so Jonah believed there was not hope for it. This is why he did not give a call for repentance. However, a surprising thing happened. The King of Nineveh did repent and commanded the people to do the same. This caused God to defer the destruction of the city (Jon 3:4-10). Unfortunately, the repentance did not last long and the people returned to evil path that they had been pursuing. God eventually had to destroy Nineveh to prevent evil spreading (Nahum 1:1-6). Speaking to nations to warn of protective judgment was a minor part of the OT prophet's role. Most of their prophecies were spoken to Israel as guardians of the covenant. Modern prophets should have a similar balance. Announcing protective judgments against the surrounding nations was relatively rare. Another two thousand years passed between the flood and the birth of Jesus. During that time God fulfilled his rainbow covenant by constraining evil on earth. Some seriously evil nations emerged, but God brought them down, before was rampant in the way that it was before the flood. When Jesus was born on earth, evil nations and empires were still at work, but they had not been able to destroy the earth. The prophets and protective judgments had limited the harm done by evil men. The rainbow covenant was eternal (Gen 9:12), so God continues to determine the rising and falling of the nations during the New Testament age.. He made all the nations; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands (Acts 17:26). When nations go sour and begin to magnify evil, God causes them to collapse and die. Sometimes they just collapse in on themselves, but often they destroyed by the armies of other nations. The big difference in New Testament times is that protective judgment has become Plan B. God's Plan A for dealing with evil nations and empires is the gospel and the Spirit. If Christians take the gospel to the evil nation, the hearts of the people can be changed. If these Christians are willing to suffer in the face of persecution, they can change the direction of the evil nation. If enough people come to faith in Jesus, the leaders of the nation will have to change too. If the church heeds his call, the Holy Spirit can use the gospel to transform an evil nation. During the gospel age, God only sends protective judgments when the gospel fails. This should be very rare. If the church is doing its job, most evil nations will be transformed by the gospel. Situations where evil gets so entrenched that it begins to threat to the world should not really occur. Unfortunately, the church sometimes gets sluggish and does not fulfil its role, which allows evil nations to expand and grow. Rome is an example. For two or three hundred years, the church was very effective and nearly transformed the Rome empire. However, after the conversion of Constantine, the church was seduced by political power, which compromised its witness. This left God with no option, but to send protective judgment to destroy the power of Rome. After being invaded by marauding armies, the Roman empire collapsed and disappeared. During the New Testament age, God is still committed to the rainbow covenant, so he continues to use protective judgements when this is necessary. However, he prefers to work thought gospel and the Spirit to transform evil nations. This is more effective way of dealing with evil, because it gets to the root cause of the problem. Statements that God has stopped using judgments during the age of grace are wrong. God's role is clearer, if prophets warn the collapsing nation why it is falling apart. When God is about to send a protective judgment, he needs New Testament prophets to speak to the nations effective. John demonstrated the role of prophet to the nations with his prophesy of the fall of Babylon the Great (Rev 18). Several changes have occurred in the modern world. During the last few centuries, the church has been effective in taking the gospel to the poorer nations of the world, be it has been less effective in taking the gospel to nations where evil has taken hold. God's Plan A has not been very effective. When Hitler rose to power in Germany, the church was compromised and ineffective. One reason Stalin was able to get control of Russia was that they Russian church had compromised with the Russian emperors. Christians have lost faith in the rainbow covenant and the protective judgments of God. Christian nations have usurped the role of enforcing protective judgments on evil nations. The British Empire was the first attempt to use Christian military power to constrain evil in the world. British efforts to play God eventually failed and their empire collapsed. During the last century, the United States has taken over from Britain as the decider of the rising and falling nations. Instead of allowing God to deal with evil in his way, the United States has usurped this role and how attempts to bring down nations they do not like. Because America does not understand God's plans, it usually makes these situations worse. The United States took responsibility for bringing down Hitler, without realising that God had raised up Hitler to destroy the power of Stalin's Russia. America provided Stalin with military and economic support against Hitler, allowing him to establish a huge evil empire in Eastern Europe. Fortunately for the world, God destroyed the Russian empire in his own way, without needing to use American military power. The United States has now decided that Iran is evil and must be destroyed. These efforts will fail, because the United States does not understand that God is raising Iran up to bring down the Western Beast when that becomes necessary. When the United State decided that Saddam Hussein had become too evil and tried to destroy him, their efforts produced large numbers of casualties and very little peace. If a Christian prophet had pronounced judgement against Saddam Hussein, releasing the power of God to remove him from office, this would probably have been far less painful for the Iraqi people than a ten-year war. A mature prophet proclaiming a protective judgment would have brought the downfall of Gadhafi of Libya quicker and more effectively than NATO. Prophetic proclamation of protective judgments is the best way to remove a bad government and evil nations. A militaristic Christian nation dominating the world with the weapons of war is not God's solution. As we move into the Time of Distress, when the church is weak and the gospel constrained, God will need to use Plan B more frequently. He will need to destroy several nations, to keep evil under control on earth. To accomplish his goals during this season, God will need Christian prophets to work with him and release his power. Many of the protective judgements that occur during this season have already been recorded in the scriptures by the Old Testament. However, their prophecies will need to be given life in their time of fulfilment by Christian prophets moving in the fullness of the Spirit. Some Christians believe that that world is about to go into a "great tribulation". Their teachers claim that evil is going to control the world for seven years while the Holy Spirit is removed. This teaching is wrong, because if God allowed evil go gain total control the earth, he would be breaking his rainbow covenant. Modern teaching about a great tribulation is wrong, because God has promised that he will never let evil take over the world again. We are getting close to the end of the Time of the Gentiles and the Fullness of the Jews. The prophetic ministry have a central role in this transition. They will proclaim protective judgments against the nations that are attacking Israel, in fulfilment of Jesus promise recorded in Matt 23:39. Blessed is he who comes in the name of Jesus. God seems to be restoring prophets to the church. If he can mature this gifting in the church, he might be able to raise up prophets with sufficient maturity to act as prophets to the nations. This would allow him to use protective judgements more effectively. Mature prophets would be able to release God to bring downs kings and rulers who had lost the plot, but we do not seem to be quite there yet. We really need genuine Daniels and Jeremiahs, who understand God's purposes. A picture of the prophets who emerge in this time is given in Revelation 10:9-11. So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, "Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but 'in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey." I took the little scroll from the angel's hand and ate it. It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour. Then I was told, "You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, languages and kings." We should be praying that God will raise up powerful prophets to speak to the nations during this season. Prophesying protective judgments against the nations will only be a minor aspect of the prophetic role. Most of their activity will be in the church, overseeing the covenant people. If the prophets can stir up the church to take the gospel to evil nations, God's Plan B will not be needed. This means that most New Testament prophets will function within the church. A few of these will speak to their own nation. Only a few of the more mature prophets will be called to the role of prophet to the nations. They will call protective judgments against evil nations, when the church has failed to apply God's Plan A.

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This article explores how malware has developed self-defense techniques and how these techniques have evolved as it has become more difficult for viruses to survive. It also provides an overview of the current situation. First we must define the meaning of the term “malware self-defense”, which is not as unequivocal as it may seem at first glance. When malware attacks antivirus programs, this is clearly a form of self defense. When malware covering its tracks, this is also in some sense a form of self defense, although less obviously so. An even less obvious form of self defense is the very evolution of malicious programs. After all, one of the motivations behind virus writers searching for new platforms that can be infected and for new system loopholes is to spread new viruses in the wild, into areas where no one yet bothers to look for malicious code as nothing has been found there before. In order to avoid confusion about what is considered a self-defense technology and what is not, this article examines only the most popular and obvious means of malware self-defense. First and foremost this includes various means of modifying and packing code, in order to conceal the presence of malicious code in the system and to disrupt the functionality of antivirus solutions. Classifying malware self defense There are many different kinds of malware self-defense techniques and these can be classified in a variety of ways. Some of these technologies are meant to bypass antivirus signature databases, while others are meant to hinder analysis of the malicious code. One malicious program may attempt to conceal itself in the system, while another will not waste valuable processor resources on this, choosing instead to search for and counter specific types of antivirus protection. These different tactics can be classified in different ways and put into various categories. As the goal of this article is not to create a strict classification system for malware self-defense techniques, let’s consider a classification system that will provide an understanding of this issue at an intuitive level. We take the two criteria which we believe are the most important, and from there we will create a scatterplot with two axes representing those two criteria. The first criterion is a malicious program’s level of self-defense activity. The most passive malware does not attempt to defend itself in any way, i.e. it does not contain any such code. Instead, the author creates a kind of protective shell for the program. More active self-defense systems involve deliberately aggressive techniques. The second criterion is the degree to which a malicious program’s self-defense mechanism is dedicated. The most narrowly dedicated forms of self defense are found in malicious programs that somehow disrupt the function of a specific antivirus program. More general self-defense mechanisms are designed to defend malicious programs against everything by making the virus presence in the system as undetectable as possible in every way. We have used a scatterplot to present the different kinds of malware self-defense mechanisms. This diagram is merely a simple example that we can use as a guide to categorize different means of malware self-defense. This model is based on a careful analysis of malware behaviors, but is, necessarily, subjective. Figure 1. A scatterplot of malware self-defense technologies Malware self-defense mechanisms can fulfil one or more tasks. These include: 1. hindering detection of a virus using signature-based methods; 2. hindering analysis of the code by virus analysts; 3. hindering detection of a malicious program in the system; 4. hindering the functionality of security software such as antivirus programs and firewalls. This article will only examine malicious programs written for the Windows operating system (and its predecessor, DOS) due to the rarity and relatively small number of malicious programs for other platforms. All of the trends examined in this article that apply to executable malware files (EXE, DLL and SYS), and to some extent also apply to macro viruses and script viruses, which is why I will not be addressing the latter separately. Sources: polymorphism, obfuscation and encryption It makes sense to examine polymorphism, obfuscation and encryption together, as they all fulfill the same end, albeit to different degrees. Initially, modification of malicious code had two goals: to make it more difficult to detect files and to make it more difficult for virus analysts to examine the code. The history of malware began in the 1970s, but the history of malware self-defense didn’t start until the late 1980s. The first virus that attempted to defend itself from the antivirus utilities then in existence was the DOS virus Cascade (Virus.DOS.Cascade). It defended itself by partially encrypting its own code. This wasn’t very successful, however, since each new copy of the virus – despite being unique from previous copies – still contained an unaltered piece of code that gave it away every time. As a result, antivirus programs could still detect it. Nevertheless, virus writers were turning in a new direction, and in two years the first polymorphic virus appeared: Chameleon (Virus.DOS.Chameleon). Chameleon, also known as 1260, and its contemporary Whale, used complex encryption and obfuscation methods to protect their code. Two years later, we saw the emergence of so-called polymorphic generators, which could be used as out of the box defense solutions for malicious programs. Why code modification can be used to hinder file detection, and how file detection works, needs some explanation. Until recently, antivirus programs worked exclusively by analysis file code. The earliest signature-based detection methods focused on searching for exact byte sequences, often at a fixed offset from the beginning of the file, in a malicious program’s binary code. Later heuristic detection methods also used file code, but with a more flexible, probability based approach to searching for common malware byte sequences. Obviously, it’s not difficult for malicious programs to get around that kind of protection if each copy of the program includes a new byte sequence. This task is fulfillled by the application of polymorphic and metamorphic techniques, which essentially – without getting into the technological nitty-gritty – enable a malicious program to mutate at byte level when the program creates a copy of itself. Meanwhile, the program’s functionality remains unchanged. Encryption and obfuscation are primarily used to hinder code analysis, but when they are implemented in a certain way, the result can be a variation of polymorphism – an example here is again Cascade, where every copy of the virus was encrypted with a unique key. Obfuscation may just hinder analysis, but when it is applied in a different way to every copy of a malicious program, it hinders the effective use of signature-based detection methods. However, it cannot be said that any one of the abovementioned tactics is more effective than any other in terms of malware self-defense. It would be more correct to say that the effectiveness of these techniques depends on the specific circumstances and how the techniques are implemented. The use of polymorphism only became relatively widespread in terms of DOS file viruses. There’s a reason for this. Writing polymorphic code is a highly time-consuming task that is really only justified in cases when a malicious program is self-replicating: then each new copy contains a more or less unique byte sequence. The majority of contemporary Trojans aren’t able to self-replication, and polymorphism is therefore irrelevant. That’s why since the end of the DOS file virus era, polymorphism has been seen less, and it was used mostly by virus writers who wanted to show off their skills rather than to create a particularly useful malicious function. Figure 2. The polymorphic code of P2P-Worm.Win32.Polip In contrast, obfuscation continues to be used today, as are other code modification methods that, to a large extent, make it more difficult to analyze code as opposed to hindering detection. Figure 3. A diagram of the obfuscated code in Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Small.ue – Click for larger version Since behavioral detection methods arrived and began to squeeze out signature-based methods, code modification techniques have become less useful in hindering malware detection. This is why polymorphism and related technologies are not commonly used today and are only really a means for hindering the actual analysis of malicious code. Concealing malicious programs in the system became the second method of self-defense against detection that was mastered by virus writers in the DOS era. This technique was first used in 1990; to be more precise, it was included in the arsenal of a virus we have already mentioned – Whale. Essentially, the concealed virus would one way or another intercept DOS system services and pass false data to the user or the antivirus program – for instance, “clean” boot sector contents, instead of the real contents which had been infected by the malicious program. Stealth technologies for the DOS operating system were reborn as rootkit technologies for the Windows operating system 10 years later. Gradually, viruses – malicious programs that can function only within a victim body and which are unable to exist as a separate file – are being replaced by Trojans, which are fully independent malicious programs. This process began when the Internet was still slow and more limited than it is today. Hard disks and floppy disks were small, which meant that the size of a program was very important. In order to reduce the size of a Trojan, virus writers began to utilize so-called packers – even back in the DOS era. Packers are dedicated programs that compress and archive files. A side effect of using packers that can actually be useful from a malware point of view is that packed malicious programs are more difficult to detect using file methods. When creating a new modification of an existing malicious program, the virus writer usually changes several lines of code, while leaving the heart of the program untouched. In the compiled file, the bytes for a certain sequence of code will also be altered and if the antivirus signature does not include that very sequence, then the malicious program will still be detected as before. Compressing a program with a packer solves this problem as changing even just one byte in the source executable results in an entirely new byte sequence in the packed file. Figure 4. The visible difference between packed and unpacked code – Click for large version Packers are still commonly used today. The variety of packing programs and their level of sophistication continue to grow. Many modern packers, in addition to compressing a source file, also equip it with additional self-defense functions aimed at hindering the unpacking and analysis of the file using a debugger. Malicious programs for the Windows operating system started using stealthing technologies to hide their presence in the system in the first years of the new millennium. As mentioned above, this was approximately 10 years after stealthing programs appeared as a concept and was implemented for DOS. In early 2004, Kaspersky Lab encountered a surprising program that couldn’t be seen in the Windows processes and files list. For many antivirus experts, this was a new beginning – understanding stealthing technologies for malicious programs for Windows – and it was the harbinger of a major new trend in the virus writing industry. The term “rootkit” stems from Unix utilities that are designed to provide a user with unsanctioned root access within the system without being noticed by the system administrator. Today, the word rootkit covers dedicated utilities used to conceal information in the system, as well as malicious programs with functionality which enables them to mask their presence. These include the manifestations of any third-party registered applications: a string in the list of processes, a file on disk, a registry key or even network traffic. How do rootkit technologies which are designed to conceal malicious programs in the system make it so difficult to detect the malicious programs using antivirus or other security software? It’s very simple: an antivirus utility is an external agent just like the user. Generally, if a user can’t see something, then an antivirus program can’t see it either. However, some antivirus solutions implement technologies which sharpen their vision, enabling them to detect rootkits when users cannot see them. A rootkit is based on the same principle as DOS stealth viruses. A large number of rootkits have mechanisms which modify a chain of system calls (Execution Path Modification). This kind of rootkit may act as an hook located at a certain point of a route along which commands or information are exchanged. It will modify these commands or information in order to distort them or control what happens on the recipient’s end without the recipient’s knowledge. Theoretically, the number of points at which a hook can be located is limitless. In practice, there are currently several different methods commonly used to hook APIs and kernel system functions. Examples of this kind of rootkit include the widely known utilities Vanquish and Hacker Defender and malicious programs such as Backdoor.Win32.Haxdoor, Email-Worm.Win32.Mailbot, and certain versions of Email-Worm.Win32.Bagle. Figure 5. Hooking ZwQueryDirectoryFile conceals the driver file in the list of files – Click for large version Another common type of rootkit technology is Direct Kernel Object Modification (DKOM), which can be viewed as an insider that modifies information or commands directly in their sources. These rootkits alter system data. A typical example is the FU utility; the same functions can be found in Gromozon (Trojan.Win32.Gromp). A newer technology that officially corresponds to the rootkit classification conceals files in alternate data streams (ADS) in NTFS file systems. This technology was first implemented in 2000 in the malicious program Stream (Virus.Win32.Stream), and got a second wind in 2006 in the form of Mailbot and Gromozon. Strictly speaking, exploiting ADS is not so much a means of tricking the system as of taking advantage of little-known functions, which is why this particular technology isn’t likely to become very widespread. Figure 6. The malicious program Mailbot (Rustock) exploits the system directory stream There is another rare technology which only partially falls into the rootkit category (but it corresponds even less to the other classes of malware self-defense examined in this article). This technology uses bodiless files – this means malicious programs do not have any body whatsoever on the disk. There are currently two known representatives of this subgroup: Codered, which emerged in 2001 (Net-Worm.Win32.CodeRed) which exists in this form only within the context of MS IIS, and a recent proof of concept Trojan that stores its body in the registry. The modern rootkit trend aims towards the virtualization and use of system functions – in other words, penetrating even more deeply into the system. Combating antivirus solutions There have always been malicious programs that have actively defended themselves. Self-defense mechanisms include: Actually, a targeted attack against a security solution is more similar to the reaction of someone pushed up against a wall rather than an active attack. In today’s conditions, when antivirus companies analyze more than the code contained in malicious programs – they analyze their behavior as well -malicious programs are more or less powerless. Neither polymorphism, nor packers, nor even stealth technologies will provide malicious programs with total protection. This is why malware has set its sights on certain manifestations or functions of the so-called enemy. Of course, sometimes self-defense mechanisms are the only solution; otherwise they would not be so common, as they pose too many disadvantages from the viewpoint of maximum, full-range defense. What will the future bring? Antivirus protection is continually evolving, moving from file analysis to program behavior analysis. In contrast to file analysis, the basics of which were explained in the section on polymorphism and obfuscation, behavior analysis is based not on working with files, but with events at system level, such as “list all active system processes,” “create a file with this name in the directory shown,” and “open the port indicated to incoming data.” By analyzing the chain of these events, an antivirus program can calculate the extent to which the component generating these processes is potentially malicious, and give a warning when necessary. However, behavior analysis can get confusing when it comes to terminology, and it’s not always easy to get things straightened out. For example, a behavioral analyzer may go by different names: HIPS, proactive protection, heuristic, or sandbox-¦ However, regardless of the term, one thing remains clear: malicious programs are ultimately powerless in the face of behavioral analysis. This vulnerability will probably have an influence on the future evolution of malicious programs. In other words, virus writers are faced with the need to somehow work around behavior analyzers. There is no way to know how they will go about tackling this obstacle. But we do know, for example, that the use of obfuscation at the behavioral level is basically ineffective. The evolution of environmental diagnostics, however, is very interesting. This is because it assumes, in part, a rise in a virus’s “self-awareness”, which would allow it to determine where exactly it is located: in the “real world” (in a user’s clean working environment) or in the “matrix” (under the control of antivirus analysis). Diagnostic technologies do have their precedents: some malicious programs, if they are launched in a virtual environment (such as VMWare or Virtual PC) destroy themselves immediately. By building this self-destruction mechanism into a malicious program, its author prevents its analysis, which is often conducted within a virtual environment. Trends and forecasts Having examined current trends and how effective current approaches are, we can expect the following from the methods of malware self-defense discussed above: 1. Rootkits are moving towards exploiting equipment functions and towards virtualization. This method, however, has not yet reached its peak and probably won’t become a major threat in the years to come, nor will it be widely used. 2. Technology which blocks files on disk: there are two known proof of concept programs that have demonstrated we can expect this area to develop in the near future. 3. The use of obfuscation technologies is insignificant, but nevertheless still current. 4. The use of technologies that detect security utilities and interrupt their performance is very common and widely used. 5. The use of packers is widespread and is growing steadily (both in quantative and qualitative terms). 6. The use of technologies that detect debuggers, emulators and virtual machines as well as other environmental diagnostic technologies, is expected to develop in order to compensate for the mass transition of antivirus products to behavioral analysis. Figure 7. An approximate breakdown of malware self-defense technologies as of early 2007 t’s not difficult to see that the evolution trends in malware self-defense technologies are changing in step with the evolution of malicious programs themselves, as well as protection against malware. When most malicious programs infected files and antivirus programs used signature-based detection, the most prevalent forms of malware self-defense were polymorphism and code protection. Today, malicious programs are mostly independent, and antivirus programs are becoming increasingly proactive. Based on these facts, we can predict which malware self-defense mechanisms will develop more intensively than others: - 1. Rootkits. Their invisibility within a system gives them a clear advantage – even if it doesn’t prevent their detection. We can most likely expect new kinds of bodiless malicious programs and, a little later, the implementation of virtualization technologies. - 2. Obfuscation and encryption. This method will remain common as long is it continues to hinder code analysis. - 3. Technologies used to counter security solutions which are based on behavioral analysis. We can expect the appearance of some new technologies, since the ones that are currently being used (targeted attacks against antivirus programs) are not effective. It’s possible that we will see some methods of detecting virtual environments or a type of behavioral encryption. What else can we say in conclusion? The mere existence of malicious programs has led to the existence and development of protection against them. And now we will see the emergence and development of malware self-defense against protection against malware. This brings up images of a never-ending conflict, where nature is red in tooth and claw. In the last few years the situation has become increasingly critical. Someone from the cybercriminal underground (or “researchers” dressed in white hats) develops proof of concept code to evade modern means of protection. This person will, for self-promotion purposes and feigning concern about progress, announce that the code is “undetectable”. But we need to emphasize that this concept will be undetectable only at the level of one- or two-step bypass of known security functions, rather than 100% undetectable. It is relatively easy to create a one-step work-around if you are familiar with protection mechanisms. Such publications cause concern among a certain percentage of users who are not familiar with the way malicious programs and antivirus programs work (“Will my antivirus protect me against this new type of threat?”). In this situation, the people creating self-defense methods have only to chip in a share of their resources in order to restore their reputation and develop a work-around – usually a one-step bypass. In the end, their reputation is saved (of course), the malware – antivirus – user system returns to its initial state, and we are again faced with the same vicious cycle. Each new iteration gives rise to even more sophisticated malware and more heavyweight means of defense. I want to emphasize that this process uses up a lot of resources, is senseless and endless, and recently, it has become even more exaggerated. All three parties in this conflict need to raise their awareness of the situation. I urge users to expand their understanding, to acknowledge that no means of protection can provide 100% security, and the best way to protect yourself against threats is to prevent them. I challenge cybercriminals and conceptualists to reconsider their intentions and motives behind publishing a PoC that will only add fuel to the fire. And I call on the “protectors” to force themselves to think outside the box, and to try to keep more than one step ahead of the enemy. We may not be able to see the end of this so-called arms race, but we can keep it from spiraling out of control.

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The Manifesto, as everybody knows, was the brainchild of that angry genius, Karl Marx. More accurately, it was the result of collaboration between him and his remarkable companion, compatriot, supporter, and colleague, Friedrich Engels. They are interesting, and, of course, enormously important men. The trouble is, they rapidly became not just men, but figures. At least until the Soviet debacle, Marx was widely considered a religious leader to rank with Christ or Mohammed, and Engels thus became a sort of Saint Paul or John. In the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, scholars pored over their works with the idolatry they ridiculed in the antireligious museums down the street. But while Marx and Engels were canonized in Stalinist Russia and, to a lesser extent, in Maoist China, they were regarded as creatures of the devil in much of the rest of the world. They merit neither treatment, for they were neither saints nor devils. Nor is their work either Scriptures or anathema. It belongs in the great line of economic viewpoints that have successfully clarified, illuminated, and interpreted the world for us, and like the other great works on the shelf, it is not without flaw. The world have been preoccupied with Marx the Revolutionary. But had Marx not lived, there would have been other Socialists and other prophets of a new society. The real and lasting impact of Marx and Engels is not their revolutionary activity, none of which bore too much fruit during their own lifetimes. It is with the vision of Marx the Political Economist that capitalism must finally come to grips. For the final imprint he made on history was his prediction that capitalism must inevitably collapse. On that prediction, communism built its edifice, heedless of its own weaknesses. But let us see the men. They were very much opposites in appearance. Marx looked like a revolutionary. His children called him “The Moor,” for his skin was dark and his eyes deep-set and flashing. He was stocky and powerfully built and rather glowering in expression with a formidable beard. He was not an orderly man; his home was a dusty mass of papers piled in careless disarray in the midst of which Marx himself, slovenly dressed, padded about in an eye-stinging haze of tobacco smoke. Engels, on the other hand, would pass for a member of his despised bourgeoisie; tall and fair and rather elegant, he had the figure of a man who liked to fence and to ride to hounds and who had once swum the Weser River four times without a break. It was not only in their looks that they differed; their personalities were at opposite poles. Engels was gay and observant and gifted with a quick and facile mind; it was said that he could stutter in twenty languages. He had a taste for the bourgeois pleasures in life, including a good palate for wine, and it is amusing to note that although he turned to the proletariat for his amours, he spent much of his time romantically (and unsuccessfully) trying to prove that his working-class mistress, Mary Burns (and later, after her death, her sister Lizzie), were actually descended from the Scottish poet. Marx was much more ponderous. He is the German scholar par excellence, slow, meticulous, and painstakingly, even morbidly, perfectionist. Engels could dash off a treatise in no time at all; Marx was always worrying one to death. Engels was fazed only by Arabic with its four thousand verb roots; Marx, after twenty years of practice, still spoke hideously Teutonic English. When he writes of the great “chock” which events have caused him, we can almost hear him speak. But for all his heaviness, Marx is the greater mind of the two; where Engels supplied breadth and dash, Marx provided the depth. They met, for the second time, in 1844 in Paris, and their collaboration begins at this date. Engels had come to merely call on Marx, but they had so much to say to each other that their conversation lasted for ten days. Thereafter there is hardly a product of the one that was not edited or rewritten or at least debated with the other, and their correspondence fills volumes. Their paths to that common meeting ground in Paris were widely divergent. Engels was the son of a pietist, Calvinist, narrow-minded father, a manufacturer in the Rhineland. When Friedrich as a young man had shown an incomprehensible taste for poetry, his father had packed him off to Bremen to learn the export business and to live with a cleric: religion and moneymaking, according to Caspar Engels, were good cures for a romantic soul. Engels had dutifully applied himself to business, but everything he saw was colored by a personality in revolt, a happy-go-lucky personality that was incompatible with his father’s rigid standards. He went down to the docks in the course of business, but his observant eye took in not only the first-class accommodations “in mahogany ornamented with gold” but the steerage as well, where the people were “packed in like the paving-stones in the streets.” He began to read the radical literature of his time, and by the age of twenty-two he was converted to the ideals of “communism”—a word that then had no very clear definition except insofar as it rejected the idea of private property as a means for organizing society’s economic effort. Then he went to Manchester to enter his father’s textile business there. Manchester, like the ships in Bremen, seemed to Engels a facade. There were pleasant streets lined with shops and suburbs ringing the city with pleasant villas. But there was a second Manchester as well. It was hidden behind the first and laid out so that the mill owners never had to see it on their trips to their offices. It harbored a stunted population living in a state of filth and despair, turning to gin and evangelism and doping itself and its children with laudanum against a life that was hopeless and brutal. Engels had seen similar conditions in the factory towns of his Rhineland home, but now he explored Manchester until he knew every last hovel and each ratlike abode. He was to publish his findings in the most terrible verdict ever passed on the world of industrial slums: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. One time he talked of the misery of the place to a gentleman friend and remarked that he had never seen so “ill-built a city.” His companion listened to him quietly and then said, “And yet there is a great deal of money made here; good day, sir.” He was writing now—treatises to show that the great English economists were only apologists for the existing order—and one of his contributions made a special impression on a young man named Karl Marx, who was editing a radical philosophical magazine in Paris. Unlike Engels, Marx came from a liberal, even mildly radical, family background. He was born in 1818 in Trier, Germany, the second son of a prosperous Jewish family that shortly thereafter adopted Christianity so that Heinrich Marx, an advocate, might be less restricted in his practice. Heinrich Marx was a respected man; he was, in fact, even appointed Justizrat, an honorary title for eminent lawyers, but in his day he had joined illegal banquet clubs that drank toasts to a republican Germany, and he had reared his young son on a diet of Voltaire, Locke, and Diderot. Heinrich Marx hoped that his son would study law. But at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, young Marx found himself swept up in the great philosophical debate of the day. The philosopher Hegel had propounded a revolutionary scheme, and the conservative German universities found themselves split wide open over it. Change, according to Hegel, was the rule of life. Every idea, every force, irrepressibly bred its opposite, and the two merged into a “unity” that in turn produced its own contradiction. And history, said Hegel, was nothing but the expression of this flux of conflicting and resolving ideas and forces. Change—dialectical change—was immanent in human affairs. With one exception: when it came to the Prussian state, the rules no longer applied; the Prussian government, said Hegel, was like “a veritable earthly god.” This was a powerful stimulus for a young student. Marx joined a group of intellectuals known as the Young Hegelians who debated such daring questions as atheism and pure theoretical communism in terms of the Hegelian dialectic, and he decided to become a philosopher himself. He might have, had it not been for the action of that godlike state. Marx’s favorite professor, Bruno Bauer, who was eager to procure an appointment for him at Bonn, was dismissed for proconstitutional and antireligious ideas (one evidently as bad as the other), and an academic career for young Dr. Marx became an impossibility. He turned instead to journalism. The Rheinische Zeitung, a small middle-class liberal newspaper, to which he had been a frequent contributor, asked him to take on its editorship. He accepted; his career lasted exactly five months. Marx was then a radical, but his radicalism was philosophical rather than political. When Friedrich Engels came respectfully to call on him, Marx rather disapproved of that brash young man brimming with Communist ideas, and when Marx himself was accused of being a Communist, his reply was equivocal: “I do not know communism,” he said, “but a social philosophy which has as its aim the defense of the oppressed cannot be condemned so lightly.” But regardless of his disavowals, his editorials were too much for the authorities. He wrote a bitter denunciation of a law that would have prevented the peasants from exercising their immemorial rights to gather dead wood in the forests; for this he was censured. He wrote editorials deploring the housing situation; for this he was warned. And when he went so far as to say some uncomplimentary things about the Tsar of Russia, the Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed. Marx went to Paris to take over another radical journal, which was to be almost as short-lived as the newspaper. But his interests were now turned in the direction of politics and economics. The undisguised self-interest of the Prussian government, the implacable resistance of the German bourgeoisie toward anything that might alleviate the condition of the German working classes, the almost caricaturesque attitudes of reaction which characterized the wealthy and ruling classes of Europe—all of this had coalesced in his mind to form part of a new philosophy of history. And when Engels came to visit him and the two struck up their strong rapport, that philosophy began to take formal shape. The philosophy is often called dialectical materialism; dialectical because it incorporates Hegel’s idea of inherent change, and materialism because it grounds itself not in the world of ideas, but on the terrain of social and physical environment. “The materialist conception of history,” wrote Engels many years later in a famous tract titled “Anti-Dühring” (it was aimed against a German professor named Eugen Dühring) “starts from the principle that production, and with production the exchange of its products, is the basis of every social order; that in every society that has appeared in history the distribution of the products, and with it the division of society into classes or estates, is determined by what is produced and how it is produced, and how the product is exchanged. According to this conception, the ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in the minds of men, in their increasing insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the mode of production and exchange; they are to be sought not in the philosophy but in the economics of the epoch concerned.” The reasoning is powerful. Every society, says Marx, is built on an economic base—the hard reality of human beings who must organize their activities to clothe and feed and house themselves. That organization can differ vastly from society to society and from era to era. It can be pastoral or built around hunting or grouped into handicraft units or structured into a complex industrial whole. But whatever the form in which men solve their basic economic problem, society will require a “superstructure” of noneconomic activity and thought—it will need to be bound together by laws, supervised by a government, inspired by religion and philosophy. But this superstructure of thought cannot be selected at random. It must reflect the foundation on which it is raised. No hunting community would evolve or could use the legal framework of an industrial society, and similarly no industrial community could use the conception of law, order, and government of a primitive village. Note that the doctrine of materialism does not toss away the catalytic function and creativity of ideas. It only maintains that thoughts and ideas are the product of environment, even though they aim to change that environment. Materialism by itself would reduce ideas to mere passive accompaniments of economic activity. That was never Marx’s contention. For the new theory was dialectical as well as materialist; it envisaged change, constant and inherent change; and in that never-ending flux the ideas emanating from one period would help to shape another. “Men make their own history,” wrote Marx, commenting on the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon in 1852, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past.” But the dialectical—the internal dynamism—aspect of this theory of history did not depend merely on the interplay of ideas and social structures. There was another and far more powerful agent at work. The economic world itself was changing; the bedrock on which the structure of ideas was built was itself in movement. For example, the isolated markets of the Middle Ages began to lock fingers under the impetus of exploration and political unification, and a new commercial world was born. The old hand mill was replaced by the steam mill under the impetus of invention, and a new form of social organization called the factory came into being. In both cases the determining framework of economic life itself changed its form, and as it did, it forced a new social adaptation from the community in which it was embedded. “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord,” Marx wrote, “there steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.” And once such a change had taken place, it carried with it a whole train of consequences. The market and the factory were incompatible with the feudal way of life—even though they were born amidst it. They demanded a new cultural and social context to go with them. And they helped in that difficult birthing process by creating their own new social classes: the market matured a new merchant class, and the factory gave birth to an industrial proletariat. But the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old ones. For society, said Marx, is organized into class structures, aggregates of individuals who stand in some common relationship—favorable or otherwise—to the existing form of production. And economic change threatens all of that. As the organizational and technical forces of production change—as factories destroy handicraft industry, for example—the social relations of production change too; those on top may find the ground cut from under them, while those who were on the bottom may be carried higher. We have seen just such an upset of the relative position of social classes in Ricardo’s day in England, when the capitalists, riding the wave of the Industrial Revolution, were threatening to usurp the time-honored prerogatives of the landed gentry. Hence conflict develops. The classes whose positions are jeopardized fight the classes whose positions are enhanced: the feudal lord fights the rising merchant, and the guild master opposes the young capitalist. But the process of history pays no attention to likes and dislikes. Gradually conditions change, and gradually, but surely, the classes of society are rearranged. Amid turmoil and anguish the division of wealth is altered. And thus history is a pageant of ceaseless struggle between classes to partition social wealth. For as long as the technics of society change, no existing division of wealth is immune from attack. What did this theory augur for the society of Marx and Engels’s day? It pointed to revolution—inevitable revolution. For capitalism, according to this analysis, must also contain “forces” and “relations” of production—a technological and organizational foundation, and an architecture of law and political rights and ideology. And if its technical base was evolving, then necessarily its superstructure must be subject to increasing strain. That is exactly what Marx and Engels saw in 1848. The economic base of capitalism—its anchor in reality—was industrial production. Its superstructure was the system of private property, under which a portion of society’s output went to those who owned its great technical apparatus. The conflict lay in the fact that the base and superstructure were incompatible. Why? Because the base of industrial production—the actual making of goods—was an ever more organized, integrated, interdependent process, whereas the superstructure of private property was the most individualistic of social systems. Hence the superstructure and the base clashed: factories necessitated social planning, and private property abhorred it; capitalism had become so complex that it needed direction, but capitalists insisted on a ruinous freedom. The result was twofold. First, capitalism would sooner or later destroy itself. The planless nature of production would lead to a constant disorganization of economic activity—to crises and slumps and the social chaos of depression. The system was simply too complex; it was constantly getting out of joint, losing step, and overproducing one good while under-producing another. Secondly, capitalism must unknowingly breed its own successor. Within its great factories it would not only create the technical base for socialism—rationally planned production—but it would create as well a trained and disciplined class which would be the agent of socialism—the embittered proletariat. By its own inner dynamic, capitalism would produce its own downfall, and in the process, nourish its own enemy. It was a profoundly important insight into history, not only for what it betokened for the future, but for the whole new perspective it opened upon the past. We have come to be familiar with the “economic interpretation” of history, and we can accept with equanimity a reevaluation of the past with respect to the struggle, say, of the nascent seventeenth-century commercial classes and the aristocratic world of land and lineage. But for Marx and Engels, this was no mere exercise in historical reinterpretation. The dialectic led to the future, and that future, as revealed by The Communist Manifesto, pointed to revolution as the destination toward which capitalism was moving. In somber words the Manifesto proclaimed: “The development of modern industry . . . cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” The Manifesto, with its rumbling, inexorable interpretation of history, was not written in Paris. Marx’s career had been brief in that city. He edited a caustic, radical magazine; he again rubbed the sensibilities of the Prussian government; and at its behest, he was expelled from the French capital. He was married now—in 1843 he had married Jenny von Westphalen, who had lived next door to him as a child. Jenny was the daughter of a Prussian aristocrat and Privy Councillor, but Baron von Westphalen was nevertheless a humanist and liberal thinker. He had talked to young Marx about Homer and Shakespeare and even told him about the ideas of Saint-Simon despite their pronouncement as heresy by the local bishop. As for Jenny—she was the belle of the town. Beautiful and with suitors galore, she could easily have made a more “suitable” match than the dark young man next door. But she was in love with him, and both families smiled their approval. For the Marxes such a marriage would be a not inconsiderable social triumph, and for the Baron it was, perhaps, a happy vindication of his humanist ideas. One wonders if he would have given his consent could he have foreseen what was to happen to his daughter. For Jenny was to be forced to share the bed of a common prostitute in jail and would have to beg the money from a neighbor to buy a coffin to bury one of her children. In place of the pleasant comforts and the social prestige of Trier, she was to spend the years of her life in two dismal rooms in a London slum, sharing with her husband the calumny of a hostile world. And yet it was a deeply devoted union. In his dealings with outsiders, Marx was unkind, jealous, suspicious, and wrathful; but he was a joyous father and a loving husband. At one period, when his wife was ill, Marx turned to Lenchen, the Westphalian family maid who stayed with them, unpaid, all their days, but even that infidelity—from which an unacknowledged child was born—could not undo a relationship of great passion. Later, much later, when Jenny was dying and Marx was ill, this lovely scene was witnessed by her daughter. Our dear mother lay in the big front room and the Moor lay in the little room next to it. . . . Never shall I forget the morning he felt himself strong enough to go into Mother’s room. When they were together they were young again—she a young girl and he a loving youth, both on life’s threshold, not an old disease-ridden man and an old dying woman parting from each other for life. The Marxes had moved to London in 1849. Expulsion from Paris, four years before, had landed them in Brussels, where they stayed (and the Manifesto was composed) until the revolutionary outbursts in 1849. Then, when the Belgian king had secured a firm enough grip on his shaky throne, he rounded up the radical leaders in his capital, and Marx went briefly to Germany. It was the same pattern all over again. Marx took over the editorship of a newspaper, and it was only a matter of time before the government closed it down. He printed the last edition in red—and sought a haven in London. He was now in desperate financial shape. Engels was in Manchester, leading his strange double life (he was a respected figure on the Manchester Stock Exchange, and he supplied the Marxes with a never-ending stream of checks and loans. Had Marx been a financially orderly person, the family might have lived in decency. But Marx was never one to balance his books. Thus the children had music lessons—and the family went without heat. Life was a constant struggle against bankruptcy, and money worries were a suffocating presence always. There were, in all, five of them including Lechen. Marx had no work—except his never-ending stint in the British Museum from ten o’clock every morning until seven o’clock at night. He tried to make a little money by writing articles on the political situation for the New York Tribune, whose editor, Charles A. Dana, was a Fourierist and not averse to a few slaps at European politics. It helped for a while, although it was Engels who bailed Marx out by composing many of his pieces for him—Marx meanwhile advising by letter as follows: “You must your war-articles colour a little more.” When the articles stopped, he tried to get a clerical job with a railway, but was rejected for his atrocious handwriting. Thereafter he pawned what was left to his name, all the family silver and valuables having been sold long ago. At times his want was so intense that he was forced to sit home because his coat and even his shoes were in pawn; on other occasions he lacked the money to buy postage stamps to send his works to the publisher. And to compound his difficulties, he suffered from the most painful boils. When he arrived home one evening after writing in misery all day long in the Museum he remarked, “I hope the bourgeoisie as long as they live will have cause to remember my carbuncles.” He had just composed the terrible chapter of Das Kapital which described the Working Day. There was only Engels to fall back on. Marx wrote him constantly, touching on economics, politics, mathematics, military tactics, on everything under the sun, but especially his own situation. A typical excerpt reads: My wife is ill. Little Jenny is ill. Lenchen has a sort of nervous fever and I can’t call in the doctor because I have no money to pay him. For about eight or ten days we have all been living on bread and potatoes and it is now doubtful whether we shall be able to get even that. . . . I have written nothing for Dana because I didn’t have a penny to go and read the papers. . . . How am I to get out of this infernal mess? Finally, and this was most hateful of all, but essential if we were not to kick the bucket, I have, over the last 8-10 days, touched some German types for a few shillings and pence . . . Only the last years were a little easier. An old friend left Marx a small bequest, and he was able to live in some comfort, and even to travel a bit for his health. Engels, too, finally came into an inheritance and left his business; in 1869 he went to his office for the last time and came over the fields to meet Marx’s daughter, “swinging his stick in the air and singing, his face beaming.” In 1881 Jenny died; she had buried two of her five children, including her only son; she was old and tired. Marx was too ill to go to the funeral; when Engels looked at him he said, “The Moor is dead, too.” Not quite; he lingered for two more years; disapproved of the husbands two of his daughters had chosen’ grew weary of the bickering of the working-class movement and delivered himself of a statement that has never ceased to bedevil the faithful (“I am not a Marxist,” he said one day); and then on a March afternoon, quietly slipped away. What had he done, in these long years of privation? He had produced, for one thing, an international working-class movement. As a young man, Marx had written: “The philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world in various ways; the thing, however, is to change it.” Marx and Engels had given the accolade to the proletariat in their interpretation of history; now they set about steering and guiding the proletariat so that it should exert its maximum leverage on history. It was not an attempt crowned with much success. Coincident with the publication of the Manifesto, the Communist League had been formed, but it was never much more than a paper organization; the Manifesto, which was its platform, was not then even placed on public sale, and with the demise of the revolution in 1848, the League died too. It was followed in 1864 with a far more ambitious organization, the International Workingmen’s Association. The International boasted seven million members and was real enough to have a hand in a wave of strikes which swept the Continent and to earn for itself a rather fearsome reputation. But it, too, was doomed to have a brief history. The International did not consist of a tough and disciplined army of Communists, but a motley crew of Owenists, Proudhonists, Fourierists, lukewarm Socialists, rabid nationalists, and trade unionists who were leery of any kind of revolutionary theory whatsoever. With considerable skill Marx kept his crew together for five years, and then the International fell apart; some followed Bakunin, a giant of a man with a true revolutionist’s background of Siberia and exile (it was said that his oratory was so moving that his listeners would have cut their throats if he had asked them to), while others turned their attention back to national affairs. The last meeting of the International was held in New York in 1874. It was a lugubrious failure. But far more important than the creation of the First International was the peculiar tone which Marx injected into working-class affairs. This was the most quarrelsome and intolerant of men, and from the beginning he was unable to believe that anyone who did not follow his line of reasoning could possibly be right. As an economist his language was precise, as a philosopher-historian it was eloquent, as a revolutionary it was scurrilous. He stooped to anti-Semitism. He called his opponents “louts,” “rascals,” even “bedbugs.” Early in his career, when he was still in Brussels, Marx had been visited by a German tailor named Weitling. Weitling was a tried son of the labor movement; he had scars on his legs from the irons of Prussian prisons and a long history of selfless and valiant efforts on behalf of the German workingman. He came to speak to Marx on such things as justice and brotherhood and solidarity; instead he found himself exposed to a merciless cross-examination on the “scientific principles” of socialism. Poor Weitling was confused, his answers were unsatisfactory. Marx, who had been sitting as the chief examiner, began to stride angrily about the room. “Ignorance has never helped anybody yet,” he shouted. The audience was over. Willich was another to be excommunicated. An ex-Prussian captain, he had fought in the German revolution and later was to become an outstanding general on the Union side of the American Civil War. But he clung to the “un-Marxist” idea that “pure will” could be the motive power of revolution instead of “actual conditions”; for this notion—which Lenin was one day to prove was not so far-fetched after all—he, too, was dropped from the movement. And the list could be extended endlessly. Perhaps no single incident was more provocative, more prophetic of a movement that was one day to degenerate into an internal witch-hunt for “deviationists” and “counterrevolutionaries” than the feud between Marx and Pierre Proudhon. Proudhon was the son of a French barrelmarker, a self-educated brilliant Socialist who had rocked the French intelligentsia with a book entitled What Is Property? Proudhon had answered, Property is Theft, and he had called for an end to huge private riches, although not to all private property. Marx and he had met and talked and corresponded, and then Marx asked him to join forces with himself and Engels. Proudhon’s answer is so profoundly moving and so prescient that it is worth quoting at some length: Let us together seek, if you wish, the laws of society, the manner in which these laws are reached, the process by which we shall succeed in discovering them; but, for God’s sake, after having demolished all the a priori dogmatisms, do not let us in our turn dream of indoctrinating people. . . . I applaud with all my heart your thought of inviting all shades of opinion; let us carry on a good and loyal polemic, let us give the world the example of an informed and farsighted tolerance, but let us not—simply because we are at the head of a movement—make ourselves into the leaders of a new intolerance, let us not pose as the apostles of a new religion, even if it be the religion of logic, the religion of reason. Let us gather together and encourage all dissent, let us outlaw all exclusiveness, all mysticism, let us never regard a question as exhausted, and even when we have used one last argument, let us if necessary begin again—with eloquence and irony. On these conditions, I will gladly enter into your association. Otherwise, no! Marx’s answer was this: Proudhon had written a book called The Philosophy of Poverty; Marx now annihilated it with a rejoinder entitled The Poverty of Philosophy. That’s enough transcribing for this evening, leaving off on page 154. To be resumed another day. [Sorry for the typos — cleaned them up 2/10/2014 and please let me know if anyone notices any I might have missed.]

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“This one might be a little stinky,” says Tenaya Norris, a scientist at The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito. Research assistant Barbie Halaska carries a limp, sodden carcass into the room and drapes it across a gleaming steel table. Even before the researchers slice into the tiny, brown California sea lion pup and remove its internal organs, the animal is mostly skin and bones. The young male was less than a year old when he arrived. He hung on for ten days, but was already suffering the effects of severe malnourishment when he arrived — he was about one-quarter the size of a healthy pup—and the staff were unable to save him. Norris stretches out the subject’s flippers. Picking up a scalpel, she gets ready to open the animal from chin to tail. The pup occupies just one narrow corner of a table large enough for an animal many times this size. And the center has seen its fair share of those. The facility takes in several hundred distressed animals each year, from sea lions to elephant seals to the occasional dolphin or sea turtle. Scientists and volunteers do their best to rehabilitate the sick animals and return them to the ocean. But about half will end up on the metal table instead. Each death is a loss — and an opportunity. Every animal that dies here is studied exhaustively. Researchers carve the bodies into samples for dozens of ongoing studies. They’re especially interested in the carcasses of California sea lions, which are helping them study a mysterious and aggressive cancer that’s plaguing the species. The disease starts in the reproductive organs of adult males and females. By the time they die, tumors have sometimes infiltrated their backbones and turned vertebrae to “mush,” Norris says. She describes examining one dead animal whose spine she could simply slice through. More than a quarter of the adult California sea lions that die at the Marine Mammal Center suffer from cancer, says director of veterinary science Shawn Johnson. That’s one of the highest cancer rates seen in any wild animal, which is why the center’s scientists have made the disease a research priority. This emphasis has led to some promising discoveries, including the identification of a virus that is likely transmitted sexually and that seems to trigger the cancer. If researchers can piece together the full story of the California sea lions’ disease, it may help explain how some cancers develop in other animals—including humans. After all, cancer-causing viruses strike people too. At the same time, our understanding of disease susceptibility in humans — in particular, how environmental stressors can turn relatively minor infections into life-threatening disease — is helping scientists understand the role the environment might play in sea lion cancer. In other words, we may not be able to fully understand the set of threats to either species’ health without understanding the other. When a sick or injured marine mammal washes up anywhere along 600 miles of the Pacific coastline, volunteers send word to The Marine Mammal Center. If the center decides a rescue is necessary and feasible, it sends a truck. The vehicles carry vanity plates like PINNIPD (for pinniped, a shorthand name for a seal, sea lion, or walrus) or BG ELIE (for elephant seal, a species that’s also represented by a life-sized sculpture at the center). Volunteers use nets and wooden boards to maneuver each sickly or injured creature into an animal crate and onto the truck for its journey to the Marin Headlands — a hilly peninsula separated from San Francisco by the Golden Gate Bridge. The center sits high above the ocean, perched on a dry brown hillside dotted with scrubby manzanita. Its remote location is a reminder of the site’s former life as a missile silo during the Cold War. On a beach visible from the center, rolling Pacific waves crest and break against tall humps of rock. In normal years, 600 to 800 different animals come through the center’s doors. But these aren’t normal years. There’s been a surge of sick animals, especially California sea lions (Zalophus californianus), which live up and down the west coast of North America. The center took in 1,800 animals last year, 1,300 of which were California sea lions. Both numbers were records in the center’s four decades of operation. A variety of environmental conditions has led to the surge. A patch of freakishly warm water nicknamed “the blob” sat in the northeastern Pacific from 2013 to 2015. The year 2015 also brought a massive bloom of the algae Pseudonitzschia. These microscopic plants produce domoic acid, a toxin that travels up the food chain and concentrates in top predators like sea lions, in some cases causing seizures and brain damage. “Off the California coast, the ecosystem is really under stress,” says Johnson. That stress is hitting California sea lions particularly hard. Amid these challenging environmental conditions, “The females are having a really, really hard time even finding enough food to produce milk for their pups,” he says. With their mothers struggling to feed them, pups may strike out on their own too soon. They’re landing on shore starving and emaciated — like the one on Norris’s autopsy table. Over the past three years, Johnson says, 80 to 90 percent of all California sea lion pups have died. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has dubbed it an “unusual mortality event.” Then there’s the cancer. Scientists first noticed it in California in the 1970s, and they now know it affects Z. californianus along the entire western U.S. coastline. Between the 1980s and mid-90s, researchers at the Marine Mammal Center saw cancer in 18 percent of adult California sea lions they examined after death. From 1998 through 2012, that number increased to 26 percent. This may mean the rate of cancer is increasing in the wild, or simply that researchers are paying better attention. Now that they know what to look for, they can spot early-stage cancer in animals without obvious tumors. The toxic algal bloom is also sending young adult animals to the center that might not otherwise have required rehabilitation. Right now, the California sea lion population is large enough that it can absorb the losses from cancer, Johnson says. But if starving pups and other challenges cause the population to plunge, cancer’s relative influence could increase dramatically. And whether or not the disease is becoming more common or simply holding steady, Johnson says he knows one thing for certain: “It’s not declining.” The disease rates researchers are seeing among sea lions are far from normal, and they want to know why. “Wild populations shouldn’t have cancers like this,” Johnson says. In the center’s outdoor pens, patients swim in pools or loll like dogs on sunny patches of concrete. Elephant seal pups with identifying yellow “hat” tags stuck on the tops of their heads watch the goings-on with bulging, Disney-esque eyes. Workers and visitors don rubber boots and step into disinfecting footbaths to avoid cross-contamination among species. Some animals in the pens are starving sea lion pups that volunteers are fattening up with a diet of thick, pink “fish milkshakes.” Others have infections, wounds from boat strikes, or brain damage from domoic acid poisoning. If the animals recover, the staff happily sends them splashing back into the surf. While about half of all patients here make it, sea lions don’t fare as well. Last year, only about 35 percent survived to be released. The first cancerous California sea lion — a male that staff members nicknamed “Bobby” — showed up among the center’s patients in 1978. During the 1980s and early 1990s, dozens more died during rehabilitation, and researchers found the same types of tumors in the reproductive tracts of all of them. Tumors first form in the cervix or penis, then spread, often metastasizing to the lymph nodes and spine. Sick animals typically have swollen genitals and hind flippers. If the cancer has infiltrated the spine, causing partial paralysis, they may have to drag their hind flippers behind them. Inside a stricken animal, “there’s just masses of yellow, cancerous tissue,” says Frances Gulland, senior scientist at the Marine Mammal Center. “Sea lions themselves are affectionate animals. They’re nice to each other. They’re very endearing,” Gulland says. “When you see a sea lion coming in with cancer and they’re in pain… it’s not only distressing but it also compels you to understand why it’s happening.” Over the past two decades, the center has intensified its work on cancer research. Scientists have largely focused on causes of the disease and why and how it spreads, Gulland says. When she started working at the center in the mid-1990s, scientists were beginning to suspect that the culprit might be a virus. It wasn’t a crazy idea. Creatures throughout the animal kingdom suffer from cancers that begin as viral infections. In humans, viruses have been linked to as many as 15 to 20 percent of cancers, including cervical cancer, Hodgkin’s disease, lymphomas, and liver cancer. Gulland and others scoured the DNA of cancerous tissues taken from dead sea lions and discovered a previously unknown herpesvirus. The virus appears in the tumors and reproductive tracts of all cancerous sea lions, but is scarce in other parts of the body, and is rarely found in healthy sea lions. While the scientists haven’t proven definitively that the virus causes cancer, evidence is piling up. Although that evidence hasn’t yet gotten them closer to curing the cancer-stricken animals, understanding the disease could lead to earlier diagnoses and the development of measures to help prevent its spread. Right now, California sea lions that arrive at the center with suspicious symptoms receive an ultrasound and other tests for cancer. If an animal tests positive, it is euthanized, Gulland says regretfully; there’s nothing else to be done. “We know [the disease] progresses, it’s painful, and it’s not curable.” But in death, Gulland says, the animals provide a goldmine of information. “Because we have them in hand, we can obtain a lot of very fresh samples.” Causes of Death Norris, it turns out, is right about the smell. The sea lion pup she’s now dissecting on the metal table has been frozen and thawed, making its odor reminiscent of roadkill. She says fresh carcasses have more of a musty, sometimes fishy aroma. An open door lets in air, along with barks and chirps that drift in from the outdoor pens. Norris and Halaska begin to remove and sort through the sea lion’s organs. They pull out fistfuls of intestines in long, pink loops. Halaska dons goggles and turns on a buzzing electric saw to cut through the skull and get at the animal’s brain. Researchers at the Marine Mammal Center must determine a cause of death for every animal that reaches this metal table. And each one—fur seal, harbor seal, pregnant female, unborn fetus—surrenders its own set of scientific samples. It may be swabbed for flu viruses; its urine or milk or bile or body lice may be carefully saved. These samples will go to labs all over the country, and some will travel the world. Researchers at the center are participating in 40 different collaborative research projects at the moment, Johnson says. And he estimates that a third of those have to do with the cancer that’s afflicting the California sea lion. The tiny sea lion whose blood is now pooling at the edge of the rimmed table was not a cancer victim, and his autopsy is comparatively short. Cancerous sea lions, in contrast, as well as a select few adult “controls” that died of other causes, undergo a much more involved “cancer protocol.” For these, researchers must take extensive samples. Skin. Blood. Brain. Tumor. Norris holds a kidney sample in her gloved palm that looks like a slice of beet—she will send tissue slices like this one to a pathologist, who will scrutinize them under a microscope for cancerous cells. Some of the “control” samples have, when observed more closely, revealed very early signs of cancer. So far, scientists have learned a few things for certain about the disease. They know animals with cancer carry the herpesvirus. The cancerous animals all have a specific genotype that may help the disease spread. They are also more inbred than other sea lions. Finally, animals with cancer have more pollutants—specifically PCBs and DDT—stored in their blubber than individuals that die of other causes. Research on other marine mammals has linked these ocean contaminants to suppressed immunity. How these pieces of knowledge all fit together, however, isn’t yet clear. The scientists’ best guess, Gulland says, is that exposure to pollutants makes a sea lion more susceptible to a herpesvirus infection. When the virus takes hold, it triggers cancer—somehow. To learn more, researchers are studying the DNA of cancerous tissues in the lab, focusing on changes at the level of the chromosome. They’re measuring the concentrations of contaminants like DDT and PCBs in sea lions’ blubber to find out whether these might make the animals more susceptible to a virus. Alissa Deming, a veterinarian and University of Florida PhD student, is looking at the genetics of the sea lion herpesvirus. She wants to prove that the virus indeed causes sea lion cells to turn cancerous. The next question will be how. “Herpesviruses are one of the oldest classes of viruses,” says University of Florida geneticist Rolf Renne, who studies the human herpesvirus that causes Kaposi’s sarcoma. “They’re pretty much in all mammals, and even in sea urchins.” Humans alone can be infected by eight different herpesviruses. These viruses have spent a long time evolving alongside their animal hosts, and they’re usually well-adapted to do little harm, because a dead host is not much good to a virus. Infections can be quite common, and typically lead to cancer or other serious illness only when something suppresses the host’s immune response. “If your immune system craps out on you, then a herpesvirus can take control,” Deming says. The human Epstein-Barr virus, for example, is a herpesvirus that infects about 90 percent of adults. It commonly causes mononucleosis, but if its host has an impaired immune system, the virus can lead to lymphomas or other cancers. Another human herpesvirus causes Kaposi’s sarcoma, a disease best known in the U.S. for affecting immune-suppressed AIDS patients. According to Renne, in sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria and other infections compromise people’s immune systems, Kaposi’s sarcoma is much more common—the most common cancer among men, in fact. Ocean contaminants like PCBs and DDT might compromise the immune systems of California sea lions in similar way. The finding that cancer-stricken sea lions have more pollutants in their blubber has caught researchers’ attention. “That’s really important for the human health perspective as well,” Gulland says. “These are contaminants the sea lions are acquiring from their prey. And the fish they eat are the same fish that we eat.” Their environment is our environment, in other words. And what scientists can learn about cancer in each species might help the other. The Messy World Flies circle as Norris and Halaska scoop up and discard what’s left of the young sea lion. Its stripped-down carcass goes into a barrel, which will be picked up and taken to a rendering plant. The carefully collected slices and scraps of its body—anything the researchers aren’t immediately shipping on ice to other scientists—go into vials and plastic baggies, and then into freezers for storage. Most of those freezers are in the basement, where Cold War missiles were once stored. The freezers stand at attention in a long white row, drawers stuffed with thousands of samples for future research. Frost crackles as Halaska opens the door to one of them. She points out a baggie holding a whale eyeball as big as an apple. Scientists who study cancer particularly value samples like these, which come from animals that lived not in the sterile confines of a lab but in the complicated, messy, germy natural world. These marine mammals’ diseases almost certainly arose from a collision of many factors: genes, environment, other animals and parasites with which they crossed paths. Complex as their stories are, in many ways these specimens are far better than specially bred, genetically identical lab rats for helping scientists understand how cancer develops in humans and other animals living in the real world. “How can we look at diseases in our marine mammals and translate what we are learning from that to human medicine, and vice versa?” Johnson asks. To him, this cross-species exploration is the most exciting research underway at the center. The idea that human and veterinary medicine can inform each other is part of a philosophy known as “One Health,” which says that we need to consider the health of people, animals, and the environment simultaneously if want to truly understand each of them. Human diseases don’t exist in isolation and, Deming says, “people are animals too.” This philosophy isn’t yet widespread in the medical world, where doctors tend to be highly specialized. But the National Institutes of Health is starting to embrace the idea. It held a workshop in 2015 on incorporating One Health into its own research; its program for “comparative biomedical scientists” trains new researchers in both human and animal health at once. Using such an approach, the research on sea lion cancer can help answer big-picture questions about cancer in other species—humans included—and the viruses that may cause it. One place it’s already revealing connections to human cancer-causing viruses is in Renne’s work on Kaposi’s sarcoma. Studying the herpesvirus that causes Kaposi’s sarcoma in the lab is difficult. “There’s not an animal model that’s very close,” Renne says. That’s why his interest was piqued when Deming approached him about working together on her PhD research: The sea lions and their resident herpesvirus are turning out to be a great model for humans and our own viruses. Deming’s investigation into the genome of the sea lion herpesvirus has already shown it to have striking similarities to both the Epstein-Barr and Kaposi’s sarcoma viruses. The three belong to the same subfamily, and the sea lion virus has genes that seem equivalent to two cancer-triggering genes in the human herpesviruses. These genes help push a host cell into an immortal, constantly dividing state—a strong hint that the sea lion virus not only causes cancer in its hosts, but does so using similar mechanisms to human viruses. Now, Renne and Deming are looking into whether the virus targets sea lion genes using microRNAs, tiny bits of genetic material that regulate gene activity. Renne has found this to be the case with the Kaposi’s sarcoma virus. If this is also true of the sea lion virus, Renne says, then the researchers will have solid evidence that there are general mechanisms by which this type of herpesvirus causes cancer across very different mammalian species. Before she began her PhD research, Deming worked as a clinical veterinarian at SeaWorld in San Diego. She used to get discouraged when she saw cancerous sea lions and could do nothing but euthanize them. But now, her work at the Marine Mammal Center is turning the deaths of these animals into research opportunities. “[It] gives us something productive to do,” she says. In a way, the center itself is also turning death into opportunity. Today the deadly missiles are gone, and the walls that once protected them now hold countless samples of animals that lost their lives on this coast. Armed with those bits of blood and bone, scientists hope to protect the health of this ecosystem and the animals—all the animals—that share it.

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You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Plant Diseases’ category. Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) is a plant disease-causing virus that has a worldwide distribution and a very broad host range. It was named so for one of the first plants in which it was found, the cucumber. CMV is found predominantly in temperate areas around the world. CMV cannot live in extremely dry conditions. The optimal temperature at which CMV expresses itself and shows symptoms appears to be between 79 and 89 deg. F. The CMV is very minute and is made up of ribonucleic acid core which is surrounded by a protein coat. They have no mode of self-dispersal; hence rely on various vectors to transmit them from infected to healthy plants. Once the virus infects a plant cell, the protein coat dissolves and the nucleic acid portion takes over the cell’s nucleic acid and protein synthesis systems and directs them to produce more viruses, thus disrupting and affecting normal activity in the cell. CMV cannot survive for long outside a cell or if the cell dies and can multiply only inside a living plant cell. CMV may be spread from infected plants to healthy plants in the following ways: - Several aphid species serve as vectors for CMV - Mechanically by humans and tools through cultivating and even touching healthy plants after touching infected plants - Through grafting - Can also be transmitted by seed Vegetables and fruits such as cucumbers and other cucurbits, squash, melons, bananas, artichokes, peppers, beans, peas, potato, tomatoes, carrots, celery, lettuce, spinach, beets, various weeds and many ornamental and bedding plants such as lily, delphinium, primula and daphne. Damage and Symptoms The following symptoms are may be associated with CMV: - Mosaic yellowish patches or green and yellow mottling on leaves - Stunted growth due to shortening of the internodes (length between stem and leaves) - Downward curling of leaves that are distorted and small in size - Distinct yellowing of the veins only - Ring-spots or line patterns on leaves or fruits - Reduced yields and distorted fruit and flowers - White streaks on flowers known as “breaks” CMV shows symptoms on leaves known as the “Shoestring” effect for most host species. This phenomenon causes young leaves to appear narrow and the entire plant to be stunted. Specifically CMV can cause cucumbers to turn pale and bumpy. The leaves turn mosaic and their rugosity is changed, making leaves wrinkled and misshapen. Plant growth is stunted, few flowers are produced, and fruits are oddly shaped and appear gray. Cucumbers like this are often referred to as “white pickles”. Infected cucumbers are often bitter. In celery, CMV can cause streaking and spotting. In lettuce, infected plants show symptoms of chlorosis, stunting and often do not properly form heads. Pepper plants often have severe foliar damage, noticed as mosaic and necrotic rings. The peppers are often misshapen and contain chlorotic rings and spots. Tomato plants when infected by CMV are usually stunted and have poorly shaped leaves, or “fernleaf”. The CMV overwinters in perennial weeds, flowers and often crop plants. In spring when plants bloom and grow the virus emerges in the top leaves where it may be transmitted to healthy plants by aphid vectors (although tomatoes are not the preferred host of aphids) or by mechanical means. CMV cannot withstand very dry conditions nor can it persist in the soil. It also is more difficult than tobacco mosaic to transmit mechanically. Thus, cucumber mosaic tends to progress more slowly than tobacco mosaic in a field or garden. Organic Means of Control and Prevention of Cucumber Mosaic Virus There aren’t any known substances that cure a plant of CMV, nor any that can protect it from getting infected. Hence control measures for plant viruses include prevention and eradication. – When purchasing seeds and plants, ensure that they are virus-free. – Strictly maintain and prevent aphids from infesting your plants. Here’s an Aphid control guide. – Remove all weeds as they are likely sources of both CMV and aphids. Groundsel and chickweed are particularly likely to harbor CMV. – Immediately set aside suspect plants and obtain a diagnosis. CMV infected plants must be destroyed. – Apart from aphids, CMV can be transmitted through gardening tools and by contact with infected plants. Maintaining clean and sanitized tools, machines and hands can go a long way in preventing the transmission of CMV. – Use resistant varieties whenever possible. Zucchini- ‘Supremo’, ‘Defender’. Bush marrow- ‘Badger Cross’, ‘Zebra Cross F’, ‘Tiger Cross’. Cucumbers- ‘Bush Champion’, ‘Crispy Salad’, ‘Jazzer F’, ‘Paskia Fi’, ‘Petita’, ‘Country Fair’. Aubergine- ‘Bonica’. These varieties have shown some resistance to CMV. – Trap crop method: In this method farmers plant resistant varieties around the perimeter of their fields and place susceptible plants in the middle. The intention of this that aphids will first land on the resistant varieties and by the time they have eaten their way to the susceptible varieties they will no longer be carrying the virus. – Avoid your tomato plants from getting infected by CMV by not planting tomatoes next to cucurbits, spinach, or other vegetables and flowers susceptible to these diseases. Botrytis is a plant pathogenic fungus that is found virtually everywhere plants are grown and prefers damp, cool to mild weather. It grows quickly, can grow utilizing many different sources of nutrients, prevails easily in greenhouses, and attacks numerous plant types. The disease caused by Botrytis fungus is commonly called Botrytis blight or gray mold. There are several species of the fungus Botrytis which can cause blights; the most common is Botrytis cinerea. Botrytis can infect many ornamental plants including: anemone, begonia, calendula, chrysanthemum, cyclamen, dahlia, dogwood, fuchsia, geranium, hawthorn, heather, hydrangea, marigold, pansy, periwinkle, peony, petunia, rose, snapdragon, sunflower, sweet pea, tulip, violet, zinnia. Among vegetables and fruits Botrytis can infect asparagus, bean, beet, carrot, celery, chicory, crucifers, cucurbits, eggplant, endive, grape, lettuce, onion, pepper, potato, raspberry, rhubarb, rutabaga, shallot, strawberry, tomato, turnip, and others. Initial contamination is usually through fungal spores carried about in the wind which infects host plant through a point of damage such as insect damage, decaying plant tissue or pruning wounds. Botrytis overwinters on plants, in or on the soil, and as sclerotia (compact mass of hardened fungus containing food reserves with the capability to remain dormant until favorable growth conditions return). Spores develop when conditions are optimal, and are moved around by wind or splashing water onto blossoms or young leaves, where they germinate and enter the plant. Spores require cool temperatures (45-60 deg. F) and high humidity (93% and above) to germinate. Green, healthy tissue is rarely penetrated by germinating spores, but they can enter through wounds on growing plants. Cuttings are particularly prone to infection. The soil surface and the densest areas of plant canopy are likely places for Botrytis to be found. It usually develops on wilted flowers first, and then quickly spreads to other parts of the plant. Harvested fruits and vegetables in storage are also potential targets of the disease. Symptoms and Damage On flowering plants, the first symptoms you may see will be water-soaked spots on the leaves, flowers, or stems. These spots will quickly develop fuzzy gray or whitish growth. Infections often start as flower blights because older petals are more susceptible. Damage will soon spread to other flowers and parts of the stem, which then collapse as the flowers dry and turn brown. On fruiting plants, a gray, tan, or whitish fluffy mold grows on berries and other fruit, which when disturbed, will emit of a puff of gray spores that scatter. Infected fruit will have water-soaked spots, which later appear light brown and crack as the fungus grows. On berries the entire fruit becomes water-soaked and rots. Organic Control and Prevention of Botrytis Blight 1. Practice good sanitation: Strict sanitation is of utmost importance and cannot be overemphasized. Remove dead or dying tissue from the plants and from the soil surface as the fungus readily attacks them and produces tremendous quantities of airborne spores. All old blossoms and dead leaves should be removed, and all fallen leaves and plant debris in the garden and greenhouse should be carefully collected and burned or hauled away with the trash. Ideally, all diseased plants and plant parts should be removed and destroyed. Botrytis spores are always present, but they don’t germinate until exposed to cool and moist conditions, especially high humidity. Try and prevent these conditions from being prevalent for long. 2. Avoid overhead watering: Water on foliage and flowers from overhead watering, especially on cool, cloudy days, promotes the disease. Try keeping the plant parts above the surface dry. Soil surface irrigation and watering in the morning is recommended. 3. Properly space plants for maximum air circulation: The fungus thrives in areas that are cool and moist and in densely packed areas. Prune or stake the interior of dense plants to increase air movement. In greenhouses, ensure maximum air circulation by either increasing heat in the greenhouse or inculcating forced circulation and ventilation. Even lowering the humidity slightly can have a significant effect on Botrytis. 4. Avoid over-fertilization: Do not over-feed your plants, especially with nitrogen as tender growth is susceptible to fungus. 5. Avoid unnecessarily wounding plants: Wounds are possible entry sites for pathogens of all types including Botrytis, so avoid injuring plants in any way. Do not leave large stubs of tissue on stock plants when taking cuttings. 6. Store harvest immediately in proper conditions: Only blemish-free, flowers, fruits, vegetables and plant material should be stored in clean, cool and dry environment without moisture on the walls, ceilings or floor. The temperature should be as close to freezing as possible. 7. Preventative biological fungicide: Developed from naturally occurring bacteria, Streptomyces griseoviridis, Mycostop biological fungicide thrives in the root zone of plants. When applied as a drench or spray the dried spores and mycelium of the Streptomyces culture in Mycostop germinate and begin to grow on and around the plant roots. In doing so, they create a biological defense against root infecting pathogenic fungi which cause disease such as wilt and root rot. This is a preventative treatment, and must be used at the time of seeding or transplanting. Mycostop has been shown to promote the growth and yield of plants even in healthy crops. 8. Plant resistant cultivars: Whenever possible grow plant varieties that are known to be less susceptible to Botrytis. 9. Organic fungicides: Spray susceptible plants with an organic fungicide like Neem oil or Soap-Shield to keep fungal diseases and other pests at bay. Damping off or damping-off is a horticultural disease or condition, caused by a number of different pathogens that kill or weaken seeds or seedlings before or after they germinate. It is most prevalent in wet and cool conditions. Damping off is caused by several soil-borne fungi including Pythium, Phytophthora, Rhizoctonia and Fusarium, which infect seedlings and cause them to “damp off” or collapse and decay. Damping off can affect any seedling, particularly under high humidity levels, in cold wet soil, poor air circulation, poor soil drainage, use of green compost, and planting too deeply. Damping off is a huge problem when sowing seeds indoor early in the season or under glass, but can affect seedlings sown outdoors when specified conditions are prevalent. Damage and Symptoms Infected seeds don’t germinate; instead they turn mushy and brown. Seeds may be infected as soon as moisture penetrates the seed coat or a bit later as the radicle begins to extend, all of which rot immediately under the soil surface. This pre-emergence damping off results in a poor, uneven stand of seedlings, often confused with low seed viability. When seedlings are attacked after they emerge, stem tissue near the soil line decays, weakens and gets a dark, water-soaked area, usually causing the plants to topple over and die. When only roots decay, the plant may continue standing but will remain stunted, wilted and will eventually die. Older plants that are infected have stem lesions that cause stunted growth, and can die. Seeds and seedlings of most plants. Organic Control and Prevention of Damping off – Cultural control of damping off diseases is based on providing favorable conditions for germination of the seeds and growth of plants while minimizing the conditions that favor fungi. This means growing seeds in well-drained soil, with adequate air circulation and dry conditions. – Use sterile well drained soil mediums. Avoid wet or compacted soil. Raise seedlings in treated commercial growing compost. If home-produced compost is being used, steam-sterilize the compost to destroy pathogens. Soil mix has to be held at 140 deg. F for at least 30 minutes to ensure sterilization. – Purchase disease free plants and seeds from a trusted supplier. Seed borne diseases can be avoided by soaking seeds for 15 minutes in bleach soak (1 teaspoon per quart of water) prior to sowing. – In warm regions, practicing soil solarization can reduce pathogens in outdoor soil. To solarize, place clear plastic tarps over soil for extended periods. – Use plant containers that have drainage holes, water from the bottom only and strictly avoid over-watering. Do not allow pots to stand in water as the excess water will starve the roots of oxygen. – Ideally, use new pots and trays to raise seedlings. If re-using old ones, make sure to disinfect them thoroughly. Never reuse pots and trays in which damping off has been a previous issue. – As a rule of thumb, do not cover seeds with soil mix more than 4 times the thickness of the seed. Do not allow for the crowns of plants to be below the soil line. – Use only well-decomposed compost. Do not use the green compost as its overly moist environment will encourage damping off fungi. Use well aerated composting soil to reduce chances of infection. Composted hardwood bark has been reported to reduce damping off. – Cover seedlings with a thin layer of perlite, vermiculite, sand, or peat moss to keep the soil surface dry and keep fungal growth to a minimum. – Avoid overcrowding and overfeeding of seedlings. Maintaining constant levels of growth through proper lighting and adequate control of growth environment is important and helps prevent damping off. – Avoid working with plants (cuttings or transplants) when the soil is wet. – Disinfect tools, containers and hands after working in areas that are likely to harbor damping off fungi. – Drench starting soil mix with an anti-fungal agent. Chamomile tea, clove tea and garlic infused water have anti-fungal activity. – Use water that you know is free from pathogens. Your mains water will mostly be safe for use on seedlings grown in pots and trays. If using rainwater, ensure that the water butt is covered to prevent the entry of leaves and other organic debris that could harbor pathogens. – Remove and discard diseased plants. – Avoid planting the same crops in the same place year after year. – Unfortunately infected seedlings usually die, but sometimes you can save the rest by improving growing conditions by making them as warm and dry as possible. – Spray plants with seaweed extract as this will help strengthen them. – Spray plants with Neem oil as it has anti-fungicidal properties as well as providing systemic benefits to the plant. Keep your zucchini, crookneck and pattypans safe! –The fruit develops a disease that is similar to tomato blossom end rot which happens when the water given to the plants is uneven which creates a calcium deficiency. This can be prevented by mulching to keep the soil moisture even, and by watering regularly to give the plants adequate water. –The second reason is that the flowers themselves develop a fungus and rot back into the fruit. This happens especially in areas or gardens that have high humidity, or where gardens are watered from above and plants are kept wet for long periods of time. In either case mentioned above, the answer to the problem is simple: -Ensure even watering, adequate and be sure to not indulge in over-fertilization, maintain appropriate pH between 6-6.5 for better calcium uptake and add a calcium rich spray or supplement to the soil. -Remove the flowers once the young fruit has begun to swell and grow. After you remove the flower, if you see any decay starting, using your fingernail gently scrape the end of the fruit to remove any decaying material. A small scar will form where you did this, but the rot will stop and your squash will develop into mature fruit with no further problems. Blossom-end rot is a common physiological problem associated with growing conditions that can affect susceptible plants anywhere. It affects fruit. Stems and leaves show no symptoms. Blossom-end rot is a non-infectious disease or disorder of fruits caused by low levels of calcium in the fruit. For example, a tomato’s fruit needs calcium to grow. Calcium acts like glue, binding cells together. Tomatoes absorb calcium through water but calcium isn’t fast moving. If a tomato grows rapidly, or if some other conditions slow water absorption, then calcium doesn’t circulate evenly throughout the fruit. The tomato’s tissues breakdown and leave the telltale damage of blossom-end rot on its bottom end. Several factors can limit a plant’s ability to absorb enough calcium for proper development. These include: - fluctuations in soil moisture (too wet or too dry) - excess nitrogen in the soil (lowers calcium uptake) - root damage - cold temperatures/cold soil - soil pH that’s markedly acidic or alkaline - excessive heat - soil high in salts (lowers the availability of calcium) Plants Commonly Affected Tomato, pepper, cucumber, squash, eggplant, watermelon and other fruiting vegetables. Damage and Symptoms Blossom-end rot occurs on both green and ripe fruits and is characterized by a water-soaked, sunken, or brown spot on the blossom end of the fruit when the fruits are approximately half their full size. The spot then enlarges and turns into a leathery brown or black patch. If the problem is severe, the fruit will have a flattened or somewhat concave bottom end. Blossom-end rot will not spread from plant to plant or from fruit to fruit. The plant will generally show no signs of damage, yet the fruit will show tell-tale signs of blossom-end rot. Organic Control and Prevention of Blossom-End Rot - Protect young seedlings from extreme temperatures and conditions by gradually hardening them off. - Grow plants in soil with good drainage. - Plant outside at the right time when soil is warm enough. Avoid setting plants out too early in the season, which can expose them to cold soil and temperatures. - Soil worked with organic matter and compost will allow the plant’s root system to grow strong and deep. - Avoid excessive nitrogen fertilization. Ensure adequate phosphorous levels. - Test your soil pH; tomatoes grow best at a soil pH of about 6.5. If needed, add quick-release lime to provide plenty of absorbable calcium. - Supply water evenly throughout the season to facilitate regular uptake of calcium. Tomatoes need 1-3 inches of water a week. They are known to prefer deep watering a couple of times a week rather than everyday superficial watering. - Avoid close, deep cultivation after fruit set, especially in dry weather. Scraping the soil lightly with a hoe is usually sufficient to control weeds in home gardens. - Mulch established plants to conserve moisture and provide a more uniform water supply. Suitable materials are straw free of weed seeds, corncobs, grass clippings, peat moss and newspaper. - Cultivate carefully around plants to avoid damaging root systems. - Choose resistant vegetable varieties whenever possible. Blossom-end rot cannot be reversed on fruits once it’s set in, but steps can be taken to slow and halt it. - At the first sign of blossom-end rot, pay attention to watering and mulching. Even out water supply to the plant so that it is never super dry and then super wet, instead make sure it has a steady, even supply of water. - Preserve affected plants by applying calcium immediately. Spray plants with natural calcium solutions such as Enz-Rot and Rot-Stop, which are specifically meant to treat blossom-end rot by correcting calcium deficiency. Follow label directions for application. Or mix 1 tablespoon calcium chloride in 1 gallon of water. Apply in the morning when temperatures are cool. - Reduce stress on the plant by picking affected fruit and thus allowing it to direct its energy to other tomatoes. - Cut out rotted spots on harvested fruit as blossom-end rot does not make the rest of the tomato inedible. However, if tomatoes have been infected by fungi or mold, discard them. - Spray with seaweed extract help supply some calcium to affected plants. Most plants usually grow out of the problem later in the season when growing conditions have been corrected. Determinate varieties are more prone to blossom-end rot because they set fruit in a short period of time, whereas indeterminate and semi-determinate varieties set fruit throughout the season, allowing for easier calcium regulation for plants.

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Headphones are a pair of small loudspeakers, or less commonly a single speaker, with a way of holding them close to a user's ears and a means of connecting them to a signal source such as an audio amplifier, radio or CD player. They are also known as earphones, earbuds, stereophones, headsets or, colloquially cans. In the context of telecommunication, the term headset is used to describe a combination of headphone and microphone used for two-way communication, for example with a telephone. The telephone earpiece such as the one pictured at the right was common around the turn of the 20th century. Headphones developed from the earpiece. Sensitive headphones were the only way to listen to audio signals before amplifiers were developed. Very sensitive headphones such as those manufactured by Brandes around 1919 were commonly used for early radio work. These early headphones used moving iron drivers, either single ended or balanced armature. The requirement for high sensitivity meant no damping was used, thus the sound quality was crude. They also had very poor comfort compared to modern types, usually having no padding and too often having excessive clamping force to the head. Their impedance varied; headphones used in telegraph and telephone work had an impedance of 75 ohms. Those used with early wireless radio had to be more sensitive and were made with more turns of finer wire; impedance of 1,000 to 2,000 ohms was common, which suited both crystal sets and triode receivers. In early powered radios, the headphone was part of the vacuum tube's plate circuit and had dangerous voltages on it. It was normally connected directly to the positive high voltage battery terminal, and the other battery terminal was securely earthed. The use of bare electrical connections meant that users could be shocked if they touched the bare headphone connections while adjusting an uncomfortable headset. Headphones can be used both with fixed equipment such as CD or DVD players, home theater, personal computers and with portable devices (e.g. digital audio player/mp3 player, mobile phone, etc.). Cordless headphones do not need to be connected via a wire, receiving a radio or infrared signal encoded using a radio or infrared transmission link, like FM, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. These are actually made of powered receiver systems of which the headphone is only a component, these types of cordless headphones are being used more frequently with events such as a silent disco or Silent Gig. In the professional audio sector headphones are used in live situations by disc jockeys with a DJ mixer and sound engineers for monitoring signal sources. In radio studios, DJs use a pair of headphones when talking to the microphone while the speakers are turned off, to eliminate acoustic feedback and monitor their own voice. In studio recordings, musicians and singers use headphones to play along to a backing track. In the military, audio signals of many varieties are monitored using headphones. Wired headphones are attached to an audio source. The most common connectors are 1/4" and 3.5 mm stereophonic jack plugs and sockets. The older 1/4" standard is used on professional equipment, and is often used on fixed equipment. Sony introduced the smaller, cheaper, and now widely-used, 3.5 mm "mini" stereo connector in 1979, adapting the older monophonic 3.5 mm connector for use with its Walkman portable stereo tape player. Adapters are available for converting between 1/4" and 3.5 mm devices. There are many different types of headphone designs, with the listening situation and the needs of the listener determining what type of headphone will be used. Generally, headphone formfactors can be divided into four separate categories: circumaural, supra-aural, earbud, and in-ear. Earcup or on-ear headphones rest on the exterior of the ear and were the earliest headphone form designed. The housing, or earcup, of an earcup headphone will be either open or closed. Open headphones, sometimes marketed as “open air” headphones, have an open grille on the back of the earcup, exposing the driver to the outside and allowing sound waves to propagate away from the ear freely. This backing type does not isolate the listener from outside sounds; in addition, sound through open headphones can be heard by others in the vicinity of the user. They usually have less distortion due to the lack of earcup resonance. Closed headphones have a sealed backing, which attenuates sound waves propagating away from the ear. As a result, listeners away from the headphones cannot hear the produced sound easily. In addition, sound from outside is attenuated by the sealed backing, providing a level of isolation to the listener. A sealed chamber is often claimed to have the negative effect of distorting sound in certain frequencies due to resonances within the earcup housing, however, bass frequencies are stronger in a sealed chamber headphone design. Circumaural headphones (sometimes called full size headphones) have circular or ellipsoid earpads that completely surround the ears. Because these headphones completely surround the ear, circumaural headphones can be designed to fully seal against the head to keep out external noise. Because the earpads must enclose the ear, circumaural headphones are often larger in size and tend to weigh more, making them somewhat less portable, but their size also allows for a larger driver. This type of headphone is commonly used in recording studios, by audio enthusiasts, or by people who must be able to comfortably wear headphones continuously for many hours. Supra-aural headphones have pads that sit atop of the ears, rather than around them. They were commonly bundled with personal stereos during the 1980s. This type of headphone generally tends to be smaller and more lightweight than circumaural headphones. Supra-aural foam pads must press down on the earlobes with some force to hold the headphones in place, so they can cause severe earlobe pain when worn for many hours at a time. Earbuds or earphones are headphones of a smaller size that are placed directly outside of the ear canal, but without fully enveloping it. They are generally inexpensive and are favored for their portability and convenience. However, due to their inability to provide isolation, they are not capable of delivering the same dynamic range offered by many full-sized headphones and canalphones for a given volume level. As a result, they are often used at higher volumes in order to drown out noise from the user's surroundings, which increases the risk of hearing-loss. During the 1990s and 2000s, earbuds became a common type bundled with personal music devices. Canalphones (also known as in-ear monitors, or IEMs) are earphones that are inserted directly into the ear canal. Canalphones offer portability similar to earbuds, and also act as earplugs to block out environmental noise. There are two main types of IEMs: universal and custom. Universal canalphones provide one or more stock sleeve size(s) to fit various ear canals, which are commonly made out of silicone rubber, elastomer, or foam, for noise isolation. Universal canalphones are typically marketed to casual listeners and are relatively inexpensive, though some offer very high audio quality. Custom canalphones are fitted to individuals. Castings of the ear canals are made, usually by an audiologist. The manufacturer uses the castings to create custom-molded silicone rubber or elastomer plugs that provide added comfort and noise isolation. Because of the individualized labor involved, custom IEMs are more expensive than universal IEMs. A headset is a headphone combined with a microphone. Headsets provide the equivalent functionality of a telephone handset with hands-free operation. Headsets typically have only one speaker like a telephone, but also come with speakers for both ears. They have many uses including in Call centres and other telephone-intensive jobs and for personal use at the computer to facilitate comfortable simultaneous conversation and typing. Headsets can come in single-earpiece and double-earpiece designs. Single-earpiece headsets are known as monaural headsets. However, double-earpiece headsets come in both stereo type (two channels of audio signal, one for each earpiece) or binaural type (the same audio channel for both ear-pieces). The microphone arm of headsets comes in external microphone type and voicetube type. External microphone designs have the microphone housed in the front end of the microphone arm, inside a microphone capsule. Voicetube designs are also called internal microphone design, and have the microphone housed near ear-piece. The sound travels through the tube to the hidden microphone. Telephone headsets connect to a fixed-line telephone system. A telephone headset functions by replacing the handset of a telephone. All telephone headsets come in a standard 4P4C commonly called an RJ-9 connector. For older models of telephones, the headset microphone impedance is different from that of the original handset, requiring a telephone amplifier to pair with the telephone headset. A telephone amplifier provides basic pin-alignment similar to a telephone headset adaptor, but it also offers sound amplification for the microphone as well as the loudspeakers. Most models of telephone amplifiers offer volume control for loudspeaker as well as microphone, mute function and headset/handset switching. Telephone amplifiers are powered through batteries or AC adaptors. Headphone transducers employ one or more of several methods of sound reproduction. The moving coil driver, more commonly referred to as a "dynamic" driver is the most common type used in headphones. The operating principle consists of a stationary magnetic element affixed to the frame of the headphone which sets up a static magnetic field. The magnetic element in headphones is typically composed of ferrite or neodymium. The diaphragm, typically fabricated from lightweight, high stiffness to mass ratio cellulose, polymer, carbon material, or the like, is attached to a coil of wire (voice coil) which is immersed in the static magnetic field of the stationary magnet. The diaphragm is actuated by the attached voice coil, when an audio current is passed through the coil. The alternating magnetic field produced by the current through the coil reacts against the static magnetic field in turn, causing the coil and attached diaphragm to move the air, thus producing sound. Modern moving-coil headphone drivers are derived from microphone capsule technology. Electrostatic drivers consist of a thin, electrically charged diaphragm, typically a coated PET film membrane, suspended between two perforated metal plates (electrodes). The electrical sound signal is applied to the electrodes creating an electrical field; depending on the polarity of this field, the diaphragm is drawn towards one of the plates. Air is forced through the perforations; combined with a continuously changing electrical signal driving the membrane, a sound wave is generated. Electrostatic headphones are usually more expensive than moving-coil ones, and are comparatively uncommon. In addition, a special amplifier is required to amplify the signal to deflect the membrane, which often requires electrical potentials in the range of 100 to 1000 volts. Due to the extremely thin and light diaphragm membrane, often only a few micrometers thick, and the complete absence of moving metalwork, the frequency response of electrostatic headphones usually extends well above the audible limit of approximately 20 kHz. The high frequency response means that the low midband distortion level is maintained to the top of the audible frequency band, which is generally not the case with moving coil drivers. Also, the frequency response peakiness regularly seen in the high frequency region with moving coil drivers is absent. The result is significantly better sound quality, if designed properly. Electrostatic headphones are powered by anything from 100v to over 1kV, and are in proximity to a user's head. The usual method of making this safe is to limit the possible fault current to a low and safe value with resistors. An electret driver functions along the same electromechanical means as an electrostatic driver. However the electret driver has a permanent charge built into it, whereas electrostatics have the charge applied to the driver by an external generator. Electret headphones, like electrostatics are relatively uncommon. They are also typically cheaper and lower in technical capability and fidelity than electrostatics. A balanced armature is a sound transducer design primarily intended to increase the electrical efficiency of the element by eliminating the stress on the diaphragm characteristic of many other magnetic transducer systems. As shown schematically in the first diagram, it consists of a moving magnetic armature that is pivoted so it can move in the field of the permanent magnet. When precisely centered in the magnetic field there is no net force on the armature, hence the term 'balanced.' As illustrated in the second diagram, when there is electric current through the coil, it magnetizes the armature one way or the other, causing it to rotate slightly one way or the other about the pivot thus moving the diaphragm to make sound. The design is not mechanically stable; a slight imbalance makes the armature stick to one pole of the magnet. A fairly stiff restoring force is required to hold the armature in the ‘balance’ position. Although this reduces its efficiency, this design can still produce more sound from less power than any other. Popularized in the 1920s as Baldwin Mica Diaphragm radio headphones, balanced armature transducers were refined during World War II for use in 'sound-powered' telephones for military use. Some of these achieved astonishing electro-acoustic conversion efficiencies in the 20% to 40% for narrow bandwidth voice signals. Today they are typically used only in canalphones and hearing aids due to their diminutive size and low impedance. They generally are limited at the extremes of the hearing spectrum (<20Hz, >16 kHz) and require a seal more than other types of drivers to deliver their full potential. Higher end models may employ multiple armature drivers, dividing the frequency ranges between them using a passive crossover network. Some combine an armature driver with a small moving-coil driver for increased bass output. Orthodynamic, isodynamic or magnetostatic drivers, are either composed of a thinly pressed disc made of tightly coiled fine aluminium wire affixed to a mylar sheet or of a printed circuit. This disc is the diaphragm. The diaphragm is then sandwiched between two magnets which have the same polarity facing each other. As a result the magnets repel from each other and so the whole assembly is clamped together. An electrical signal is passed through the disc as it would be through the voice coil of a moving coil driver and the motion produced generates the sound. Once a popular choice for manufacturers such as Yamaha for their headphones, the technology has fallen generally into disuse as companies increasingly favour moving-coil designs. Fostex though, continues to manufacture orthodynamic headphones. Transducer technologies employed much less commonly for headphones include the Heil Air Motion Transformer (AMT); Piezoelectric film; Ribbon planar magnetic; Magnetostriction and Plasma-ionisation. The first Heil AMT headphone was marketed by ESS Laboratories and was essentially an ESS AMT tweeter from one of the company's speakers being driven at full range. Since the turn of the century, only Precide of Switzerland have manufactured an AMT headphone. Piezoelectric film headphones were first developed by Pioneer, their two models both used a flat sheet of film which limited the maximum volume of air that could be moved. Currently TakeT produce a piezoelectric film headphone which is shaped not unlike an AMT transducer but which like the driver Precide uses for their headphones, has a variation in the size of transducer folds over the diaphragm. It additionally incorporates a two way design by its inclusion of a dedicated tweeter/supertweeter panel. The folded shape of a diaphragm allows a transducer with a larger surface area to fit within smaller space constraints. This increases the total volume of air that can be moved on each excursion of the transducer given that radiating area. In 2008 during a tour of their manufacturing facility, the RAAL company showed a basic prototype of a true ribbon headphone, but does not have plans to bring it to market at this time. Magnetostriction headphones, often called "Bonephones" are headphones that work via the transmission of vibrations against the side of head, transmitting the sound via bone conduction. This is particularly helpful in situations where the ears must be left unobstructed or when used by those who are deaf for reasons which do not affect the nervous apparatus of hearing. Magnetostriction headphones though, have greater limitations to their fidelity than conventional headphones which work via the normal workings of the ear. Additionally, there was also one attempt to market a plasma-ionisation headphone in the early 1990s by a French company called Plasmasonics. It is believed that there are no functioning examples left. Headphones may be used to prevent other people from hearing the sound either for privacy or to prevent disturbance, as in listening in a public library. They can also provide a level of sound quality greater than loudspeakers of similar cost. Part of their ability to do so comes from the lack of any need to perform room correction treatments with headphones. High quality headphones can have an extremely flat low-frequency response down to 20 Hz within 3dB. However, rated frequency response distortion figures do not provide information on what character the sound reproduced at that frequency will be. Marketed claims such as 'frequency response 4 Hz to 20 kHz' are usually overstatements; the product's response at frequencies lower than 20 Hz is typically very small. Headphones are also useful for video games that use 3D positional audio processing algorithms, as they allow players to better judge the position of an off-screen sound source (such as the footsteps of an opponent). Although modern headphones have been particularly widely sold and used for listening to stereo recordings since the release of the Walkman, there is subjective debate regarding the nature of their reproduction of stereo sound. Stereo recordings represent the position of horizontal depth cues (stereo separation) via volume differences of the sound in question between the two channels. When the sounds from two speakers mix, they create the phase difference the brain uses to locate direction. Through most headphones, because the right and left channels do not combine in this manner, the illusion of the phantom center can be perceived as lost. Hard panned sounds will also only be heard only in one ear rather than from one side. This latter point is of particular importance for earlier stereo recordings which were less sophisticated, sometimes playing vocals through one channel and music through the other. Binaural recordings use a different microphone technique to encode direction directly as phase, with very little amplitude difference (except above 2 kHz) often using a dummy head, and can produce a surprisingly life-like spatial impression through headphones. Commercial recordings almost always use stereo recording, because historically loudspeaker listening has been more popular than headphone listening. It is possible to change the spatial effects of stereo sound on headphones to better approximate the presentation of speaker reproduction by using frequency-dependent cross-feed between the channels, or—better still—a Blumlein shuffler (a custom EQ employed to augment the low-frequency content of the difference information in a stereo signal). While cross-feed can reduce the unpleasantness that some listeners find with hard panned stereo in headphones, the use of a dummy head during recording, with artificial pinnae, can allow on playback through headphones, the experience of hearing the performance as though situated in the position of the dummy head. Optimal sound is achieved when the dummy head matches the listener's head, since pinnae vary greatly in size and shape. Over time, headphone cables fail. The common scenario in which a replacement might need to be purchased is the physical breakdown of copper wiring at junction points on the cord (at the TRS jack, or at the point of connection to the headphone). These are the sites of greatest and most stressful motion on a cord and so they are typically fitted with some kind of strain relief. Using headphones at a sufficiently high volume level can cause temporary or permanent hearing impairment or deafness due to an effect called "masking." The headphone volume has to compete with the background noise, especially in excessively loud places such as subway stations, aircraft, and large crowds. This leads to the disappearance of the normal pain associated with higher levels of volumes. Extended periods of the excessively loud volume may be damaging; however, one hearing expert found that "fewer than 5% of users select volume levels and listen frequently enough to risk hearing loss." Some manufacturers of portable music devices have attempted to introduce safety circuitry that limited output volume or warned the user when dangerous volume was being used, but the concept has been rejected by most of the buying public, which favors the personal choice of high volume. Koss introduced the "Safelite" line of cassette players in 1983 with such a warning light. The line was discontinued two years later for lack of interest. The government of France has imposed a limit on all music players sold in the country: they must not be capable of producing more than 100dBA (the threshold of hearing damage during extended listening is 80dB, and the threshold of pain, or theoretically of immediate hearing loss, is 130dB). Many users decry this as an infringement on personal choice, and use third-party options to reverse the volume limits placed on such devices. Still, other users welcome the government's pro-health stance. Canalphones and in-ear monitors have been described as being less likely to cause hearing impairment in noisy environments because much of the external noise is physically blocked out due to the noise isolation properties of the in-ear seal. This allows the user to listen at lower volume levels. However, the user can still choose to listen at dangerously high levels. Other risks arise from the reduced awareness of external sounds—some jurisdictions regulate the use of headphones while driving vehicles, usually limiting the use of earphones to a single ear. The complete isolation from outside noise can be a hazard in itself, as a user could miss the sound of a car horn and walk into traffic with fatal consequences. Losing situational awareness can also lead to theft, particularly in busy environments where bumping into another person would be ignored, e.g., subway stations. Motorcycle and other power-sport riders benefit by wearing foam earplugs when legal to do so to avoid excessive road, engine and wind noise, but their ability to hear music and intercom speech is actually enhanced when doing so. The ear can normally detect 1-billionth of an atmosphere of sound pressure level, hence it is incredibly sensitive. At very high sound pressure levels, muscles in the ear tighten the tympanic membrane and this leads to a small change in the geometry of the ossicles and stirrup that results in lower transfer of force to the oval window of the inner ear. Since earplugs reduce the noise in the auditory canal, this protective mechanism is less likely to trigger, and full sensitivity of the ear is maintained. With normal sensitivity, a listener has excellent hearing while listening to helmet speakers through the earplugs. This technique allows excellent hearing of speech, music and most external sounds at sustainable levels without hearing damage. Listening to music through headphones while exercising can be dangerous. Blood may be diverted from the ears to the limbs leaving the inner ear more vulnerable to damage from loud sound. A Finnish study recommended that exercisers should set their headphone volumes to half of their normal loudness and only use them for a half hour. | This page or section needs to be cleaned up. Please help cleaning it up if you can. When the cleanup is done, this template should be removed. For tips on making this article better, read "How to edit a page" and "How to write Simple English articles". Tagged since July 2010 Headphones are devices that let people listen to music on a Walkman, MP3 player, or computer. Headphones come in many different sizes from big to small. They are also known as earbuds, stereophones, headsets or even cans.

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In the previous census, conducted in 1994, the city's population was reported to be 2,112,737, of whom 1,023,452 were men and 1,089,285 were women. At that time not all of the population were urban inhabitants; only 2,084,588 or 98.7% were. For the entire administrative council there were 404,783 households in 376,568 housing units with an average of 5.2 persons per household. The major ethnic groups included the "Amhara (48.3%), "Oromo (19.2%), "Gurage (13.5%; 2.3% "Sebat Bet, and 0.8% "Sodo), "Tigray 7.64%, "Silt'e 3.98%, and foreigners from "Eritrea 1.33%. Languages spoken included "Amharic (72.6%), "Oromiffa (10.0%), "Gurage (6.54%), "Tigrinya (5.41%), and "Silt'e 2.29%. In 1994 the predominant religion was also "Ethiopian Orthodox with 82.0% of the population, while 12.7% were "Muslim, 3.87% "Protestant, and 0.78% "Catholic. Standard of living According to the 2007 national census, 98.64% of the housing units of Addis Ababa had access to "safe drinking water, while 14.9% had flush toilets, 70.7% pit toilets (both ventilated and unventilated), and 14.3% had no toilet facilities. In 2014, there were 63 public toilets in the city, with plans to build more. Values for other reported common indicators of the "standard of living for Addis Ababa as of 2005[update] include the following: 0.1% of the inhabitants fall into the lowest wealth quintile; adult literacy for men is 93.6% and for women 79.95%, the highest in the nation for both sexes; and the civic "infant mortality rate is 45 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, which is less than the nationwide average of 77; at least half of these deaths occurred in the infants' first month of life. The City is partially powered by water at the "Koka Reservoir. The economic activities in Addis Ababa are diverse. According to official statistics from the federal government, some 119,197 people in the city are engaged in trade and commerce; 113,977 in manufacturing and industry; 80,391 homemakers of different variety; 71,186 in civil administration; 50,538 in transport and communication; 42,514 in education, health and social services; 32,685 in hotel and catering services; and 16,602 in agriculture. In addition to the residents of rural parts of Addis Ababa, the city dwellers also participate in animal husbandry and cultivation of gardens. 677 hectares (1,670 acres) of land is irrigated annually, on which 129,880 quintals of vegetables are cultivated.["citation needed] It is a relatively clean and safe city, with the most common crimes being pickpocketing, scams and minor burglary. The city has recently been in a construction boom with tall buildings rising in many places. Various luxury services have also become available and the construction of shopping malls has recently increased. According to Tia Goldenberg of IOL, area spa professionals said that some people have labelled the city, "the spa capital of Africa." "Ethiopian Airlines has its headquarters on the grounds of "Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa. Tourism is a growing industry within Addis Ababa and Ethiopia as a whole. The country has seen a 10% increase in tourism over the last decade, subsequently bringing an influx of tourists to Addis Ababa. In 2015, the European Council on Tourism and Trade named Ethiopia the #1 tourist spot in the world. Law and government |This section does not "cite any "sources. (September 2016) ("Learn how and when to remove this template message)| Pursuant to the Ethiopian Constitution of 1995, the city of Addis Ababa is one of the two federal cities that are accountable to the Federal Government of Ethiopia. The other city with the same status is Dire Dawa in the east of the country and both federal cities are located within the State of "Oromia. Earlier, following the establishment of the federal structure in 1991 under the Transitional Charter of Ethiopia, the City Government of Addis Ababa was one of the then new 14 regional governments. However, that structure was changed by the federal constitution in 1995 and as a result Addis Ababa does not have statehood status. The administration of Addis Ababa city consists of the Mayor, who leads the executive branch, and the City Council, which enacts city regulations. However, as part of the Federal Government, the federal legislature enacts laws that are binding in Addis Ababa. Members of the City Council are directly elected by the residents of the city and the Council, in turn, elects the Mayor among its members. Term of office for elected officials is five years. However, the Federal Government, when it deems necessary, can dissolve the City Council and the entire administration and replace it by a temporary administration until elections take place next. Residents of Addis Ababa are represented in the federal legislature, the House of Peoples' Representatives. However, the city is not represented in the House of Federation, which is the federal upper house constituted by the representatives of the member states. The executive branch under the Mayor comprises the City Manager and various branches of civil service offices. The current Mayor of Addis Ababa is Mr. Diriba Kuma from the Oromo People Democratic Organisation (OPDO), which is member of the ruling coalition Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Mr. Diriba Kuma took office on 9 July 2013. His predecessor, Mr. Kuma Demeksa (also from the OPDO party), served a five-year term from 30 October 2008. Before that, the Federal Government appointed Mr. Berhane Deressa to lead the temporary caretaker administration that served from 9 May 2006 to 30 October 2008 following the 2005 election crisis. In the 2005 national election, the ruling EPRDF party suffered a major defeat in Addis Ababa. However, the opposition who won in Addis Ababa did not take part in the government both on regional and federal level. This situation forced the EPRDF-led Federal Government to assign a temporary administration until a new election was carried out. As a result, Mr. Berhane Deressa, an independent citizen, was appointed. Some of the notable past mayors of Addis Ababa are Arkabe Oqubay (2003–06), Zewde Teklu (1985–89), Alemu Abebe (1977–85) and Zewde Gebrehiwot (1960–69). Addis Ababa is considered to be extremely safe in comparison to the other cities in the region. On a crime index, Addis Ababa scores a 44.28, putting it at a crime level of moderate. Pickpocketing and petty unarmed thefts are more common within the city. Corruption and bribery are extremely common crimes in Addis Ababa. Violent crimes are very unlikely to happen in the city. High rise, architecture and skyline A financial district is currently under construction in Addis Ababa, that will include many high-rise buildings. Mayor "Kuma Demeksa embarked on a quest to improve investment for the buildings in the city. Addis Ababa is the headquarters of the "United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the "African Union.["citation needed] The fossilized skeleton, and a plaster replica of the early hominid "Lucy (known in Ethiopia as Dinkinesh) is preserved at the "Ethiopian National Museum in Addis Ababa. "Meskel Square is one of the noted squares in the city and is the site for the annual "Meskel at the end of September annually when thousands gather in celebration. The city is home to the "Ethiopian National Library, the "Ethiopian Ethnological Museum (and "former Guenete Leul Palace), the "Addis Ababa Museum, the "Ethiopian Natural History Museum, the Ethiopian Railway Museum and National Postal Museum. Notable taller architecture in Addis Ababa includes the Huda Tower, Nani Tower, Bank Misr Building, as well as the approved Angola World Trade Center Tower, Abyssinia Bank Tower, Mexico Square Tower and the 200 million dollar "AU Conference Center and Office Complex. |This section does not "cite any "sources. (September 2016) ("Learn how and when to remove this template message)| Notable buildings include "St George's Cathedral (founded in 1896 and also home to a museum), "Holy Trinity Cathedral (once the largest "Ethiopian Orthodox Cathedral and the location of "Sylvia Pankhurst's tomb) as well as the burial place of Emperor "Haile Selassie and the Imperial family, and those who fought the Italians during the "World War II. There is also "Menelik's old "Imperial palace which remains the official seat of government, and the "National Palace formerly known as the Jubilee Palace (built to mark Emperor Haile Selassie's Silver Jubilee in 1955) which is the residence of the President of Ethiopia. Jubilee Palace was also modeled after Buckingham Palace in the United Kingdom. "Africa Hall is located across Menelik II avenue from this Palace and is where the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa is headquartered as well as most UN offices in Ethiopia. It is also the site of the founding of the "Organisation of African Unity (OAU) which eventually became the "African Union. The African Union is now housed in a new headquarters built on the site of the demolished Akaki Prison, on land donated by Ethiopia for this purpose in the south western part of the city. The "Hager Fikir Theatre, the oldest theatre in Ethiopia, is located at the Piazza district. Near Holy Trinity Cathedral is the art deco Parliament building, built during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie, with its clock tower. It continues to serve as the seat of Parliament today. Across from the Parliament is the Shengo Hall, built by the "Derg regime of "Mengistu Haile Mariam as its new parliament hall. The Shengo Hall was the world's largest pre-fabricated building, which was constructed in "Finland before being assembled in Addis Ababa. It is used for large meetings and conventions. "Itegue Taitu Hotel, built in 1898 (Ethiopian Calendar) in the middle of the city (Piazza), was the first hotel in Ethiopia. In the Merkato district, which happens to be the largest open market in Africa, is the impressive Grand Anwar Mosque, the biggest mosque in Ethiopia built during the Italian occupation. A few metres to the southwest of the Anwar Mosque is the Raguel Church built after the liberation by Empress Menen. The proximity of the mosque and the church has symbolised the long peaceful relations between Christianity and Islam in Ethiopia. The Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family is also in the Merkato district. Near "Bole International Airport is the new Medhane Alem (Savior of the World) Orthodox Cathedral, which is the second largest in Africa. Other features of the city include the large "Mercato market, the Jan Meda "racecourse, Bihere Tsige Recreation Centre and a railway line to "Djibouti. Sport facilities include "Addis Ababa and "Nyala Stadiums. The "2008 African Championships in Athletics were held in Addis Ababa. The "Entoto Mountains start among the northern suburbs. Suburbs of the city include Shiro Meda and "Entoto in the north, Urael and "Bole (home to Bole International Airport) in the east, "Nifas Silk in the south-east, Mekanisa in the south, and "Keraniyo and "Kolfe in the west. Kolfe was mentioned in "Nelson Mandela's Autobiography "A Long Walk to Freedom", as the place he got military training. Addis Ababa has a distinct architectural style. Unlike many African cities, Addis Ababa was not built as a colonial settlement. This means that the city did not have a European style of architecture. This changed with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936. The Piazza district in the city center is the most evident indicator of Italian influence. The buildings are very much Italian in style and there are many Italian restaurants, as well as small cafes, and European-style shopping centers. Parks include "Africa Park, situated along Menelik II Avenue. |This section does not "cite any "sources. (October 2016) ("Learn how and when to remove this template message)| The city hosts the We Are the Future centre, a child care centre that provides children with a higher standard of living. The centre is managed under the direction of the mayor's office, and the international NGO "Glocal Forum serves as the fundraiser and programme planner and coordinator for the WAF child centre in each city. Each WAF city is linked to several peer cities and public and private partners to create a unique international coalition. Launched in 2004, the programme is the result of a strategic partnership between the Glocal Forum, the "Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation and Mr. Hani Masri, with the support of the "World Bank, UN agencies and major companies. "Addis Ababa University was founded in 1950 and was originally named "University College of Addis Ababa", then renamed in 1962 for the former Ethiopian emperor "Haile Selassie I who had donated his Genete Leul Palace to be the university's main campus in the previous year. It is the home of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and the Ethnological Museum. The city also has numerous public universities and private colleges including "Ethiopian Civil Service University, "Admas University College, "St. Mary's University and "Unity University. A massive new university solely dedicated to science and technology is under construction in the east of the city. Public transport is through public buses from "Anbessa City Bus Service Enterprise or blue and white "share taxis. The taxis are usually "minibuses that can seat at most twelve people. Two people are responsible for each taxi, the driver and a "weyala who collects fares and calls out the taxi's destination. The construction of the Addis Ababa Ring Road was initiated in 1998 to implement the city master plan and enhance peripheral development. The Ring Road was divided into three major phases that connect all the five main gates in and out of Addis Ababa with all other regions ("Jimma, "Debre Zeit, "Mekelle, "Gojjam and "Ambo). For this project, China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) was the partner of Addis Ababa City Roads Authority (AACRA). The Ring Road has greatly helped to decongest and alleviate city traffic. Intercity bus service is provided by the "Selam Bus Line Share Company. The city is served by "Addis Ababa Bole International Airport, where a new terminal opened in 2003. The old Lideta Airport in the western "Old Airport" district is used mostly by small craft and military planes and helicopters.["dubious ] Addis Ababa originally had a "railway connection with "Djibouti City, with a picturesque French style railway station, but this route has been abandoned. The new "Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway started operation in September 2016, running parallel to the route of the original railway line. Addis Ababa opened its "light rail system to the public on 20 September 2015. The system is the first of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa. The Ethiopian Railway Corporation reached a funding agreement worth millions of dollars with the "Export and Import Bank of China in September 2010 and the light rail project was completed in January 2015. The route is a 34.25 km network with two lines; the operational line running from the center to the south of the city. Upon completion, the east-west line will run from Ayat to the Torhailoch ringroad, and from Menelik Square to Merkato Bus Station, Meskel Square and Akaki. 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Retrieved 6 January 2014. - "Census 2007 Tables: Addis Abeba", Tables 2.1, 2.5, 3.1, 3.2 and 3.4. For Silt'e, the statistics of reported Shitagne speakers were used, on the assumption that this was a typographical error. - Central Statistical Agency. 2010. Population and Housing Census 2007 Report, National. [ONLINE] Available at: http://catalog.ihsn.org/index.php/catalog/3583/download/50086. [Accessed 13 December 2016]. - "The 1994 Population and Housing Census of Ethiopia: Results for Addis Ababa", Tables 2.1, 2.2, 2.8, 2.13A Archived 15 November 2010 at the "Wayback Machine. - "Census 2007 Tables: Addis Abeba", Tables, 8.7, 8.8 - Smith, David (28 August 2014). "Ethiopians' plight: 'The toilets are unhealthy, but we don't have a choice'" – via The Guardian. - Macro International Inc. "2008. Ethiopia Atlas of Key Demographic and Health Indicators, 2005." (Calverton: Macro International, 2008), pp. 2, 3, 10 (Retrieved 30 September 2010) - Overseas Security Advisory Council – Ethiopia 2007 Crime and Safety Report["dead link]. - Massages and manicures hit Addis Ababa["dead link] by Tia Goldenberg. Retrieved 15 January 2010. IOL'. 6 November 2007. - "Company Profile." "Ethiopian Airlines. Retrieved on 3 October 2009. - CNN, Sophie Eastaugh, for. "What makes Ethiopia the world's best spot for tourism?". CNN. Retrieved 2016-11-14. - "5 Reasons to Visit Addis Ababa Now". www.fodors.com. Retrieved 2016-11-14. - "Crime in Addis Ababa". www.numbeo.com. Retrieved 2016-11-14. - Solomon, Abiy. "Ethiopia building a Financial District in Addis Ababa". - Addis Today by Molalign GIRMA, 2014 - "Ethiopia Capital City, About Addis Ababa Tourism and Trave". - "INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTI-NATIONAL CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS: Addis Ababa Ring Road Project – A Case Study of a Chinese ..." (PDF). 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